Mutant Labor Markets and Inequality
If you like this blog, then you’ll love Ecocomics, the blog about comic books and economics. For example, why can’t mutants just do an honest day’s work?
Each mutant possesses a special skill which has its own inherent value. Because of this, a mutant can be viewed as a craftsman or a skilled laborer. Mutants with enhanced strength can work in construction, demolition, or even transportation. Storm could irrigate the crops of all the suffering farmers in the midwest and California when the droughts of summer are destroying their crops. Quicksilver could sort the daily mail output of the United States in 3 hours. And the extraordinary power of these abilities would only make the economic effect of using mutant powers that much more extraordinary itself. Time, labor, and machinery costs would all be cut dramatically.
Tragically, most mutants use their powers to either save the world or terrorize it. At least this is the popular depiction in Marvel Comics. Imagine what Magneto could do if he worked in construction. For one thing, all of those New York City public works project would have their completion dates moved up from 2018 to roughly five minutes from now. But instead, he spends his time sinking Russian submarines and making asteroid bases to live in. For the love of God, the man has the power to build himself a high-tech home in space. He could repair the Hubbell telescope with no trouble whatsoever.
This could be an interesting topic to explore. An influx of mutants into the labor market might lead, initially, to massive layoffs. Quicksilver could replace a huge number of mail carriers, and Colossus and Magneto would displace many many construction workers. Concern would immediately develop that even though our new, mutanted-up society was more prosperous overall, that the gains were not being widely shared. Instead, a relatively small number of high-powered mutant laborers, and those who had the good fortune to already own capital whose value can be enhanced by mutant labor, would reap essentially all the gains. The majority of people would be left behind.
We could, however, rectify the situation with a substantial progressive income tax levy. That, in turn, would provide the funds necessary to finance generous public services—clean, safe, complete streets; excellent schools and hospitals; efficient mass transit systems—that would benefit everyone. Of course you’d hear the argument that this kind of hefty taxation would eliminate the most talented mutants’ incentive to work hard and create value. And you might even hear the argument that the best way to finance services is to cut taxes on well-endowed mutants, and then create so much growth that the tax cuts pay for themselves.
48 Responses to “Mutant Labor Markets and Inequality”
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May 28th, 2009 at 8:35 am
The collective powers of mutants turned to economic purposes would create a huge surplus relative to our current economy, probably going a long way toward eliminating scarcity. So I think you need to think in much more radical terms, as in like Star Trek economics.
May 28th, 2009 at 8:36 am
ROFL. This is one of the funniest posts I’ve read on any political blog in a long time.
May 28th, 2009 at 8:38 am
Would the superworkers have their own unions?
I think the supply-side arguments you mention at the end of your post really would be more compelling in the case of people with super powers. The wealth these superworkers would earn is more clearly linked to their special skills and thus more difficult to replace with people who are willing to do that work for a little less after-tax income.
May 28th, 2009 at 8:41 am
With respect to me most recent post, I mean more compelling with respect to the supply-side economics in the world we live in as opposed to more compelling than progressive economics.
May 28th, 2009 at 8:43 am
This could be a better way for Magneto to gain power, lol. Actually, I’ve thought about this before and it is really quite dependent on the mutant. Some are just much better suited for destruction or theft than actual wealth creation.
May 28th, 2009 at 8:45 am
The collective powers of mutants turned to economic purposes would create a huge surplus relative to our current economy…
Assuming mutants allowed their powers to be treated as some kind of evenly-distributed public good, which in the context of creating dramatic conflict, they do not ever do.
ROFL. This is one of the funniest posts I’ve read on any political blog in a long time.
Ugh. Put me down for “against” when it comes to this kind of whimsical metacommentary. Writers have been doing it since Larry Niven’s “Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex” in the early 1970s, and it just tired to me.
May 28th, 2009 at 8:48 am
Unsurprisingly, Letterman was there first.
From 1991:
http://books.google.com/books?id=wp-B-RoYYkAC&pg=PA74&lpg=PA74&dq
(See number 2.)
May 28th, 2009 at 8:57 am
Wow, I guess then male mutants could end up showing each other their tax rates in macho showoffs.
