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Slave Lives
(On several occasions I have been rebuked in discussions on Ricochet for referring to the various flavours of collectivists as “slavers”, it being argued that doing so makes of light of the abomination which is human bondage. Well, I’m going to go on calling them slavers, because in my opinion there is no clear moral distinction between appropriating a fraction of a person’s life by coercion and threat of force and taking the whole thing. This view is informed by the concept of “slave lives”, to which I was introduced by my late friend and business associate Phil Salin, in a discussion of large government-funded technology projects such as the Space Shuttle and what was to become the International Space Station. Ever since, I’ve always thought of “projects worthy of public funding” in terms of slave lives, and perhaps you’ll find the perspective as enlightening as I have. Here is an essay I wrote in 2012 explaining the concept.)
In each of our long and tedious traverses through life, we’re lucky if we have the privilege to encounter at least one Wild Talent—a person so endowed with the ability to see things as they are and project their consequences into the future that you feel yourself in the presence of what, in ages before rationality rang down the curtain on the miraculous, one would have called a seer. This was the case when I made the acquaintance of Phil Salin, initially as a spokesman and negotiator in Autodesk’s alliance with the Xanadu project, and then Autodesk’s investment in the American Information Exchange (AMIX) which he invented—the world’s first electronic open auction market for knowledge. A few years after Autodesk terminated its involvement in Xanadu and AMIX, I remarked “In 1989, we had the prototypes of both the World-Wide Web and eBay working in our laboratory and we walked away from both of them because they weren’t within our ‘core competency’ ”.
Meeting Phil Salin was a life-transforming experience for me, not just for the ventures he introduced me to, but mostly the pellucid way he explained the difficult concepts of economics and management that this programmer and engineer only dimly grasped. Here, I want to present just one heuristic I learned from Phil Salin: “slave lives”.
Suppose Pharaoh decides to build a pyramid. Let’s say this will take on the order of ten years with an average workforce of 15,000 people. Assuming the workforce were slaves, who were not compensated other than sustenance for their work (this has been disputed—some argue those who built the pyramids were skilled labourers paid for their work), then we might compute the number of slave lives consumed in building the Great Pyramid as 15,000 people times 10 years divided by a generous 30 year work career of a labourer in Old Kingdom Egypt. This works out to be 5,000: five thousand complete lives of slaves consumed to build the Great Pyramid.
Now, Phil Salin asked, how does this apply in today’s world? Well, we take the cost of some great “public enterprise”, divide by the lifetime earnings of the median taxpayer who funds them, et voilà, the slave lives consumed in realising them. Let me begin with the one he originally cited to me: the grotesque and detestable “International Space Station”. This monument to pork, crony capitalism, civil servant space cadets, and marooning human destiny in low earth orbit has cost, to date, around US$150 billion (in rapidly-depreciating 2010 greenbacks, including all contributions by international partners).
To convert this into Salin’s slave lives, let’s look at the median personal income in the United States, which works out to be on the order of US$29,000 a year. (There are many ways to interpret these data, but for this kind of broad brush analysis the details matter but little.) Assume each of these median income workers earns that median salary over their whole working career, and that they work from age 20 through 65, or 45 years. Their total career income, assuming, as with slaves, it was entirely appropriated by the state, is then US$1,305,000. (Amazing, isn’t it, that after a century of debasement of the currency the median wage-earner is paid more than a million funny-money dollars during their career?)
We can now compute the cost of the International Space Station in slave lives: divide the total cost of around US$150,000,000,000 by the lifetime labour of a slave: US$1,305,000, and we discover that the entire lifetime efforts of around 115,000 people have been consumed to build this “space station”—or about 23 times as many slave lives as were consumed in building the Great Pyramid.
The measure of “slave lives” is particularly useful when dealing with those who argue certain “public expenditures” are so small as to be negligible. There has long been a great debate over public funding of collectivist propaganda on the airwaves. It appears that as of 2010 the Corporation for Public Brodcasting had a federally-funded budget of US$422 million. So let’s work it out: US$422,000,000 divided by a slave life of US$1,305,000: three hundred and twenty-three slave lives—working their entire lives for no other compensation, to fund Elmo and Big Bird. Would you consign 323 people into lifetime servitude to subsidise puppets? There is no moral difference whatsoever if the funds are coercively taken in nibbles from a larger population.
