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What is your definition of slavery that would mean there is more slavery now than before the civil war?
Well there's absolutely a lot of real and actual slavery across the country, from domestic servants who are being held against their will, to sex slaves, and of course the numbers scale up with our population. So our population during the civil war was 31+ million, with close to 4 million of that being slaves, now we have 331+ million people, if you combine the instances of domestic and indentured servitude with sexual slavery, then add in those wrongfully in the prison system it scales to being much more than the sub 4 million in slavery during the civil war.
I know a lot of people would want to say "but the prison system is prisoners who committed crimes" but a lot of people are in prison because of failed justice, or on poverty based offenses, some of which compile with other petty offenses. Now also another caveat is that prison work isn't usually compulsory, it's normally voluntary, but one can argue that it's the prison that has the leverage over these people volunteering or not.
Overall these statistics aren't easy to calculate because modern day slavers want to hide and obfuscate their crimes, but it's there, it exists, and it exists in places you may not expect, like the next time you're sitting in a park in Manhattan consider the fact that one of the many domestic workers present may in fact be enslaved against their will, and this could be said in LA, Miami, Atlanta, anywhere in the US.
If you aren't accounting for the change in population and you're just comparing the estimated number of slaves, then you are definitely correct. However, I think its probably better to measure what percentage of the population is made up of slaves.
I agree, but that's also what I'm trying to say is that the natural scale of the population increase will still scale out to be a higher slavery total than back then, but that's total numbers, the percentages would be vastly different, like during the civil war era slaves were about 9.6% of the population of the US, but because of slavery not being tracked so closely now we couldn't get an accurate total for slavery in the modern era, and there would be nitpicking about what counts as slavery and what does not.
Always loved this logic.
There's more people enslaved today than there ever has been in the history of the world
No no, let's not think about it that way -
The percentage of people that are slaves is roughly the same or decreasing 🥰🥰🥰
Obviously there are going to be more total enslaved people now, it scales with the population. The problem with looking at it that way is that it doesn't actually tell you if the situation is improving. All it tells you is that there are way more people now. That's why you look at a percentage. That will tell you how bad the problem was, how much better its gotten, and how much better it needs to get.
I'm not trying to argue that everything is ok because a smaller percentage of people are enslaved now. A percentage is simply the more useful method of measuring how common slavery is and comparing it to different times.