May 28th, 2009 at 8:58 am
And who exactly is volunteering to tell the Hulk his taxes are going up? You don’t want to get HIM angry!
May 28th, 2009 at 9:03 am
I once read a discussion about alternate realities and how they depended either upon elves or slaves. It crystallized the genre for me and I can’t stand to think about the genre anymore.
May 28th, 2009 at 9:03 am
I think this is what happenned to the Flash in Frank Miller’s Dark Knight sequel. Put the whole IBEW out of work.
May 28th, 2009 at 9:09 am
Marvel doesn’t put out comic books on economic and political commentary because it realized that the Serious People already controlled the market.
Seriously. George Will’s columns, for example, have always been a cartoon of Reality. A very boring cartoon.
When you’re running a con, you don’t want to make the story too complicated for the Mark. By definition, he ain’t all that intelligent.
May 28th, 2009 at 9:09 am
@Moral Panicker, I think you’re exactly right. In a world built on the backs of mutants, there really would be an argument that the risk of their “going Galt” would be catastrophic. If Quicksilver sorted all the mail and all of the postal workers were fired, what if he decided to, you know, stop? Similarly with Magneto and building construction, or any number of mutants. Basically, the excerpt proposes a world where mutants offer to dedicate their lives to the good of society. Seems to me that they’ve got to have some powerful incentives to do so, and that after society becomes dependent on them, the incentives for them to remain in their jobs would have to be ever-increasing.
May 28th, 2009 at 9:27 am
A world in which Magneto used his powers to aid in building construction would result in a world where architecture in general trended towards buildings made of ferrous materials.
On the other hand, you’d have a society that would be wholly dependant on the good will of Magneto for its construction industry.
More to the point: Alan Moore covered this ground in Watchmen with respect to the technological and societal impact of the existence of Dr. Manhattan.
May 28th, 2009 at 9:34 am
Let’s assume Magneto agrees to take care of construction work in NYC, and the accountants estimate that he can replace, say $10 billion of annual construction cost, of which approximately 25% is labor cost. Magneto isn’t particularly greedy, so he offers his services for the nominal fee of $1 billion dollars per year. Of course, he puts most of that labor out of work (let’s say there’s still a level of cleanup and planning). So he “only” puts 40k workers out of their $50k/year jobs.
In other words, now Magneto is making $1 billion, and the workers are out $2 billion in aggregate. There’s obviously no way you can tax him enough to cover their expenses.
And in any case, it’s the taxpayers of NYC who are making out like bandits here – they’re saving $9 billion per year. If anyone should be “taking care of” the 40k displaced workers, its the rest of the taxpayers who can cover their salaries in full, and still save $7 billion/year.
Of course, you guys won’t think that’s fair. So you’ll tax Magneto at a progressively high rate. And, depending on how much he values his leisure time, and how much money he feels like he needs, he might work for a couple of years, long enough for the city to get dependent on him, and then say “fuck it” and quit to go build moon bases and recover sunken submarines instead.
So now you’re in the worst possible situation – your construction costs have gone back up, your construction workers’ skills have atrophied over a couple years of living on Magneto-provided welfare and, knowing you all, instead of taking that $7 billion surplus and giving it back to the taxpayers, you’ve used it to create new services. So now you have to go back and tax the rest of the citizenry more, because you have to make up the shortfall, and you’ll have to retrain all your construction workers (which will take considerable time and cost) while the construction jobs lay fallow.
And all of this happens because you feel that Magneto should “pay his fair share.” The surplus he provided to the people of NYC was 7x his full salary.. how could that possibly not already be “his fair share”????
May 28th, 2009 at 9:37 am
The problem with this analogy is the Bill Gates is not a I think that Mickey Kaus has a point about inequality which is more true in the case of mutants which is you can’t do anything about it. Even very progressive tax rates would not do much about income inequality as Quicksilver could work for a few hours and be set for life while regular people are forced to work long hours just to scrape by. As a theoretical matter we should notice that poor people benefit more from each marginal dollar of income than do rich people and try to maximize utility accordingly. As a practical matter the Mutants will exercise excessive political power which they will then use to marginalize and rule over normal people. Worse yet Magneto really wouldn’t worry much about mobs with pitchforks so it seems quite likely that normal humans would be killed off by their superhuman counterparts.
