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Irrelevant even if true (and I'm not sure a meaningful measurement is possible).
There was plenty of competition in Europe and around the Mediterranean Sea... but slavery still persisted.
Being a slave owner doesn't make you a personally unproductive leech, any more than being a factory owner does.
Yeah it does, any individual inefficiency and weakness is a lot less meaningful when the whole thing is made up of inefficiencies and weaknesses. Like let's use top athletes and gamers as an example, they're having to optimize the most niche and unimportant elements of their field in order to gain an advantage while beginners just have to do simple things like practice a few more times or learn the rules more to get significant improvement. One of the things I noticed watching bronze OW players in vod reviews years back is that quite a few of them just needed to learn what each characters ultimate did.
When there's much bigger issues in a less competitive environment, smaller optimizations don't really give that much of an advantage. A player who knows what the characters do and how to hold high ground and hits 54% of shots will almost always do better than the player who doesn't know but hits 58%.
The slave owner doesn't provide zero value, they do serve similar to a factory owner in that they're the peak of management. But unlike modern capitalism where people tend to get in that management position because of talent and skill at management, slavery tends to happen because of skill at other things. Especially back when generational wealth and power was even more meaningful, fail child kings and queens would stay in place until a revolution whereas the big rich names of 50-100 years ago are practically meaningless today. No one is talking about the Rothschilds and the Carnegies, we're talking about Bezos and Musk.
Which is a great deal larger than zero.
Getting to the top of a hierarchy requires the same basic skills regardless of what the hierarchy is. A cynic would say "backstabbing and douchebaggery", though admittedly it's not ONLY that.
Don't the Rothschilds still run The Economist? If nobody's talking about them (aside from the DR, occasionally), it's because they don't want to be talked about.
But all of this is besides the point, which is that until very recently there weren't any successful non-slaveowning societies. Which very strongly suggests that slavery was an advantage.
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