Volume 21, Number 14 · September 19, 1974
Were Slaves More Efficient? Some Doubts About 'Time on the Cross'
By Thomas L. Haskell
The carnival of publicity attending the publication of Time on the Cross suggests that the authors, Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman, desire an audience embracing not only econometric historians but all reasonable men. I am not an econometric historian or a specialist in the history of slavery, but I am a reasonable man and, as such, entitled to judge the plausibility of the authors' argument. Fogel and Engerman contend that slave labor was more efficient than free labor. This contention appears to rest on a dubious inference that vitiates several of the book's most striking conclusions.
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