"Workers in food stores are the ones keeping this nation from going into civil unrest. Because if there is no one working in the stores, we are in trouble." — John T. Niccollai, President, UFCW Local 464A
"Prosperity in human societies is best understood as the accumulation of solutions to human problems. We won't run out of work until we run out of problems." - Nick Hanauer (as quoted by Tim O’Reilly in “What’s the Future and Why It’s Up To Us”, p300)
The realization came fast: if everyone socially isolates, then no one can do anything. People asked "Are there any jobs that are SO important those who had them would not be able to isolate?" The question was answered almost as soon as it was asked. Grocery store workers were among the most commonly cited example of front line workers, among many others. We called these people "heroes". All they asked in return were fair wages, not fighter jet flyovers. It turns out that the most essential workers are among the lowest paid in America (this alone should've caused the nation to pause and reflect). Nonetheless, soon complacency set in, the news cycle shifted, and nothing much changed. The national discussion concerning "essential workers" during the height of our global pandemic panic in 2020 rose quickly in March before peaking and declining in April. But it should have been sustained for much longer. It's a fascinating topic, and can lead to a much stronger society if we follow the implications through. What are people doing? I mean really doing? The abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass initially declared "now I am my own master", upon taking a paying job. However, later in life he concluded to the contrary, saying "experience demonstrates that there may be a slavery of wages only a little less galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery, and that this slavery of wages must go down with the other".
Confucius said, “Exemplary persons cherish fairness; petty persons cherish the thought of gain.” A Confucian perspective of critical services might be called "essential role ethics".
Why do we so often present the future to children in the form of the question: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Is it better to be a doctor or lawyer? Farmer or shepherd? This or that? How to decide? Interest? Aptitude? Necessity? Family tradition? ...Don't throw your lambs to the wolves! Provide better context. We need essential labor workforce modeling to address universal basic services. This is the existential phenomenon or problem area that they will face when they grow up, the area that a large number of people are already addressing in one way or another. Much work is engaged in this one single problem, and many curricula vitarum merely serve to catalogue our personal encounters with it's various aspects. In some essential sense, all work is in service of this one overarching
goal, supporting our "interdependent collective survival enterprise" as Peter Corning
has called it; confronting the "risk society" as Ulrich Beck called it. Would it be possible to present children with this sort of holistic model of labor, as opposed to the fractured models they typically receive, to help them make informed educational and job/career path decisions? Contemplating one's future career path can often be loaded with existential anxiety. Youth in Japan have struggled with finding work, meaningful work in particular. Is this the failure of neoliberal/ capitalist/ market fundamentalism and the spread of Western individualist cultural norms? How do we place people back at the center, relating them to one another and to the environment upon which we all depend? In his book, “Man’s Search for Meaning”, Viktor Frankl says “Those who have a ‘why’ to live, can bear with almost any ‘how’.”
Jason Hickel wrote: “Economists assume that people have unlimited needs and the point of capitalism is to satisfy them. But actual capitalists know that people's needs are finite, and seek to overcome this limit by either preventing the satisfaction of human needs or perpetually manufacturing desire.” This doesn't always succeed. Today many people see the hollow existence that a life lived in the pursuit of unlimited acquisition and manufactured desire can lead to. Love and care for others motivate people, not profit in the abstract. Based upon this, Universal basic services (UBS) focus on the social infrastructure that enables individuals to reach their potential. A list of essential infrastructure workers who “protect their communities, while ensuring continuity of functions critical to public health and safety, as well as economic and national security” was designated by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). These industries employed anywhere from 49 million to 62 million people in 2018, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), representing about 34% to 43% of the total U.S. workforce. Alaska issued an "Essential Services and Critical Workforce Infrastructure Order". I have a lot of questions. The determination of which services (and therefore workers) are more critical/essential than others does not seem sufficiently rigorous. The binary "essential or non-essential" distinction is inadequate. Because services are networked, some nodes or links in that network will inevitably be more critical than others (such as, perhaps, the office economy). Secondly, the correlation between the order and the public and private job sectors has not been clearly made, leaving many organizations confused as they seek to determine their status. We can look at the chamber of commerce and government agency employee directories to help sort that out, but it remains unclear. Putting it more generally, has the job sector been diagrammed/mapped out so as to correlate it with a rigorous model of "primary needs domains" (see the lists identified by Percy and Corning at bottom)? This is the next step.
In an article from 2014, “The U.S. military is a socialist paradise”, Jacob Siegel notes the socialist, intentional community nature of the military, which has been pointed out many times before and since. In fact, that’s one reason why many people join; the clear organizational structure is attractive, especially if you have poor job prospects or can’t afford the cost of continuing education. The military has been engaged in workforce modeling to address existential problems for decades. (Of course, the military-industrial complex has objectives other than simply ensuring continuity of functions critical to public health and safety.) Imagine, what if the socialist paradise of the military was leveraged to fight our existential threats, and not to defend wealth accumulation and special privilege for the few? Perhaps that seems impossible today, but consider this fact: military leaders have been remarkably consistent in their criticism of Trump. Why? As Dwight Stirling wrote: "U.S. military culture stresses organizational, rather than personal, loyalty. When Edward Gallagher’s SEAL colleagues reported him, they were doing what Navy SEALs are taught to do: They put the good of the institution before the individual." ...Rule of law, not of men.