The pyramids have lasted longer than the ISS ever will, so its value is even less.
And I apologize for the following tongue in cheek silly joke relating to Maj’s post:
What if slave lives were on the gold standard?
This is timely, John, given the present hysteria. It is more than ironic that the left wishes to implement an even more spirit-killing form of modern slavery, putatively as penance for that of the past (in which none of us, the living, participated). They would have the state confiscate all wealth production (for the greater good) and starve out (see Google’s fired engineer) any who dared oppose their received wisdom by word or deed.
I love this concept. It shall be used by me in the future.
It’s definitely a keeper.
I’ve often applied a similar idea to crime: theft steals part of the victim’s life.
The old saul time is money can also translated to money is freedom. The taking of ones money takes his liberty.
I had a (somewhat) similar marker back in 2008-2009: how many seconds of one day’s deficit spending would my lifetime worth of taxes pay. (At the time, the daily deficit was in the $4 billion range).
I think about this sort of thing when I hear conservatives — yes, conservatives — talk about death panels and how cruel it would be to ration health care for the elderly. So if Gramma is in a nursing home and it costs $4500 a month from the state to keep her alive, and let’s say the median Minnesotan wage earner is paying $1000 a year in state income taxes, it’s taking the entire state income tax payments of 54 working people to keep her alive. People think it’s cruel to measure life in dollars and cents, but those dollars and cents are coming from somebody’s pockets.
Morals aside, I wonder if the marginal utility of time and money makes a practical difference in people’s perception of what’s acceptable. People do tend to be angrier when you take their last five bucks from them than they are when you take their first five bucks from them.
I was listening to an Area 45 podcast today in which they were talking about schools. People tend to underestimate the amount actually spent on schools. They usually think it’s about $8k/student per year; when they find out it’s $12k, they’re a lot less likely to approve of more money for schools.
In “Why Buy the Cow?” Peter Schiff has an interesting take on this: For US corporations “the government gets about 65% of the non-retained earnings while shareholders, who put up the money and take all the risk, get 35%. Does this seem fair?” As he also says, “as a result of our current and proposed tax policies towards corporate shareholders, our government collects a portion of industrial output that would inspire envy in even the most rabid Bolshevik.” Only in America, still known as “the land of the free.” Some have wisely said this is the perfect form of enslavement.
In 1983, Glenn T. Seaborg chaired a commission on education in the United States. In 1983, it published a report, “A Nation at Risk”, which said, in the introduction:
The amazing thing is that this has not happened as a result of a failure to spend money on education, but rather at a time when, by all measures, the funding for education at all levels has been rising faster than the cost of most other goods. This is entirely the result of slavers picking the pockets of taxpayers to fund legions of administrators and drones who have nothing to do with educating students and impossible-to-fire teachers whose pay is decoupled from their performance in teaching students.
As it happens, I’m currently re-reading Heinlein’s Expanded Universe, in which there’s an essay, “The Happy Days Ahead”, in which he discusses the state of education in the U.S. He compares the level of literacy in letters he’d received from fans over his writing career from the 1930s to 1980, and the education his father and he received in public schools to that in contemporary schools and campuses of the University of California and lesser colleges in that state. As usual, he saw it all coming well before it was obvious to many other observers.
I remember the book, and the quote.
As it happens, I’m currently re-reading Heinlein’s Expanded Universe, in which there’s an essay, “The Happy Days Ahead”, in which he discusses the state of education in the U.S.
I don’t think I’ve seen this. I’ll look it up. Thanks for the steer.
One note: the reprint edition from Phoenix Pick has broken the original book into two volumes (one, two). You have to buy both to get all of the content which was in the original 1980 publication. “The Happy Days Ahead” appears in volume two of the reprint edition.
I picked up this collection to revisit “Solution Unsatisfactory” [spoilers], which was mentioned in a book I’ll be reviewing here before long and, as usual with Heinlein, couldn’t put it down.
When I went to Amazon, they made it obvious there were two volumes.
You’ve been rebuked for use of the word “slave?”
Seems kind of odd… I think it’s a pretty good descriptive term.
Slave lives matter.
