analaguously, I got the impression from the article and the discussion here that slavery was a dead-end trap; a local maxima - without pain being experienced by

analaguously, I got the impression from the article and the discussion here that slavery was a dead-end trap; a local maxima - without pain being experienced by people who had the ability to change things, there wasn't much incentive to make such change - "just buy more slaves"/"just work the slaves harder"