In "In times of climate breakdown, how do we value what matters?" Ian Gough comes very close to laying the necessary groundwork. Paraphrasing: "The coronavirus has achieved in a few weeks a shift in perspective unequaled in eight decades. We have begun to question the nature of economic value. We can discuss again ‘valuing what matters’. When we need to identify essential or critical occupations we come back to human need satisfaction and the foundational economy. And despite the different raison d’etres, the government’s list of Covid-critical sectors and occupations match these closely. They include the sort of ‘mundane’ services that are taken for granted until they fail. Notably, there are large discrepancies between the social and market valuation of occupations, suggesting elements of an inverse law, where socially beneficial jobs are paid least and the least beneficial or most harmful are paid most. It takes a major crisis to achieve a shift in common sense understanding. Yet a much, much greater crisis is now walking towards us – that of climate and ecological breakdown." Gough suggests rating the social contribution of different sectors, groups of workers and consumption practices. "Identifying essential workers in this way has been anathema to conventional neo-classical economic theory, where any activity is deemed valuable or productive if it is remunerated, whatever its social value or disvalue. Extensive citizen participation is needed to avoid accusations of ‘nanny statism’, elites knowing what’s best for ordinary people, bureaucratic or professional authoritarianism. But at the same time, the irreplaceable contribution of experts must be acknowledged – another lesson Covid-19 has brought home. The growing experience of citizen’s assemblies and forums, which bring together experts and citizens in an ongoing panel, will be invaluable here." Now I'm looking for community level examples to point to.
There was a time when it was common for each family to pass on to their
children a family trade, fields, flocks, or hunting grounds. This was an
intergenerational model, a legacy, an inheritance, a promise that they
would never be in want, or fear for lack of shelter, food, and other
basic needs. Youth could depend upon the accumulated knowledge,
traditions, and wisdom that spanned many lives and passed from hand to
hand as each new generation rose to replace the last. A path was clearly
laid out, and they could follow it, or leave it as they chose. Families
provide some of the best role models for how to live, so children don't
have to begin from scratch and reinvent the wheel all over again. Of
course there are no guarantees in life, and even our best plans to
provide for the needs of future generations may come to nothing, but
what can we strive for, as a society, or as families to provide our
children with? The market economy of today has slowly eroded the fabric
of extended families, and at the same time social supports are under
attack. What are we doing? ...Who has traced the evolution of labor in
society (both paid and unpaid) in any complete way? Is it possible to
better anticipate this change, updated in real time and in as fine
grained detail as necessary?
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| Basic needs domains (Corning) |
It is difficult to capture the relationships between and among specific jobs and goals, and how and in what way they relate to one another. But that's where the value of a model lies, in providing a systems level understanding and the many benefits that brings with it. Hai Zhuge described the importance of modeling workforce relationships: "Technology alone cannot transform a city without the participation and cooperation of its citizens. Geographically dispersed users will be able to cooperatively accomplish tasks and solve problems by using the network to actively promote the flow of material, energy, techniques, information, knowledge, and services". The benefits of a better model include the ability to identify problem areas, goals and the tasks relevant to addressing them, unmet needs and possible organizational improvements, spot inefficiencies, anticipate disruptions before they occur, facilitate adaptive changes, and offer a descriptive analysis of existing conditions. Ecologists map healthy ecosystems to understand how adaptive dynamics are established and maintained. But do sociologists do the same with local, regional, and global economic interactions, all the way down to the level of jobs and even individual tasks (those part of an informal microeconomy)? And once sketched out, do they evaluate them according to some criteria for how "essential" they are? That would enrich the DHS discussion concerning essential workers, and help to prepare us for the next inevitable shock.
The modeling and evaluation components are difficult because they require new tools. Alex Pentland has been working on developing the modeling component, and he understands the potential to apply the evaluative component for improving economic and ecological relationships, to create "societies that are more fair, stable and efficient as we get to really understand human physics at this fine-grain scale". He said theorists like Adam Smith and Karl Marx only had half the answers, but now we have the potential to move past Marxism and capitalism, from the reasoning of the enlightenment about classes and markets to a fine grain understanding of individual interactions. He wrote "The challenge is to figure out how to analyze the connections between people and come to a new way of building systems based on understanding these connections, the causality of connections in the real world." According to LeRon Shults, the move from workforce modeling to the identification of "essential workers" who "have a special responsibility to maintain your normal work schedule" (memorandum) moves us from descriptive computational social science (CSS) to a more prescriptive sort of social engineering. But he quickly adds that other groups are already doing this, bad actors like Cambridge Analytica are effectively engineering society without transparency or public accountability. Shults believes the answer is to do the work with transparency and simultaneously speak out about the ethical danger inherent in it, to be both a modeler and an ethicist.
