I haven't done any research regarding the comparative rate of unemployment between Europe and the East but it's irrelevant to this matter because: when you need more labor to produce a given result, it's actually very bad. The incentives to improve were on Asia's side, but they didn't.
You are not considering all the variables. Your view is too simpleton.
Of course the end result was bad after over the hundreds of years that Asia fell behind the West in terms of industrialization. In that sense it was defeating and China ended up killing 57 million in a Cultural Revolution to deal with the adverse effects of the inefficiencies and further retarding their economic development. But now they've suddenly started to catch up, because they had no choice. And they offered the release value for the Westerners to be able to continue to live the high life with the least effort.
But over the 1000 or so years that it worked for China, it was because it provided social harmony. Rice production requires communal irrigation and thus very strong local social integration, sharing, and harmony. This is why the Chinese are innately collectivist and into political connections as a method of production.
You are not factoring in the geography of China. China can't be attacked from the West, only from the North (and of course Japan from the East), and thus the Great Wall. China was mostly isolated from the rest of the world by the Himalayan mountain ranges. It is impossible to run military supply lines over those mountain ranges. Thus it was sheltered from the relative competition, until finally in the modern era it no longer is and had to open up because the Chinese people could see on TV what they were missing.
Not incorporating geography[1] and all factors leads simpletons to their Dunning-Kruger behavior.
And I assure you I could refute all your other statements resoundingly, but I don't have time to devote to this.
I suggest you do more studying. And open your mind to many more variables than you are considering before you jump to erroneous simpleton conclusions.
[1] Don't forget my up thread point about the USA having the most ideal geography in the world for physical trade being bissected by navigable from North-to-South Mississippi River and having coasts on both Atlantic and Pacific. This advantage will fade as we grind into the Knowledge Age with localized production with 3D printing.
I address a few real quickly...
When you produce something efficiently that means that there is labor available to produce something else in the economy (a nascent new market) and that the output is cheaper so their is savings available to buy the products of the nascent new market. It's not bad, it's good.
Not at all. You follow Karl Marx in that you focus only on the labor value of an economy. You could have only 20% of the population producing 80% the GDP (most efficiently) and that wouldn't necessary make the rest of the people in the country more productive. They may instead become wards of the State. Saudi Arabia is perhaps an example.
Chineses and Europeans both lived in squalor because they where, as the whole wold, under a Malthusian economic reality (GDP per capita stagnant despite growth in GDP), until Europe starts to escape the Malthusian trap because of its creativity.
You've made no point.
Also Armstrong's chart that you have posted is misleading because it makes a comparison based on the GDP and not the GDP per capita. Under the Sung dynasty (from 950 to 1250) GDP per capita was higher in China than in Europe, but after China GDP per capital stop improving and soon Europe took the lead on that metric (the only relevant one).
GDP per capita is not the relevant statistic on which region becomes the next financial capital of the world. In fact, the very high GDP per capita of Europe is precisely what is enabling this dysfunctional outcome which I somewhat explained in my prior post about cultural stereotypes.
Europe's population is much higher now than it was then before the Black Death, so there wasn't any Malthusian check.
Europe's population right after the Black Death was much lower than before, so there was a Malthusian check.
Ahem. Do you not see your error in logic?
Mathusians claim the natural resources can't support a greater population. Yet the population is now higher than it was and we are not mining resources from outside planet Earth.
Please I am not going to respond any more to people who have such poor logic skills that I will end up in noisy nonsense.
The resource problems are always due to Coasian barriers (to human innovation and expansion of the entropy in the human economy) and there has never been and never will be a Malthusian point of truth. I wrote an essay about this:
http://unheresy.com/Information%20Is%20Alive.html