May 28th, 2009 at 9:45 am
Why would Quicksilver sort the mail? As long as most skilled and unskilled labor (as opposed to professional services) are paid by the hour, he’s got no incentive.
Anyway, this stuff is fine for the occasional goof, but the real reason this stuff rarely appears in the comics is because everybosy knows that if real people had superpowers, it’d completely reshape society, and that’s not the genre. The genre is watching what superheroes do in something otherwise like the real world.
May 28th, 2009 at 9:48 am
There’s a real sustainability problem here. Magneto was born in the 1940’s. The guy’s pushing 70 now. If he’d started erecting buildings in, say, 1970, we’d have spent the past 40 years watching advanced architecture, construction, and engineering stall and then, ultimately, regress. So, what happens when Magneto dies and nobody knows how to fix the bridges he built? It’s like Stonehenge–we’ve lost the knowledge of how it was built, though fortunately we now have new technologies that would allow us to re-build it if we wanted to. But how many generations of Magnetos would it take for us to be in a similar bind when it came to vital infrastructure? And would we be able to develop those new technologies before the infrastructure came tumbling down?
Quicksilver, arguably, has the same impact on lots of industrial process advancement. Not to mention, if he were sorting all the mail in 3 hours, mail would be super-cheap and fast, so why would we have developed email? Email is much, much better than quicksilver in the long run, but in its initial stages it would not be competitive with Quicksilver.
These are enormous problems.
May 28th, 2009 at 9:51 am
I don’t like this idea – what would Wolverine do?
For obvious reasons, many if not most mutants in the Marvel Universe have powers very handy for combat but not necessarily for actual civilian use. They might become disgruntled and start an insurgency or something…
May 28th, 2009 at 9:53 am
by the way, Felix Salmon is adding a bit of Star Trek wonkery to the banner of his blog, which, up to a point, anyone can read without detracting from the ability of others to do so as well
May 28th, 2009 at 9:54 am
Rand didn’t understand the story of Atlas. Atlas didn’t hold up the world on his back out of kindness. If Galt is supposed to be Atlas, there’s no place for Galt to “go Galt” except death. Atlas was a stupid Titan and the clever gods beat them. He’s forced labor.
May 28th, 2009 at 9:56 am
I worry a little bit that enough research has been done about this:
I don’t follow X-Men religiously anymore, and they sneak things like Spidey’s organic webbing past me, so this may have changed, but historically (i.e., in the 80’s-90’s) it was explicitly established that Storm moves humidity around, but doesn’t create it. If she irrigates the midwest, she does it by exacerbating the drought in California. In fact, she was essentially doing this as a local rain goddess when Prof. X recruited her.
My geeky trivium aside, I think it’s weird when people complain about an amusing theoretical like this as being tired, overdone, or silly. Superheroes are cartoons — superhero economics is a cartoon of economics. Most of us aren’t economists, and thinking through simplified illustrations (including their shortcomings) makes key concepts clearer. Also, it’s fun.
May 28th, 2009 at 10:10 am
And Wolverine could work in a deli.
I found the ultimate real-world take on comic book mythology in the comic strip Mister Boffo some years ago: If you did get bitten by a radioactive spider all you’d get is a painful itchy rash.
May 28th, 2009 at 10:19 am
Actually, a spell of innovation is not unlike an influx of mutants into the labor force. As Arthur C Clarke said, (I paraphrase) “any technology sufficiently advanced appears as magic.”
May 28th, 2009 at 10:25 am
I think the biggest troubles will be in intellectual property issues. Given the emergence of genetic engineering, the question will arise, “Does Magneto own the rights to his mutation?” If I get a hold of his DNA and isolate the telemagnetic manipulation genes, can I patent them? Could he even patent them? As a naturally occuring genome, I don’t think anyone could, though they could be treated as a trade secret. I think we’d have a lot of mutants very quickly.
