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Slavery as an Obstacle to Economic Growth in the United States: A Panel Discussion

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 February 2011

Extract

Every economist must be pleased to start some hares; it can become embarrassing, however, when they begin to breed like rabbits. In the ten years since we first tried our slavery model in public, in Professor Gerschenkron's history seminar, more than thirty published arguments addressed to that model have come to our attention. We don't pretend to know whether that represents an increased output over preceding decades. Besides, in our youthful enthusiasm we gave the impression that we were disposing, once and for all, of a piece of intellectual game that was already rather high. In any event, the apparent egocentricity that turned up all those papers and articles may be explained, if not justified, by Ralph Barton Perry's dictum that every reader looks up two references in an index: sex, and his own name.

Type
Obstacles to Economic Growth: Papers presented at the Twenty-Seventh Annual Meeting of the Economic History Association
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1967

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References

1 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Sense and Non-Sense. Translated by L., H. and Dreyfus, P. A.. (Evanston, I11.: Northwestern University Press, 1964), chs. viii, ix.Google Scholar

2 Fogel, Robert W., “The New Economic History: Its Findings and Methods,” Economic History Review, XIX (12. 1966), 642–56.Google Scholar

3 Elkins, Stanley M., Slavery (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1963).Google Scholar

4 The reference is to Genovese, Eugene D.. The Political Economy of Slavery (New York: Pantheon Books, 1966), pp. 47, 63Google Scholar.