The Logistics of Reparations

[Rev. Rye]

I think there might be some merit in OB's reasoning. Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of stupidity in the OP (specifically the question of "if it turns out there's some Massa genes in said black person, does that cancel out the slave DNA?," which disregards that A: the average black person has enough white ancestry for an entire great-grandparent, and B: The "One-Drop Rule" meant that even if you were sired by Massa, Hell, even if you had a single great-grandparent who wasn't white, you still counted as black; plus the fact that he seems to willfully disregard that, if you know how taxes work, who gets to pay for them becomes obvious), but the question of how much gets to be paid to the black community is a question that should be answered.

I can remember once looking at an article from Harper's (which I can't find, but its methodology can be found elsewhere, although the 222,505,049 hours of unpaid labour over 246 years seems kinda low to me, considering that this amounts to less than one million man-hours per year, and if we assume that the 700,000 slaves recorded in the 1790 census is a good approximation of the average number of slaves in America per year between 1619 and 1865, that only works out to a bit less than 78 minutes of unpaid labor per year!) that calculated the cost of reparations as about $100 trillion. Unfortunately, as of 2017, the nominal world GDP is roughly $80 trillion. This, you will notice, is much smaller than $100 trillion. While the Purchasing Power GDP is $127.8 trillion, subtracting the $100 trillion from that leaves just $27.8 trillion. Divided amongst the other 7 billion people of the world, this leaves a bit less than $4000 per capita for everyone else. If you think income inequality is bad now, wait until we somehow manage to make Wakanda real... by turning the rest of the world into what the rest of the world thinks Wakanda is before the events of Black Panther.

To be fair, that $100 trillion estimate is an outlier, and I couldn't find it because it was swamped with smaller figures, with a range in the first page of Google search results ranging from $2.8-51 trillion. So, now that we've got a price figure that won't totally bankrupt the world economy, we'll need to figure out: how do we distribute those funds so they actually do the most good and equalise the economy? Now, this is a good question, and one that's worth discussing. Unfortunately, I don't know how to do that, but I'm sure that people who actually study the damn issue and aren't just writing on an Internet forum in their underwear can at least make a good stab at it and not just ask the question to imply that it's a bad thing.