A certain American professor – of sociology, naturally – called Matthew Desmond has decided to pleasure us with the ignorance of his knowledge of the subject under discussion, economics. I’m not the first to note this and doubt I shall be the last. But in his introductory paragraphs in the New York Times Magazine – a place where the editors clearly don’t know enough to catch such errors – he tells us that:

If the price of goods is constantly being depressed then what is that doing to the real wages of the workers? Good, excellent, you now know more economics than a professor of sociology. Actually, than two such professors plus the editorial team of the New York Times Magazine. For, just to explain for those who might be sociology professors or editors, if the price of things declines then you can buy more things with your labour. That’s what declining prices means. And, equally true and equally obviously so, being able to buy more things with the rent of your labour means that your wages have just risen.

Given that this error appears in paragraph two of the screed we don’t need to trouble ourselves all that much more with the views of this sociologist upon economics. Even though it will be fun to do so:

We are all aware of the whippings that the current United States thrives upon, aren’t we? The punishments for leaving the plantation, as with slavery, or the farm as with feudalism, serfdom? Walmart, Amazon, McDonald’s, have not all raised wages – announcing, nay trumpeting that fact as they do so – in recent years?

Wages are higher where? Brazil, Thailand, the US? Indonesia, Portugal – where I currently sit – or America? Thus, if we wish to talk about capitalism going high – to concentrate upon those higher wages say – we would want to do what with worker protections? That is, it isn’t just an ignorance of real wages, our sociologist is having problems with basic logic.

As a matter of simple history all that wealth was wiped out by 1865 of course. Meaning that it’s unlikely to have all that much influence upon the current state of play, eh?

Well, yes, as Don Boudreaux points out:

And double entry?

Sure, there were slaves in 13th and 14th century Italy. But double entry bookkeeping wasn’t developed to keep track of them. Oh, and that existence of chattel slavery then does rather kill off that attempt to insist that chattel slavery was something unique to the American experience too.

Do these people never, ever, consider matters? If widespread slavery held down wages in a capitalist system then why were American free wages considerably higher than those in the slavery-free Europe of the time? Why did those millions board those boats – voluntarily – to come to America?

American freedom was of some lesser kind than European? That really isn’t what the flow of people tells us now, is it?

Eh? Glass Steagall never did say anything about interest rates. It enforced the separation of the banking and securities industries. Might have been a good idea, might not – I think not but so what? – but it was nothing at all to do with interest rates. Nor, really, about bank mergers either.

Oh, and have interest rates – properly measured, the gap between deposit and lending rates – risen or fallen in recent decades anyway? Now answer again absent the effects of QE.

Slaves often enough were the collateral for a mortgage. But the system of mortgages didn’t actually start there:

Further, wasn’t there a Russian novel about collecting the documents of the now dead serfs to be able to mortgage them?

All in all our sociologist manages to show very little knowledge of the economics of the subject under discussion. Which is a pity, as he’s trying to write about the economics of the subject under discussion.

What he really wants to say is that because American capitalism was built upon slavery, upon the processes of slavery, therefore modern American capitalism is like slavery. Which is indeed problematic given that American workers gain some of the highest real wages in the world. Some slavery, eh?

But then if you really want to enrage try pointing out that American slaves enjoyed some of the highest real wages of slave populations anywhere over history or geography.