Improper valuation

Over at Chicago Boyz a post and thread on slavery and the Civil War got me noodling around to see if I had ever figured out how much of the drop in wealth in the South was due to destruction and opportunity cost of war, and how much to the disappearance of the "wealth" value of the slaves. Apparently I didn't, and there's quite a bit of research and back and forth on the subject.

Studies of things like census records suggest that the South had per capita wealth almost twice the North, with claims of less income inequality. Income inequality is lower in rural areas, and the South was more rural than the North, but I'd love to see histograms rather than averages. And to what degree the bigger boys were also more indebted. Apparently Olmstead's observations are not supposed to tell the whole story--though he was there and the new researchers weren't.

Anyhow, a population of 5.5M free (3.5M slave) with a per capita wealth for the free of about 1040, gives about 5.7 billion dollars, and estimates of the value of slaves run from about 3 to 3.5 billion. So that's about a 50-60% drop in net "wealth". A wicked bubble.

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An unexpected oddity--I added a LaTeX app to the blogsite so I could write equations more easily, and that turns the dollar sign into math-mode start/stop. Just a heads-up if you were planning to do the same.