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Total Estate, however, also includes real estate, and Soltow reports that amount actually involves an average of 2 slaves. Thus, according to the table above, In , the top one percent of wealth holders held 27 percent of Total Estates; the bottom 50 percent held but one percent of the total. In Figure 6 below, we see how the distribution of Total Estate in the South compared to that in the North in The data again come from Soltow's sampling.
As one can see, there is almost no difference between the North and the South at the top of the distribution. The North is slightly above the South at the 0. The largest planters were as wealthy as the major Northern merchants and industrialists. The evidence suggests that a Southern white farm family of four a husband, wife, and two children who owned a slave family of four had more wealth than a Northern white farm family of four that employed a couple of farm laborers.
Non-slaveowners in the South were probably little different from Northern farmers. Of the ten "measures" developed by MeasuringWorth , two are useful for discussing the value of the wealth invested in slaves.
They are relative earnings and relative output. We discussed the concept of relative earnings in relation to evaluating a slave's price above, but it is also useful for discussing wealth, as people with high relative earnings are typically people of wealth.
The people who are the financial and political leaders of a community are often its most wealthy. Even if they have not been elected to power, the wealthy often have disproportionate influence on those who do. Relative output measures the amount of income or wealth compared to the total output of the economy. Those individuals with considerable income or wealth are more likely to be able to influence the composition or total-amount of production in the economy. While this number seems very large, as we will show below, the wealth tied up in slaves was a large proportion of the total wealth of the nation.
Slave owners as a group had considerable economic power. This finding is consistent with the history of the period when southern states exercised great influence on such issues as tariffs, banking, and in which new areas of the country slavery would be allowed.
As the century progressed, the political influence possessed by slave owners declined because industrialization and agriculture in the North grew faster than the slave economy. The Total Estates of slave owners were quite large, as is demonstrated when measured in current dollars.
Table 3 shows the relative earnings and relative output of their estates in dollars. Comparing these two tables, it becomes quite clear that the holder of 10 slaves likely ranks in the top one percent of the distribution, if relative earnings is used as the standard of comparison. Potentially all slaveholders rank in the top one percent, if relative output is used as the standard of comparison. Clearly, the ownership of even one slave implied that the owner was a wealthy member of the community.
Those who owned over slaves had a measure of relative output that compares to billionaires today. How much wealth was invested in slaves? Slaves had an important impact on the differences in regional wealth. Gavin Wright made estimates of both Northern and Southern wealth. His data for and are reported in Table 4 below. The "value of slaves" figures are taken from Sutch and Ransom A significant proportion of the wealth of slave owners was eliminated by the stroke of Abraham Lincoln's pen when he signed the Emancipation Proclamation that freed slaves in the rebellious areas.
Success on the battlefield ensured their freedom. Remember that the Emancipation Proclamation freed slaves only in areas in rebellion not all slaves. More fundamentally, it was success on the battlefield that eliminated this wealth. Total slave wealth was immense. Figure 7 shows the aggregate value of slaves adjusted to today's prices measured using the relative share of GDP. While it varies with the price of slaves over the period, it is never less than six trillion dollars and, at the time of Emancipation, was close to thirteen trillion dollars.
An alternative way of making that calculation is to use Soltow's finding that Total Estate in slaves was In case anyone think that a relatively small number, it is roughly 77 percent of GDP today.
If Wright's figures above are adjusted to today's prices through the use of the relative share of GDP measure, they tell the same story as the Table 5 below shows. It should be noted that wealth grows roughly 30 percent over the decade of the s in both the North and South. However, in the South, the value of slaves grew about 40 percent over the decade, while non-slave wealth grew at only about 25 percent.
This is a concept called "crowding out. Slavery in the United States was an institution that had a large impact on the economic, political and social fabric on the country. This paper gives an idea of its economic magnitude in today's values. As noted in the introduction, they can be conservatively described as large. Carter, Susan B. Haines, Alan L. Conrad, Alfred, and John Meyer. New York: Oxford University Press, Fogel, Robert William. Galantine, and Richard L. New York: Norton, New York: W.
Norton, Fogel, Robert William, and Stanley Engerman. Boston: Little, Brown, Baltimore: Waverly Press, , p. Kotlikoff, Laurence J. New Haven, Yale University Press, Officer, Lawrence H.
New York, Cambridge University Press, Williamson, Samuel H. Wright, Gavin. Slavery and American Economic Development. There is also evidence that slaves purchased in Virginia in the early s were treated in a manner similar to indentured servants i. The pirates hoped they'd corralled a treasure ship.
Discovering only human cargo, they took as many slaves as they could carry. The Earl of Warwick, a British aristocrat, owned the Treasurer, and the governor of Jamestown was the Earl's man, so the privateers carried their booty to the Virginia coast. There they sold about 30 slaves, roughly split between males and females, to five or six plantation owners. Back to text. There is ample evidence that these slaves who were not productive did not receive as much food as the able bodied, but there is no evidence that they were allowed to starve.
Norton, , Chapter 3. Money put in a bank or alternative investment today will grow over time depending on the interest rate. What is received in the future is principle plus interest.
Present value calculations determine the amount of principle that is needed today in order to realize a given series of payments in the future. However, as there were cases where slaves bought their own freedom, the opportunity cost question is the same. Officer and Samuel H. Provided a country's purchasing power parity does not change much compared to Sweden, this should give a reasonable accounts of the worth of money over time also for other countries.
This is a test version and may therefore contain serious errors. Please contact the author if you detect any errors rodney. The comparison is based on data gathered within the project Historical monetary and financial statistics for Sweden. The data is complemented with sources from other countries see list below.
Athens, Sofia, Bucharest, Vienna. A dollar today only buys 2. The inflation rate was 1. The current year-over-year inflation rate to is now 5. The current inflation rate page gives more detail on the latest inflation rates. In other words, a dollar will pay for fewer items at the store. This effect explains how inflation erodes the value of a dollar over time. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, each of these USD amounts below is equal in terms of what it could buy at the time:.
This conversion table shows various other amounts in today's dollars, based on the 3, Inflation can also vary widely by country. CPI is the weighted combination of many categories of spending that are tracked by the government. Breaking down these categories helps explain the main drivers behind price changes.
This chart shows the average rate of inflation for select CPI categories between and The graph below compares inflation in categories of goods over time. Click on a category such as "Food" to toggle it on or off:. For all these visualizations, it's important to note that not all categories may have been tracked since
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