Thank you, John. Another way to see how we are slaves to the Leftist agenda and how vulnerable we are to the discourse. It makes me wonder if there really is an escape or if we are all going to be trapped in this agenda for the rest of our lives. We are more than willing to step up with the right issue and explanation. Oh my.
You forgot to discount your slaves to the present.
John, rummaging around in my mind for years has been the concept of a slightly different work slave; a serf abused by our new Deep State Aristocracy.
You see, based on analysis of various people, it appears that for at least the last 17 years, the American middle and lower class, particularly that of the deplorable bent, have had no real increase in the value of their wages but have suffered an enormous increase in the cost of living, particularly in the cost of such basic necessities like housing, food, insurance, energy and cost of higher education, thus placing a very high percentage of Americans of the verge of serfdom. This is the real slavery of our time.
In my view, our increasingly unconstitutional Deep State run government has heavily tilted the playing field to enrich it’s favorite interest groups like public employees and their unions, environmental groups and their donors, government related NGO consulting firms, big corporations and banks, and select political correct victims groups, at the expense of the deplorable everyday middle and lower classes, and particularly the Left’s favorite bogeyman, small business. Almost every government initiative these days either depresses wages or increases costs to the consumer and eventually businesses, putting the middle and lower classes year after year into an economic squeeze that is reaching to the breaking point.
The CATO Institute estimates the cost of educating a student in LAUSD at $29K per year, K-12. Dick Reardon and someone I know tried to verify that amount several years ago and found it impossible as the accounting at LAUSD is so byzantine. LAUSD will usually cite an amount around $12K/year; when challenged they admitted that figure does not include some “overheard”.
“At some point obfuscation becomes malfeasance.” (I don’t remember who said that but I quote it all the time.)
Edited to add link from article in 2013: The Mysterious Case of LAUSD’S Finances
Eight hundred million US airline flights per year.
Assume ten minutes (ha!) of extra delay from the expanded TSA screening, per passenger.
Eight billion minutes spent.
133 million hours.
5.6 million days.
Fifteen thousand years of human life spent per year, waiting to be screened.
Two hundred-odd human lives per year, with nobody actually dying. Usually.
I’m not sure how you’d do this. The slaves live in their own present, and they can calculate the percentage of their own lives which are taken. For them, that would seem to be the most important thing.
Most people aren’t aware that medieval serfs usually owed less to their feudal masters than citizens of modern nations pay in all taxes, and that doesn’t include the hidden costs of business taxes and regulations which increase the cost of everything on which people today spend their after-tax earnings.
That’s why the whole thing is so insidious. Every little increase in the friction of getting anything done: another form to fill out, another delay in obtaining a permit, another venture foregone because “it’s just too much trouble” is hardly perceptible at the time, but before long the rate of economic growth isn’t 4% a year but less than 2% and nobody knows why: “It’s the ‘new normal’ ”.
It isn’t just the wealth that’s taken out of the economy and squandered; it’s all of the things which are never done because the regulatory forest is so difficult to navigate or those contemplating them look at the reality of having an armed silent partner who will take half of the profits yet bear none of the risk and decide they’d rather not.
Makes me wonder if there is an 19th century slave finance textbook……
I am thinking that if instead of a rough 29000*45, you would discount the out years to the present. This would more rationally present the lifetime value of a slave, and increase the total number of slaves necessary to fund a project.
I think you are understating the moral calamity.
Exactly. That’s why the government takes it out of Yer paycheck first, then leaves You the rest.
I’m not a number! I am a free man!
This is one reason why the Leftists tend to focus so much on robotics and AI: they will argue that the wealth (now, and even more so in the future) is *really* being produced by the machines, so if you take it away for Social Good, you aren’t really taking it away from anyone in particular.
Yeah, but if you reduced the friction, what would all those lawyers and paper pushers actually do?
My thesis is that in the United States we actually defeated the laws of physical scarcity just before the Great Depression. The Great Depression and WWII was required to allow western societies the space to rebalance the economy from productive work to unproductive work in what seems like a natural evolution. Otherwise we would have wound up in the distopian utopia described in A Brave New World. I still don’t think that the human psyche is ready for the end of physical scarcity, which is why the government must take most of our productive capacity and burn its fruits.