> Top 20% of households have about 60% of wealth...
but slaves are then apparently counted as part of wealth. If we include them as part of the population, how much more concentrated was wealth? I wonder if the slave-owning regions were really that much different (in this respect) than Latin America. One might argue that, without an indigenous population to exploit, the colonists imported one...

ARRRGGHHH!
Is the guy that wrote that from Iowa? Fish, fish, fish, fish, fish. Lots of trees next to the shore so you could build lots of little smoky fires for smoking the fish and exporting them back to England or the Netherlands or Denmark or Galicia or wherever.
When the Pilgrims got to Boston, know what they found? An apple orchard. Apple orchards are not native to the Americas.
And once they imported some beehives, they even got apples.

I'm surprised that in 1774 New England was so much poorer compared to the Southern and Middle States.

In 1856, Abraham Lincoln said:
"The slaves of the South, at a moderate estimate, are worth a thousand millions of dollars. Let it be permanently settled that this property may extend to new territory without restraint, and it greatly enhances, perhaps quite doubles, its value at once. This immense palpable pecuniary interest on the question of extending slavery unites the Southern people as one man." Speech on Sectionalism made in 1856, Nevins, The Life and Writings of Abbraham Lincoln, 406

Lincoln was well aware of the impact of the economic value of slaves as a cause of the Civil War.

a friends response to the section entitled "Slave Raiding":

o Carry 150 slaves--100 survive--surplus value: 100 x 1/4 x
10 yrs = 250 man-years of value
o Amortized cost of ship: 25 man-years
o Cost of crew (2 voyages a year): 10 man-years
o Cost of trade goods (guns): 15 man-years
o A 5-1 ratio of revenue to cost--but exceptional hazards
o Having someone else do your shit for you.... priceless

There are somethings that you have to do yourself, for everything else there is slave labor. Accepted everywhere.

That population in 1600 is surely the European population, correct? I seem to remember that a fair number of people already lived here before then.

Query: Of what does the "wealth" in owning a slave consist? Is it anything other than the then-present discounted value of not having to pay the guy in cash, only in room and board? If this is it, then surely the wealth gained by the theretofore slaves in taking ownership in themselves was a wash: the wealth has simply moved from the white guy to the black one. Where's the economic effect?

[Shouldn't be one: I don't think that "slave wealth" is net wealth for society...]

Shouldn't "Year Y/Pop in 2004$" be inflation-adjusted? Interestingly, if one does this using the BLS CPI estimates*, the numbers for 1840, 1929 and 2004 become, respectively, $6,000, $16,179 and $7,055, highlighting the hazards of such an exercise.

*http://minneapolisfed.org/Research/data/us/calc/hist1800.cfm

This may be a dead thread, but in case it's not:

Andrew Boucher says "I'm surprised that in 1774 New England was so much poorer compared to the Southern and Middle States."
New England had one or two of the wealthier individuals in the American colonies (John Hancock, for one) but before industrialization it was a really poor place. The arable land close to transportation had long since been subdivided into marginal plots-- Europeans had been doing that for about 150 years by 1774 and they tended to have very large numbers of surviving kids. See James Henretta's short demographic history of the US for a readable discussion.
Colonial migrants knew about comparative poverty (and clannishness), so they went to PA and to the southern backcountry where at least they could get some land.
Pre the mills of the early 19th century, New England is best thought of as Newfoundland with farms.

Re David Lloyd-Jones and the value of slaves. Isn't he leaving out the future value of the slaves' children? This was important during three periods-- in the early years, when North American slavery was an offshoot of the lucrative Caribbean trade and slaves were comparatively very expensive; second, about the mid-18C when rice planters were willing to pay a lot more for slaves than tobacco planters, so Chesapeake planters needed slave children; third, when legal slave imports were cut off.
Besides, I think his formulation elides the central issue. Isn't the whole point of owning someone, or owning the skunk factory, to be able to own what's produced? If the slave owns what the slave produces, what good is slavery to the planter? And, just in economic terms, isn't that ownership worth a premium?