NSR, great link to an $11K reference. Neat reference to the changes wrought by the plague.
The picture I keep in my mind is that, in the North, McCormick developed the reaper. In the South, owners used slaves. Post emancipation, it took the South a long, long time to catch up, economically.
That’s what artificially cheap labor does, as you point out: it creates an economic barrier to innovation; why develop a labor-saving machine when labor is so (misleadingly) cheap?
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