That gets it slightly backwards. The decline of slavery has to do with the fact it kind of sucks as an economic system from a productivity and incentive standpoint. (The moral is a no, duh.) And that is before the economic effects of slaves as inferior to even free paupers, and overall efficiency.
It literally incentivizes only working hard enough to not be punished and effort and investment of owners is into more slaves instead of improving productivity. Slavery is an economic trap of local maxima to the slaveholder. It is no coincidence that late abolishers are worse off than their neighbors who abolished earlier.
Not bothering with slavery is what helped acquire technology to massively beat out the short term. In spite of the emphasis on lower per unit cost slavery also is terrible in an industrial context, especially in a war one. The gulags weren't closed from kindness but because they looked at the infastructure produced and saw how awful it was. Using it for war materiale you may as well not bother with any locks or posted guards and outright invite in any foreign spies and saboteurs you find because you have them all literally incentivized to work just good enough to make it appear initially good to inspection and then fail in practice.
In all fairness to slavery it was the alternative to genocide historically. Yes, that previous sentence is horrifying on many levels. Genocide was the prior status quo and fights were over food supplies in the first place meaning displacement to a hostile undesirable wilderness or outright genocide were the common outcome for losers and being taken as a mate was "being lucky".
Food was too expensive to keep non-working captives for anything less than a suitably huge ransom. Human sacrifice had a habit of appearing and then falling out of favor once slavery was instituted (seen well in early Chinese tombs). The implications of human tendencies towards rationalization to justify what they want are clear and disturbing.
It literally incentivizes only working hard enough to not be punished and effort and investment of owners is into more slaves instead of improving productivity. Slavery is an economic trap of local maxima to the slaveholder. It is no coincidence that late abolishers are worse off than their neighbors who abolished earlier.
Not bothering with slavery is what helped acquire technology to massively beat out the short term. In spite of the emphasis on lower per unit cost slavery also is terrible in an industrial context, especially in a war one. The gulags weren't closed from kindness but because they looked at the infastructure produced and saw how awful it was. Using it for war materiale you may as well not bother with any locks or posted guards and outright invite in any foreign spies and saboteurs you find because you have them all literally incentivized to work just good enough to make it appear initially good to inspection and then fail in practice.
In all fairness to slavery it was the alternative to genocide historically. Yes, that previous sentence is horrifying on many levels. Genocide was the prior status quo and fights were over food supplies in the first place meaning displacement to a hostile undesirable wilderness or outright genocide were the common outcome for losers and being taken as a mate was "being lucky".
Food was too expensive to keep non-working captives for anything less than a suitably huge ransom. Human sacrifice had a habit of appearing and then falling out of favor once slavery was instituted (seen well in early Chinese tombs). The implications of human tendencies towards rationalization to justify what they want are clear and disturbing.