The calculations sound plausible because compound interest is a real and well-understood financial concept. When debts are left unpaid, they do grow. Banks and governments apply compound interest to unpaid obligations as a matter of routine. The principle that a debt does not disappear simply because it is ignored has genuine force.
The attempt to quantify the debt also has a certain intellectual honesty. Rather than simply asserting that a wrong occurred and demanding an unspecified remedy, the calculations try to put a number on the liability. The effort to be precise is, in principle, more rigorous than vague appeals to ‘justice’.
The general direction of the figures, that the aggregate wrong of slavery is very large and that its financial consequences for descendants of the enslaved are still felt, is probably correct at the level of a general statement. The Caribbean did enter independence poorer than it would have been without slavery. The people descended from enslaved people are, in aggregate, less wealthy than the people descended from those who enslaved them. These facts have economic causes.
