Seven Billion Servants

Yesterday I heard a person state that quality of life is higher than ever otherwise we wouldn’t have seven billion people alive right now. I nodded and accepted the implicit premise that average lifespan and fertility rates are directly proportional to quality of life. But is that the case? Do we live in a time where you can have long, unhealthy, miserable life with lots of unhealthy, miserable children? Or worse, do the majority of the seven billion of us live long lives trapped in servitude of the upper class?

It is in the interest of the corporate stakeholders of the world to increase the population size. The larger the supply of able-bodied workers, the lower the demand and consequently price of that labor. The healthier the working class is, the more hours per day and years per life they can work for a company. With a larger global population, we have a larger global consumer market, with corporate profits and dividends going to the privileged shareholders, not the working class. There are reasons why the upper class would support efforts to vastly increase the population through more accessible healthcare and effective medical treatment, but as in criminal law, motive does not constitute guilt. You need evidence, and blaming the bourgeois for padding their bottom line by ballooning the working class is a particularly hard claim to prove.

This is where the thought experiment should end and the research should begin. Research into corporate dollars spent lobbying to get the people to pay for their own health. Making health insurance mandatory and paid for by the workers themselves, whether through monthly payments to insurance companies, or through their tax dollars, or costed into their salary to begin with if the company contributes to the insurance premiums. Who decides how healthy the working class has to be? Not the working class. They just foot the bill. We need to find out who lobbies for these standards and why.

Unfortunately I cannot research this topic in depth for two reasons: 1) I have to go to work, and 2) I am an engineer not a policy or economics expert. Any research or writing I would do on these topics should be taken with the same small grain of salt that I take when listening to any random wannabe space visionary propose, say, a concept for shooting people into space with a rail gun. It’s good to branch out and think outside the box, but I know when and where I’m outclassed.