Monday, January 18, 2016

The inflation-adjusted price of the average prime slave from 1860 is $44,100, very close to the 2014 raw average US wage of $44,569

The average price of a prime slave from 1860 was about $1,500. Using the consumer price index, that's the equivalent of about $44,100 in 2014. The raw US average wage in 2014 was $44,569 according to the Social Security Administration.

The annual mean price of the labor of a slave from 1860 brought a return on investment of about 12%, and on a month to month basis about 14%.  In 2014, corporate profits before taxes came to 12.7% of GDP.

Total slave population in 1860 is estimated to be 3.95 million,  14.7% of the total white population.

See The Economics of American Negro Slavery by Robert Evans Jr. of MIT (1962), here.