Blog Post #4

This article from the New York Times details the relationship between American capitalism and slavery. First, author Matthew Desmond discusses the atrocities of American capitalism. Joel Rogers called it “low-road capitalism” meaning that business compete over the price instead of the quality of goods and wages are depressed. Because of this, poverty spreads greatly and the amount of inequality grows. Desmond explains, “The richest 1 percent of Americans own 40 percent of the country’s wealth.” This creates a broken system as the top one percent keeps growing and controlling the country. The amount of people in poverty also keeps growing while they do not have much control over this. Then Desmond points out a reason for why the system may have gotten like this. Slavery was a big source of wealth in the economy. Mississippi had the most millionaires and it was because of slavery. Cities in the South had more money than densely populated places such as New York City simply because of slavery. Despond explains that realistically slavery occurred not all that long ago in regard to history as a whole and because of this we still feel the effect that slavery has on America’s capitalistic economy.

In American Economy, the section “A Factory Girl Leads a Tour of the Lowell Mills” discusses the Lowell Mills, the textile mills in Massachusetts, named after Francis Cabot Lowell and his manufacturing system. The section is like a written tour of the factory and all the different rooms inside, explaining what is done where.