The Slavery Myth Nobody Questions

Friends —

I wanted to learn why there was still slavery today, and I began researching.

I first learned that roughly 50 million people are currently living in some form of modern slavery. And that number is up about 10 million from 2016.

My first reaction was: how is this not the only thing anyone is talking about?

My second reaction — after digging for a while — was more complicated.

I’ve noticed a pattern across a lot of hot-button topics. Whether it’s homelessness, hunger, or the environment, advocacy groups often face a real temptation: exaggerate the problem to attract attention and funding. But this often backfires. The inflated number gets out, skeptics tear it apart, and suddenly people who should care about the real problem just … tune out entirely.

Watch Now

That’s what’s happening here. When you trace the 50 million figure back to its source, you find an advocacy organization — not a neutral research body — with methodology that one UN advisor called “complex, opaque and incomplete.” Their single largest category of “slaves” worldwide is within forced marriages. And in their count, those can include women who were coerced into a marriage with a peer, fell in love, built a family, and have no desire to leave. There might be a problem with how that started, but it’s not slavery.

To be clear — there are still millions of people living in what, by any definition, looks strongly like slavery. Forced work camps for Uyghurs in China. Or North Korea, where they throw entire families into prison for the “crime” of just one person. Or Mauritania, one can still be born into slavery.

Here’s the part that actually surprised me, though. When you cut through the inflated numbers and look at what’s real, the story underneath isn’t one of despair. It’s one of the most remarkable quiet victories in human history — one that almost nobody is talking about because the people who should be shouting about it are too busy chasing funding.

You can watch it here.

– Ken

Subscribe now