[...much] Jacoby concludes by suggesting that reparations are a Pandora's Box which will do little good to open and may do much harm, including the exacerbation of national wounds that should be permitted to heal:
America long ago paid the price for slavery: a horrific Civil War that killed 620,000 soldiers, more than half of them from the North. It is as vile to insist that white Americans today owe a debt for slavery as it would be to insist that black Americans owe a debt for freedom. What the reparations extremists are demanding would make a mockery of historical truth and inflame racial strife. Their cynicism is toxic, and corporate America had better find the courage to say so. [emphasis added]
His article is worth reading in full (registration required), but his appeal to reason, forgiveness, and institutional guts seems unlikely to stem the tide that is now building to flood force. Therefore, I am going to take the argument precisely in the direction decried by the sentence boldfaced above -- not for the purpose of transforming the descendants of slaves into debtors, but to illuminate the only rational basis on which reparations could be calculated in dollars and cents. I know that it's risky to apply cold logic to an issue so fueled by emotion, but I ask readers to follow my logic to its conclusion before exploding in righteous fury.
The first step is to acknowledge that any claim of reparations pursued through the courts now is on behalf of people who have not themselves been slaves. The specific pain and suffering illustrated by the photograph(s) above was committed by people who are now dead against victims who are now dead. All possibility of reparations as a moral expiation of guilt is moot because all parties to the immoral acts involved have been deceased for about a century. For this reason, the question of what reparations might be owed to the descendants of slaves must be a purely financial one, computed in terms of opportunity cost; that is, what financial losses are still being experienced by African-Americans that they wouldn't be experiencing if slavery had never existed in this country.
It is easy to see that the only valid comparisons we can make in this regard are between contemporary African-Americans and contemporary sub-Saharan Africans. The latter are the control population -- that population which was NOT captured, chained, sold to slave traders, and carried to American states for resale to slave owners. It is equally easy to see that the only statistic which matters is the lifetime financial expectations of African-Americans versus those of sub-Saharan Africans.
Lifetime financial expectations can be estimated based on two variables: per capita income and years of life expectancy. A contemporary African-American must accept the premise that without slavery in the U.S., his lifetime financial expectations would be those of an average contemporary sub-Saharan African, which can be calculated according to the following formula: Number of years of life expectancy multiplied by average annual per capita income.
Granted, these numbers are hard to acquire with a high degree of accuracy, but we can make approximate estimates based on surveys and studies which have been performed in recent years. For example, with respect to life expectancy, a 2000 report from the World Health Organization provides a worldwide summary, including this:
All of the bottom 10 countries were in sub-Saharan Africa, where the HIV-AIDS epidemic is rampant. In ascending order... those countries were Sierra Leona, 25.9 years of healthy life for babies born in 1999; Niger, 29.1; Malawi, 29.4; Zambia, 30.3; Botswana, 32.3; Uganda, 32.7; Rwanda, 32.8; Zimbabwe, 32.9; Mali, 33.1; and Ethiopia, 33.5.
The overall life expectancy in sub-Saharan Africa has dropped precipitously over the past 10 years, mostly because of the AIDS epidemic, the WHO says. Life expectancy dropped for female babies from 51.1 years to 46.3 years. For males, the level dropped from 47.3 years to 44.8 years.
To be conservative, we should round the figure upward; call it 50 years, on average. And what of per capita income? The figures that are available to us come from sources like the World Bank. A written summary of the year 2003 states:
In marked contrast to East and South Asia, poverty actually rose in Sub-Saharan Africa. Since 1981, a 13-percent contraction in GDP per capita in Sub-Saharan Africa resulted in a near-doubling of the number of people living on less than $1 a day, from 164 million to 314 million, a rise from 42 to 47 percent of the region's population.
Close to half of sub-Saharan Africans make less than $365 per year. For them, lifetime financial expectations are less than $18,250. Obviously, the 53 percent who make more than that may make considerably more than that, and fortunately the World Bank does break out figures for individual countries. Here's a link to a spreadsheet that captures the World Bank figures for Sub-Saharan African nations (2003) and also captures population data from another source. The result is a computation of per capita income for all of Sub-Saharan Africa: $509.
This gives us an easy way for anyone to guesstimate his lifetime financial expectations if he happened to live in Sub-Saharan Africa. We can call it the "50-500 Formula": (50 years ) x ($500) = $25,000.
If this number turns out to be greater than the lifetime financial expectations of an average African-American, the descendants of American slaves can sue for the difference.
What do we know about per-capita income for African Americans? Here's an indication, drawn from a Tennessee source that cites national census data:
African-Americans moved closer to per capita income parity between 2000 and 2002. In the former year, African-American real (inflation-adjusted) per capita income was $15,451. Although that number decreased $10 over the following two years to $15,441, overall per capita income fell even more, declining $541. As a result, African-American per capita income increased from 66.2 percent of per capita income for the general population in 2000 to 67.7 percent in 2002.
Oops. It begins to look as if any African-American who lives at least two years is going to enjoy a higher lifetime income than a Sub-Saharan African. What can we determine about life expectancy?
Racial disparities in life expectancy have declined since 1960. However, the pace of the decline is slower than what occurred in earlier years. For both blacks and whites, improvements in the life expectancy are relatively very small. From 1960 to 1990 the life expectancy for whites increased from 70.6 to 76.1 years, and for blacks the life expectancy increased from 63.2 to 69.1 years.
Oops again. Using round numbers, we can easily calculate an average lifetime financial expectation for African-Americans: (70 years) x ($15,000) = $1,050,000. Approximately $1 million.
Finally, we can compute our average per capita reparations owed to African-Americans: $25,000 minus $1,000,000 = ($975,000). Of course, the brackets and red type indicate that it's a negative number, meaning no reparations owed. End of legal case. Period.[...much]
