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ete comments on Natural Selection of Government Systems - Less Wrong Discussion

5 Post author: cleonid 08 February 2015 06:11PM

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Comment author: ete 09 February 2015 04:38:30PM *  0 points [-]

In the modern economies, mechanization generally made forced labor economically inefficient.

Although this may become true as automation becomes able to do more things more cheaply, China seems to be a very strong counterexample at our current/recent technological level. Prison slaves, Forced student labour is central to the Chinese economic miracle, Laogai or "reform through labor" programmes, etc. America's prison labor system is also quite scary.

Comment author: ete 10 February 2015 08:00:56PM 0 points [-]

I'm curious as to why this was downvoted? China is definitely at the industrial level and there appears to be strong evidence for forced labor driving parts of the economy, which seems a relevant counter to the suggestion that there's not an economic incentive to enslave groups in the industrialized world.

Perhaps extracting forced labor from an internal group rather than captured neighbors is a more important distinction to some people?