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I am considering tons of sugar produced, in that sense slave plantations were more efficient compared to other forms of ownership. So no matter the initial organization of labor, slave plantations will be more efficient and thus will be established as dominant structure as that is how incentives are aligned.
By the way it is not dissimilar to some issues here an now: organic and ethical farms are less efficient compared to industrial agriculture and that is why we have the system that we have now. The same goes for textile industry and so forth. And even the do-gooders and Buddhist vegans may not be as squeamish buying illegal drugs with all the costs associated with financing criminal cartels wreaking havoc in many countries. I do not see the situation that different - if English ladies and gentlemen of 18th century wanted to sweeten their tea with sugar, they just accepted slave labor in the same way modern comrades in California accept some people being horribly executed by cartels just as a price of having fun when partying.
Organic and ethical farms are actually dramatically more efficient at turning energy into food than industrial agriculture. Industrial farming lets you turn petroleum/oil into food, and despite being less efficient (and causing damage to the soil to boot) the sheer amount of energy contained within petroleum lets modern industrial agriculture outcompete organic and ethical farming.
You may have your own metric of what is "efficient", I use markets and capacity to produce at scale. You may use different idea of what "efficient" means including efficiently satisfying your aesthetic need but then we are not discussing the same thing. Slave plantations were able to produce more cash crops for cheaper compared to other types of agricultural production, that is why they emerged in the first place and it did not matter if it was French or Portuguese or English or Dutch or later Americans being in control, all of them were running slave plantations despite being of different religions, cultures, languages etc. Playing word games of what it means to be efficient does not change the economic incentives.
As has been pointed out below, my metric is actually energy returned on energy invested, i.e. input vs output on an energetic level. To the best of my knowledge this is actually what people usually mean when they use the term "efficient" and I'm not trying to play any language games here. Organic farming turns 1 calorie of input into 10 calories of output, petroleum/modern agriculture turns 10 calories of input into 1 calorie of output. To go back to slavery, slavery might even be incredibly inefficient, but the slaveowner doesn't care because he's using other people's resources without compensating them - slavery isn't really about efficiency.
As for changing economic incentives, I think there's actually a very substantial chance of that changing over the next few decades - go look at a chart showing conventional oil discoveries over time (you can look at the non-conventional discoveries too, but they need to be accounted for differently due to depletion rates etc). Modern industrial agriculture relies on petroleum and there are no substitutes, so expect economic incentives to change dramatically as oil's price changes.
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From what I remember from his other comments, his metric of efficiency how much energy you need to put in vs how many calories of food you get out. It's a valid metric IMO, and markets obfuscate it when energy is cheap.
I could ride my horse to the next valley for 10 potatoes. Or I could walk there for 3 potatoes.
The market has determined that generally people's time is more valuable than the energy, and the market's efficiency is calculated by taking the two factors (among others) into account. To say that the market result is not maximally energy efficient is a trivial, one-eyed view. The labour efficiency of organic farming is abysmal.
I see that side of the argument as well, and actually I'm more partial to it. That said, it's not like market profitability can't be a one-eyed view in it's own way, it's not hard to come up with an example of an unsustainable project that got started because that's where the profits were at the moment.
What the market has going for it is it's self-correcting mechanisms, but these corrections can be pretty painful, so I can understand wanting to avoid it, if you think you can see one coming.
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That is a silly metric. You may as well count total weight of machinery produced and declare that USSR centrally planned economy was more efficient by West.
The whole point is that this system produced more luxury good and sucked at other things.
For a toy example: if you take over island and force people to work to death in a gold mine, then it is not a better economical system even if it produces more gold.
(and organic farms AFAIK are straightforwardly less efficient, Norman Borlaug was one of great heroes - also you can have unethical organic farm, using some type of fertilizers over another does not make impossible to use slaves etc)
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