Sometime before that point, I would invest in spandex and get the most avant guard designers under contract.
May 28th, 2009 at 10:52 am
Clark Kent was laid off at the Daily Planet when they went internet-only back in March. Can you find a non-super job for this out-of-work newsman who still wants to keep his secret identity? I think counting..err reading cards at the blackjack table in Vegas wouldn’t qualify.
May 28th, 2009 at 10:55 am
I think this overestimates the value of Magneto. (Also, I’m not sure his orbital homes are very relevant. First of all, he had more than one, and wasn’t one held together at least in part by his willpower – his constant attention? That’s a sign of sloppy design, and/or an intentional ego trip, which are completely unfeasible for a skyscraper. Secondly, at least one orbital home incorporated technology from a more advanced civilization, so we don’t know how much credit to give him for that one.) He has the raw power to lift a skyscraper, but building one is a lot more complicated. If you just put the pieces together without welding, it’ll be as stable as a Jenga tower. He can’t directly manipulate glass, wood, plastic or anything else non-metal. All in all, Magneto could replace a crane or even one company, but not the entire construction industry of even a small city.
The same for Quicksilver – the Flash could put sort the mail in three hours, but he’s faster than light. Quicksilver, as far as I know, doesn’t bend the laws of physics. He might put a hundred postal workers out of work, but not a thousand, let alone all of them. Also, he has a notoriously short attention span. Good luck getting him to stay with that job for longer than a day.
There’s a real sustainability problem here. Magneto was born in the 1940’s. The guy’s pushing 70 now.
He was an adult in Auschwitz, or at least a teen. He’s pushing 80 or past it. Which only reinforces your point.
May 28th, 2009 at 11:11 am
What if the mutants decide they don’t like doing all the work and not seeing the rewards? If they see the humans living a great life of leisure while they take care of the heavy construction and keep the crops growing and deliver the mail and do all the other fun stuff.
Mutants may decide to rebel.
They may decide to rebel against the heavy taxation on their labor if they are highly compensated for their efforts and the Government institutes a heavy progressive tax rate on them.
Or, they may decide that its bogus that they are doing all the work and some rich Wall Street a-hole or big, faceless corporation and its investors are reaping the rewards. So they rebel against the oligarchs and corporations.
Either way, they’ve decided that they belong on top of human society.
Which leads to Magneto trashing a bunch of stuff and…Sentinels. Or, at least humans subjugated by the mutants. President Magneto. Professor Xavier running Citigroup. The Beast running Microsoft.
In a peaceful scenario, it may mean that the mutants instead Go Galt and quit using their powers to generate all this economic growth.
I can’t imagine that the mutants would be happy in the long run acting as the labor force to ensure regular humans get to live the life of leisure. They’re gonna want something out of it.
May 28th, 2009 at 11:14 am
Actually, Matt’s point says a great deal about upper-class ‘liberalism’. They really don’t get that the objections to classism aren’t simply about money. Redistribution is necessary, but so is opportunity.
All the ‘redistributive’ efforts in the world won’t really help alleviate the true evil of aristocracy: The belief that rank should be passed on through birth. Matt’s plan to help ‘non-mutants’ is similar to his proposals to help lower income families. In real life, people from the lower class need the ‘opportunity’ to make it to any of the ‘upper’ classes. Not a 1-in-1000000 chance, a REAL chance.
Right now, you’re either born into a high SES family or you never really have to opportunity to reach the higher classes. People like Matt don’t seem to understand that that is a problem, and one that can’t be papered over with transfer payments alone.
May 28th, 2009 at 11:18 am
The key point that no one has mentioned is scarcity. I mutants are truly rare, as they are now in the comics, then the above comments about ‘going Galt’ apply. At various times in comic history, however, there have been thousands of mutants with multiple individuals wih redundent powers. Magneto’s strike wouldn’t be as devastating if there are other magnetism based people to take up the slack. Also, magnetism isn’t uniquely suited to construction. If Magneto quits, Jean Grey may just take his place. And that doean’t even take into account the fact that technology may provide a means to grant powers to normal folks.
