Pharma jobs in an RBE

Supposing it was discovered that (say) eating a handful of grass every day would ward off cancer. In an RBE there would be much rejoicing at the discovery and studies would look into how we can produce and distribute enough grass to meet this new need, and/or how we could extract or manufacure the active ingredient if that would make the remedy more efficient. The objective would be to derive the most human benefit from the least unit of resource.

In our current economy, the jobs of people who work in big pharma and the cancer industry would be at stake. It would be in the vested interest to discredit the claim that grass cures cancer, or to corner the market in grass, or to monetise it or the active ingredient that brings the benefit. It is easy to deride this need to protect vested interests, but it is a very real need. If people don't have jobs their lives collapse. Therefore there's a trade off of jobs for other gains. The "need" to have a job has to be weighed against other needs.

In an RBE, there is no need to do work for its own sake and if work can be handed over to machines or obviates, that is done as soon as possible. Thus if grass cures cancer and there is no more need for people to work in big pharma or the cancer industy that is good. Those people can do something else.

Work - a systems approach

In my previous post I cited the defence that someone who has worked hard to get something should not have it taken from them. On the face of it, that seems fair, but let's analyse a bit further.

If we could enumerate all work on a standard scale of standard units, we could perhaps consider a system in which the reward was commensurate with the work. Even if we could work out a single scale for all work, there are problems with this arrangement. Would we want people competing to do more and more work for more and more reward? Or would we say that reward would be commensurate with the proportion of work done.

To know what proportion of work someone has done, we need to know what the total work done is, but either way, we have to face the question of what work we want done. You don't want someone to break your window so that it needs to be fixed. These two pieces of work cancel out, ideally. We seem to have no problem with this concept in our homes, where we work together and conserve our resources, or in our organisations, so why is it different at a planetary level? Perhaps it was because we couldn't organise ourselves on a planetary level, but with the internet this is clearly becoming something we can do, if it has not actually become so.

Returning to our homes and the broken window analogy, we would presumably want a society where no-one had an incentive to break your window deliberately, and your window would be designed and constructed in such a way that the possibility of it being accidentally broken was minimised. That makes perfect sense at the level of your home, but of you are a glazier you might quite like the idea that windows get broken as it's work for you.

So, again, logic seems to dictate that we should minimise the total amount of work that needs doing, at a planetary level and this requires co-operation in not deliberately making work for ourselves or others. The reward being commensurate with the proportion of work done seems workable and fair - so far.

A big problem seems to be that at the moment we reward more work, in most cases. More windows fixed = more money to the glazier. How are we going to reward people according to the proportion of work that they do? Is this as impractical as having a unified scale of work so that it can be all be equated? What if we arranged it so that no work needed doing? What if there were people who couldn't do any of the work that needed doing either ever, or at a particular period of their life (too young or too old)? Rather than deal with these complexities, why not just let people have at least the means to survival without the need for them to have "banked" (or to have the potential to bank) any work?

Another way of putting it

We definitely live within the limits of the earth's resources. That's a fact and not up for debate. I would suggest that it's not controversial to suggest that we should not squander those resources, but conserve them, even if not for altruistic reasons. If The Earth is analogous to a space ship or submarine, with a finite water / air supply, then contaminating or wasting those resources is bad for each individual.

What's debatable is whether we attempt to share the planet's resources to the general benefit, or whether we continue to fight over them as if they were scarce - paradoxically making them scarcer as we do it, to make them have a price [that increases].

I would suggest that the basic goals of humanity  should be that each person on the planet has adequate nutrition and shelter and means to maintain his/her health. That's not intended to be comprehensive, but it gives an idea. There are things we might want to achieve beyond these basics, but the principle holds.

To achieve what we want for humanity as a whole, it follows that there is work to do and it seems only fair that each person does their fair share of it. This is not all that easy as people have different abilities individually and over time. No work should be done by anyone or anything unless it furthers humanity's goal of being a successful species in the long term.

If we agree that we should share the work out fairly (even if it's not clear what 'fairly' entails), it makes perfect sense for us to automate / eradicate as much work as possible. Why do it if it's not helping us achieve our goals? Why have futile, or worse, destructive jobs just to get money? Why do the work ourselves if machines can do it quicker, more accurately, and without the need for rest and recreation? Why don't we just do the work that machines can't do.

There's a great deal of intellect being deployed in playing what are really games with money, albeit in increasingly abstract forms. "Options" to buy shares at a certain price at  certain time are just one example of an abstraction from money, which is an abstraction in itself in that its only actual use is to procure resources. Those intellects need to be deployed directly towards  the survival and true prosperity of our species. The games they play are not frivolous as - say - computer games could be seen to be, because money is viewed as a resource in itself, even though it is actually a proxy, or an attempt at a proxy, for all other resources. If those resourced aren't scarce, money doesn't fit in, so the monetary system seeks to make them scarce to fit its world view.

Efficiency and employment are opposing each other

"In some parts of the country ... the public sector accounts for a third of the workforce. An urgent rebalancing was vital", wrote Damian Reece in The Daily Telegraph.

How much of the workforce should be in the public sector, then? We have to start from the premise that the public sector is a Bad Thing, which Reece only hints at by suggesting imbalance between the private and public sectors (presumably).

Here's the point. The only work that should be done is work that is directly relevant to social progress. Having a job to get money does not count as 'relevant to social progress', unless the work being done is in itself relevant to social progress. The work that needs to be done should be done in the most efficient way possible relative to the actual (ie not money) resources available. In many cases this means machines. Humans should only be doing socially relevant work that cannot be done by machines.

People in he public and private sectors all want/need to keep their jobs and there's a tendency to not be as efficient as possible in order that people may stay in work. The public sector gets criticised for that because it's tax funded and most people have no choice but to pay taxes, whereas in the private sector you allegedly have choice. This is a false dichotommy. The obvious essential service that the private sector predominates is food production and distribution. But food isn't produced and distributed as efficiently as possible, because people would lose their jobs - so it's the same thing as the public sector being inefficient to save jobs.

Until we decouple the need for access to the necessities of life from work and money, we are always going to have this problem. If we were so efficient that few if any people had jobs and therefore money to buy the efficiently produced goods/services, they would have to be given away. In our current system we create a cycle of consumption whereby jobs are made for people so that they can get money to buy the goods that are made for the large part to keep people in work.