236 / PARADOXES or FORCED LABOR

tive or negative. For example, it is generally thought that the
nonpecuniary income earned by most members of the fac-
ulty of Harvard University is large and positive, since these
faculty members usually prefer to stay at Harvard even
when they have been ofiered much larger pecuniary incomes
by other institutions. The difference between the pecuniary
income actually received by professors at Harvard and what
they could earn elsewhere is a first approximation of the
value that these academics attach to the nonpecuniary bene-
fits of being located at Harvard.

It is not necessary to belabor the point that for free men, 7

work in gangs on plantations involved large nonpecuniary
disadvantages. Nevertheless, it seems reasonable to suppose
that if planters offered free laborers large enough pecuniary
payments, they could have attracted a sufficient number of
free laborers to run their plantations. How big a premium
would they have had to offer to induce free agriculturalists

to forego the tempo and life-style of small farms and to -

accept a much more intense, more highly regulated, more
interdependent regimen? And did the plantations have the
capacity to pay that premium? For as competitive firms,
there was a we1l~defined upper limit to the premium that
they could afford. The ceiling on the potential premium to
free labor for plantation work was given by the increase in
output that could be achieved through combining small-scale
farms into large-scale farms. Thus, if a would-be planter
tried to bribe a typical group of white farmers into forming
a large—scale plantation based on gang labor, he would not
be able to offer more than a 50 percent increase over what
they were already earning through their labor on small
farms. The failure of free small-scale farmers to combine
into large—scale plantations is prima facie evidence that the
nonpecuniary disadvantages of gang labor ——- and all that it

free farm laborers.

—: 

PROPERTY mcrrrs IN MAN / 237

that since slaves did work on plantations, the nonpecuniary
disadvantages of gang labor to them was less than 50 per-
cent of the wages of free labor. That conclusion would be
warranted only if the conditions under which labor was
elicited from slaves corresponded to those for free men.
Obviously they did not. In general, the labor of free men
could only be elicited through wage bargains. However,
ownership of the human capital of blacks carried with it the
right to use force to obtain labor. Ownership of the title to
a slave gave a master the right to use whatever force was
necessary— including such force as might eventuate in
death — to compel his chattel to engage in the normal work
routine of the plantation. From the master’s viewpoint, the
advantage of force, when judiciously applied, was that it
produced desired behavior, in certain realms of activity, at

a lower cost than could have been achieved through financial 

inducements. The analogy to the parental use of force today
is striking. Parents often find that it is cheaper (easier) to
compel children to go to bed at a given hour rather than to
attempt to bribe them into doing so. But one should not leap
from this analogy to the unwarranted conclusiontthat force

necessarily resulted in the infantilization of mature slaves. _

Force was not an incidental feature of slavery. Without
force, the alienability of the file to the human capital of
blacks would have been worthless, at least insofar as it
affected the plantation’s capacity to produce. For it was only
by applying force that it was possible to get blacks to accept
gang labor without having to pay a premium that was in
excess of the gains from economies of scale. The validity
this contention is demonstrated by the experience of the
immediate postemancipation period. After the slaves were
freed, many planters attempted to reconstruct their work
gangs on the basis of wage payments. But such attempts
generally foundered, despite the fact the wages offered to
freedmen exceeded the incomes they had received as slaves

 

  
 

entailed —were greater than 50 percent of the wages of_£

by more than 100 percent. Even at this premium, planters/J
It might be thought that the preceding argument implies