One more thing. Magneto’s powers don’t make him an expert in archetecture. Losing his labor wouldn’t mean that we’d lose the know how to create buildings. We’d just lose some efficiency while we retrained the work force.
May 28th, 2009 at 11:20 am
Why would the mutants pay your taxes when they could simply kill you all?
May 28th, 2009 at 11:22 am
Think of all the chiropractors Cyclops must keep busy working on the whiplash injuries to his neck when he lets loose an optic blast.
May 28th, 2009 at 11:48 am
Reed Richards Is Useless
May 28th, 2009 at 11:53 am
This trope is called Reed Richards is Useless. TV Tropes has a bunch of examples at the link. Directly quoting from the article, the main three reasons comic books don’t let Reed Richards cure cancer, or Magneto replace the construction industry are:
1) To keep the world similar to the real world. This is particularly common in an Urban Fantasy or another sci-fi / fantastical series set in a world that is superficially like the real world, such as the superhero (sub)genre; unlike, say, Star Trek or Lord Of The Rings, one of the key draws of the series is it’s superficial similarity to the real world, which is lost if you make the fictional world too fantastic in comparison. This is particularly common in comic books, where major modifications to the world are only done to fictional locations, and often only to current levels of technology.
2) To ensure that there’s some level of drama in the story. If the super science or magic can literally do anything, then the heroes can just use the super science to get them out of any jam. Goodbye potential conflict. Even in the case of Star Trek, there were tons of things the replicators and transporters should have been able to do which would have ruined the plot of half the episodes, necessitating a lot of Holding Back The Phlebotinum to maintain drama.
3) To avoid trivializing real-life problems. This particular application dates back to World War II; the editors and writers of the time felt it would be disrespectful to have superheroes solve world problems, since the next day would still see hundreds of soldiers fighting and dying over the same issues, with most comic books of the time instead focusing on the characters’ fictional universes (although some, notably Captain America, did featured Allied heroes fighting in zero-sum games with Axis villains). A similar governing principle exists today, since if Mr. Fantastic actually does discover, say, a cure for cancer in the Marvel Universe, there’s going to be plenty of real-world sufferers still suffering from it when they finish reading the comic, and they aren’t necessarily going to be too thrilled with the suggestion (however inadvertent) that the only hope of curing them is to hope for a comic book superhero to solve the problem.
May 28th, 2009 at 12:14 pm
“Quicksilver could sort the daily mail output of the United States in 3 hours.” File clerks are now comic book superheroes ?
May 28th, 2009 at 12:17 pm
Phoenix is the methadone treatment to our addiction to Magneto. In the real world, oil and ethanol execs are far more megalomaniacal than these two.
So, does Marrow work at a haunted house? Also, who needs mail? Just have Professor X or the (forgotten) Gamekeeper read the mind of somebody who wants to say something to someone, then communicate the thought to the recipient.
Michael Strazinski’s (sic) Rising Stars is about this. Check it out.
May 28th, 2009 at 12:35 pm
Tsk. This was in the comics:
Damage Control is a fictional construction company appearing in Marvel Comics which specializes in repairing the property damage caused by conflicts between superheroes and super-villains. Three Damage Control limited series have been published to date.
Hercules: Did community service with Damage Control before, but seen as a regular employee for Damage Control in the 2004-2005 She-Hulk series and Thing #6 (2006), after losing much of his godly riches to the Constrictor in an excessive force lawsuit. Hercules works on construction and demolition.
Robby Baldwin (Speedball): Briefly worked as an intern for Damage Control.
Vincent “Vinnie” Patillo: Former super-villain known as Leap-Frog who briefly was employed by Damage Control. Eugene Strausser made some improvements on the Leap-Frog suit.
In the Ultimate Universe, Damage Control is also a construction and demolition company. The Ultimate version of the Wrecking Crew are employees of Damage Control as debuted in Ultimate Spider-Man #86 (January 2006)
May 28th, 2009 at 12:55 pm
“I don’t like this idea – what would Wolverine do?”
Make the holes in Swiss cheese, of course.
