Not the OP, but one might argue that slavery disincentivises the slave-holder from innovating the labour process.
The (Nietzschean?) counterargument here is that slave-labour enables division of labour and frees enough from non-specialised labour (e.g. individuals being responsible for all of producing food, building dwellings, providing security, raising children, caring for the elderly etc, and thus not being particularly good at any of them) to allow the emergence of a 'caste' of full-time scientists, engineers. Such a 'caste', such division of labour is required to drive technological progress to a level where slavery becomes unnecessary.
My historically uninformed and naive suggestion would be that ancient Greece was an example of the latter while most other societies with substantial slavery (such as South America and Africa) were examples of the former.
Aside: Any serious discussion of
slavery must begin with the question: what do you mean by "slavery",
for the term is used in wildly different ways.
Not sure what you mean? I am not trying to justify anything I am simply saying that the claim about slave labour being a negative for the slave owner is wrong.
Is that "certain perspective" interesting? Nobody wants to work that's a given that doesn't need to be argued, whence work needs incentives (in a generalised sense) from salary to force.
Most human labour has historically related to food production, production and maintainance of dwellings, sanitation, health, care of the young & elderly, and security (from animals, natural forces, other humans). Since division of labour became possible additional forms of labour emerged, such as science, engineering, and organisation of labour whose raison d'être is to lighten humanity's workload. One can and should certainly ask if work could be organised better, but there is a base load of things that need to be done to perpetuate humanity.
When you force people to work, they're apt to poison you, sabotage the work, do as little as possible, be as unhelpful as possible, etc. Defending against that is costly.
Costly, yes. But do those costs out-weigh the immediate benefits of slave ownership? Probably not.
I have a hard time thinking slave-owners were hurt by slavery; they made out like bandits, but their gains don't counter all the harm done to those enslaved.
That's a more difficult question to answer. Slaves are only good for the lowest menial labor, such as picking cotton. Up until the introduction of the cotton gin, slavery was dying out in the US because it was unprofitable. The cotton gin made slavery profitable again, but it was again dying out by the time of the Civil War. One of the causes of the Civil War was the southern states trying to erect trade barriers to protect the economics of the slave plantations.
Businesses run on slave labor just could not compete with those run with free labor.
(For example, it was illegal in the slave states to teach slaves to read, and any slave who could read would do well to conceal the skill. The southerners were fearful of an educated slave, because that made them more dangerous. But an illiterate slave was also less useful as a worker.)
It's not so much the slaveholder as an individual, but the slaveholding society. You end up with large numbers of free men who aren't invested in the society because their labor is effectively worthless. They may revolt, or it may just be when there's a threat to the society (invasion, most commonly, or a big natural disaster) they aren't willing to make any sacrifices to save it. And you certainly can't rely on your slaves to fight off an invader.
As a slaveholder, you're forced to provide all the needs of your slaves. This prevents you from being able to externalize costs to others (e.g., the cost of schooling), and from being able to capitalize on "economies" of scale. There is also a large hidden cost in that maintaining a plantation slave society required virtually the entire free male class to participate in martial civil defense against slave uprisings.
Can I recommend you read the life and times of Frederick Douglass, or perhaps some of his assorted essays and sermons? He addresses this in considerable depth.
The (Nietzschean?) counterargument here is that slave-labour enables division of labour and frees enough from non-specialised labour (e.g. individuals being responsible for all of producing food, building dwellings, providing security, raising children, caring for the elderly etc, and thus not being particularly good at any of them) to allow the emergence of a 'caste' of full-time scientists, engineers. Such a 'caste', such division of labour is required to drive technological progress to a level where slavery becomes unnecessary.
My historically uninformed and naive suggestion would be that ancient Greece was an example of the latter while most other societies with substantial slavery (such as South America and Africa) were examples of the former.
Aside: Any serious discussion of slavery must begin with the question: what do you mean by "slavery", for the term is used in wildly different ways.