Piketty, in his most recent book, brings up the point that when all these former colonialists ended slavery (by their own hand or otherwise), the big concern was how much the former slaveholders would be paid back in exchange for their lost 'capital'. No concern was ever given to how much those former slaves should be owed for what was done to them. The US civil war in some ways allowed the US to avoid both questions.

He also points out the rather shocking fact that eleven out of the first fifteen US presidents were themselves slaveowners.

Here's why this seems unsurprising to me. The switchover from slavery to non-slavery will (if it's not forced from outside) happen around the time when the forces for and against this change are evenly matched.

One way to move that balance is to bribe some of the powerful people who are on the fence, or close to it. (For instance, people who are starting to see the moral case, but are also pretty concerned about their 401k, or its 18thC equivalent.) Of course this bribe was tempting to those pushing for change, they could have victory now, instead of waiting another generation.

On the other hand, attaching to the bill to free the slaves a huge bill to pay them each compensation, this would clearly push the balance the other way, and thus delay the date until it could get a majority (of those with the relevant power).

This is on point. Perhaps (in a very morbid way) it would have been better if the end of slavery had happened slightly later such that there was enough of a "surplus" of support for abolition that slaves and their descendants were actually compensated to some degree.

Though I can't see that the compensation would ever have been significant enough to cover the costs of having been enslaved.

Most slaves were banned by law from learning to read or write, and that alone (I mean, even without being enslaved) would have been an _immense_ cost on any individual trying to make their way in the world at that time.

And that is why Adams, not Jefferson, should be on the $2 bill.

From a US perspective: yes. In the US the compensation is also used as a punishment for the culprit (so e.g. larger companies pay more). I dont know about the dutch system, but in germany they just compensate the financial loss, so more like anual salary* years to retirement (maybe minus deduction of living cost for the deceiced). From the numbers it looks like the Dutch system might je similiar.

but the financial loss should certainly be larger than €123?

Wouldn't anyone who was killed earn more than €100 a year for their lifetime?

I am sure the court has some guiding rationale, but without it this feels outrageous.

Possibly they're not inflation adjusted for whatever reason? Also they probably assumed the widow would not receive all of her husband's money.

Adjusting for inflation would get us to around 2000 euro, which makes sense for poor countries.

They are insultingly low amounts and almost seem like adding insult to injury.

From the article:

> The court recognised in its ruling that the sums granted the relatives of victims were “disproportionate” to the suffering caused.

Then why not make them proportional?

Because court can only compensate actually proven material damage, not "suffering".

Sure they can, e.g. look at the compensation for people who have been convicted wrongly.

In the Netherlands the compensation for that is about €85,- a day. Not very helpful if you lose your job.

Which is shockingly poor.

(But, not picking on the Netherlands here, for it is shockingly poor in lots of other countries too.)

I got 20k euros for going to court after my boss that tried to blackmail me and didn't pay me extra hours (everything was paid by insurances of course), how is 10k euros appropriate in that kind of situation?!

Why should it be any amount of money at all? If crimes were committed, the people responsible should be tried and held accountable.

The people responsible are probably all dead by now, given that the crimes occurred 73 years ago. The people were acting on orders of their government, so the only recourse now would be payment to the families of the victims. The payments seem to be exceptionally small to me.

Using an analogy: Do you think governments should help subsets of their population that are affected by sudden extremely rare disasters? Part of the goal of a government is to provide public goods - like fire fighting services, for example. Maybe your argument is "they should have been insured against having their family members killed by the state"? Pretty clear to me (at least) that this is an absurd position to hold.

Of course, the fact that this "disaster" was directly caused by the government probably builds a stronger case for the government having to use some of its budget to help them out. That just seems like a good policy in terms of incentive design.

Edit: Maybe your argument is that Indonesia should have (in effect) sued the Netherlands if they wanted to get compensation for their citizens?

Those responsible were soldiers acting for the state. The state still exists.