“This particular application dates back to World War II; the editors and writers of the time felt it would be disrespectful to have superheroes solve world problems, since the next day would still see hundreds of soldiers fighting and dying over the same issues”
Maybe, but there were those Superman cartoons where he fights the Axis. The one where he goes to Japan manages to fit in some quite spectacular casual racism with its propaganda.
May 28th, 2009 at 1:22 pm
Yeah, I gotta say the WWII thing doesn’t really hold. Superman famously captured both Hitler and Stalin and delivered them to the Hague to stand trial for crimes against humanity; Captain America’s debut was socking Hitler in the jaw, for crying out loud.
If anything that’s a post-WWII phenomena.
May 28th, 2009 at 1:55 pm
The real problem with this in my view is that many mutants are so powerful they effectively put hundreds or even thousands out of work. The Magneto construction example could possibly put tens of thousands out of work he is so powerful. If the mutant population is high enough this results in a situation where the optimal use of resources is becomes one where something like 1% of the workforce does something like 50% of the work and is then massively taxed to redistribute their massive earning to displaced workers. That starts to look functionally similar to mutant slavery. I think thats why comics rarely go into that sort of thing. Super heros should only have jobs as PIs and the heads of giant multi-nationals and such, its easier.
May 28th, 2009 at 2:58 pm
I’m not a big X-Men buff, but wasn’t that Magneto’s point for his acts against humans? That is, he argued they were superior to humans, and could build a better society, if they didn’t have to worry about humans who could not compete against them. It’s almost an Ayn Rand-style argument, except in this world, the supermen actually do have significant superior abilities. That’s especially true if they come to depend on Quicksilver sorting the mail, or what-have-you. If build a society where one person actually does run an entire sector of the economy, you’re really out of luck if that person decides to hang it up.
May 28th, 2009 at 4:15 pm
I don’t like this idea – what would Wolverine do?
Fireman, one of those search-and-rescue EMTs in wilderness areas, detective… there are lots of totally normal industries where a healing factor or enhanced senses or claws would be useful, let alone all three.
May 28th, 2009 at 5:12 pm
Of course, once the normals started trying to base their society off taking the mutant surplus, then they’d just start sinking the submarines all over again.
Which is a pretty good parallel to consider, really – in the real world, and a little less dramatically, that’s why no government can long sustain a distribution of power much different from its distribution of inputs.
Nancy Kress did a decent novella-turned-trilogy (the first two, anyway) about this, with genetic engineering in place of mutation. Beggars in Spain / Beggars and Choosers / Beggars Ride. Good stuff.
May 28th, 2009 at 10:29 pm
This ignores that the global economy is increasingly becoming a knowledge economy, and more and more of our manufacturing jobs are done by robots. Really, you just need Forge. Forge alone could utterly and completely transform the American economy to one in which we could rely on completely automated labor, destroy all foreign competition, even those with cheap labor, and use export taxes to fund a gorgeous life for every American.
May 29th, 2009 at 12:02 am
Word.
May 29th, 2009 at 12:23 am
I’d be more alarmed by one of Magneto’s tea parties than the ones we have!
May 29th, 2009 at 6:38 am
As was said above, comics don’t deal with this because it’s entirely distinct from the kind of stories they tell. ‘The Golden Pecs of the Desert Sheik’ doesn’t tell you about the politics of the Sheik’s emirate, or focus on his uniquely dysfunctional machismo — it tells you about his taut, rippling body, shimmering like golden desert sands, and how he sweeps the heroine into his strong Oriental arms. So it is with comics.
I always assumed the reason mutants don’t gain greater prominence is because We Were Here First. There’s SUCH strong opposition to mutants amongst existing humans that they can’t find employment, and there aren’t enough mutants to profitably establish their own firms. Quicksilver can’t start a ‘mail sorting business’ because no humans would use it — they would see it, possibly rightly, in the first step to usurping human economic dominance. So mutants are marginalised, unemployable, and die so rapidly (because of constant intramutant and interspecies fighting — there’s certainly enough generic corpses at any battle scene) that they can’t compete.
May 30th, 2009 at 10:18 pm
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