OK, so you’ve somehow worked your way through the issues of who pays and who gains from reparations. Now comes the really hard part–calculating the amount of the payments.
If the event triggering the need to pay damages is limited to slavery, the job is actually reasonably straightforward, if hardly easy. You could probably determine the average wage of a free agricultural worker in the South in the antebellum years through available documents. You would then subtract a small amount for subsistence payments, add an arbitrary fixed amount for emotional distress, apply an appropriate discount rate, and you would have your figure. At least the first part of it. But more is to follow.
From what I have seen, most of the arguments about reparations revolve around the very real wealth disparity between African-Americans and white people, which is usually attributed to the effects of segregation. The proponents of reparations typically assume that there is a fixed lump of wealth and that, if African-Americans lost x number of dollars as a result of segregation, the same x flowed to white people and should be used for the payments. That isn’t true; there is no lump of wealth. It is perfectly possible that white people would have been better off financially without segregation, as is the case in post-apartheid South Africa. As a result, identifying the funds that should be paid by white people to African-Americans due to losses attributable to segregation, as opposed to slavery, is incredibly hard.
And then there is an argument to be made for offsets. The victims of slavery had their lives completely ruined by it. But are their distant ancestors financially worse off today than they would be if they still lived in Africa? Not bloody likely.
All of this is academic, of course. If reparations were somehow to become reality, you can be certain that the amount selected would be small and arbitrary–possibly based on median wealth differentials. Would that actually help to heal the wounds? More on that tomorrow.