This sort of modeling project is clearly critical of established power structures, there's no other way to interpret Pentland's statement about moving past Smith and Marx. It makes no special virtue of market fundamentalism, capital accumulation, or deregulatory efforts; some might compare it with organized labor, cooperatives, the modern welfare state, and greater economic regulation. The sort of information needed for a complete map of labor relationships and the public-private partnerships that exist at all scales is not readily accessible, perhaps, one is tempted to speculate, because were it so that could serve to undermine the consumer culture, growing inequality, and wage slavery that defines our societal paradigm today. That data is exactly what is needed to begin addressing existential threats and move from fractured systems to restoring a more holistic social and ecological harmony.
Every new generation includes a handful of whiz kids who leave a big impact on society, and increasingly these impacts are being realized through social media. How different would the world be without tech entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, or more recently Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg? Maybe we'd be better off without them. But behind the biggest names are perhaps even more inspiring, if less well known, people. Avi Schiffmann is one of these people. This year the 17-year-old created the web’s preeminent covid-19 case tracker and, more recently, a protest tracking site. "The trackers have garnered praise for providing concise, instantly updated information. Schiffmann’s coronavirus tracker is so thorough, in fact, that epidemiologists have used it to predict the disease’s spread. Schiffmann has earned the Webby Person of the Year award along with praise from Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who called the teen’s site “essential.” Is it as essential as essential workers? Yes it is! It enables us to effectively deploy our labor and resources as we struggle to contain the spread of disease. So my next question is: could Schiffmann and Ian Gough team up and create a website that uses the same sort of web scraping methods to collect real time data about critical services (those based on social value as opposed to remunerative value) and model the organizations and workers providing these?
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| hypergraph |
After Zhuge, Pentland, and Schiffmann, it's useful to note Stephen Wolfram, who is attempting to provide an alternative to string theory. He does so via a branch of mathematics called graph theory, which studies groups of points or nodes connected by lines or edges. In a way, I'm reminded of C. S. Peirce, another academic outsider a hundred years ago who made semiotic graphs, or Judea Pearl, who more recently has made causality his field of study using graphs (though not hypergraphs). Wolfram wrote "A New Kind of Science" (compare with Karl Friston's recent, and almost as ambitious sounding "A Free Energy Principle for a Particular Physics"). Wolfram has essentially described a way to model causal relationships, but there remains controversy as to whether it makes any new predictions in the field of physics. Putting that aside, his Mathematica software certainly is useful as a template for modeling and representing detailed data. Wolfram’s career has been "an ongoing effort to vacuum up the world’s knowledge into Mathematica, and make it accessible via Wolfram Alpha, the company’s computational knowledge engine, or interlingua". This approach, or one of many like it that have since been developed, could help us understand some useful aspects about how the fabric of society is woven in the hypergraph of objects, services, and relationships that correspond to essential services and workers engaged in promoting and maintaining social harmony.
Economic (workforce) graphs, social hypergraphs, and the "hypergraph of things"
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web, wrote that: "The Web is more a social creation than a technical one. I designed it for a social effect — to help people work together — and not as a technical toy. The ultimate goal of the Web is to support and improve our weblike existence in the world. We clump into families, associations, and companies. We develop trust across the miles and distrust around the corner. What we believe, endorse, agree with, and depend on is representable and, increasingly, represented on the Web." The original idea and goal of social media remains unfulfilled today. In perhaps one of the greatest ironies resulting from the attention economy, the "fear of missing out" (FOMO), instead of providing us with more rewarding social connections, in many cases leads to diminished social health instead. Over-indulgence is axiomatically not healthy. But why? (1) It can divert attention away from the most important relationships we have. (2) Instead of increasing the resonant synchrony we seek to cultivate with each other, the "push and pull" of outrage and distraction can lead to disharmony and strained relations. What is to be done? To avoid tossing the baby out with the bathwater, which is the knee-jerk reaction, we must ask which models of connection with each other and the common pools of information we share will lead to greater synchrony, consensus building, and healthy, balanced relationships.
Facebook's "social graph" is the largest social network dataset in the world; it contains the largest number of defined relationships between the largest number of people among all websites. Facebook's Graph API (Application Programming Interface) allows websites to draw information about more objects than simply people, including photos, events, and pages, and their relationships between each other. This expands the social graph concept to more than just relationships between individuals and instead applies it to virtual non-human objects between individuals as well. Facebook's social graph is owned by the company, preventing its users from taking their graph with them to other services when they wish to do so, such as when a user is dissatisfied with Facebook. Google has also worked on a Social Graph API to allow websites to draw publicly available information about a person to form a portable online identity. Both companies monetize collected data sets through direct marketing and social commerce. And in December 2016, Microsoft acquired LinkedIn for $26.2 billion. How has Facebook modeled its social graph? According to Michael Frederikse, "The answer is a hypergraph [recall Wolfram above], a particular type of graph network whereby a single edge edge can be connected to multiple vertices. This is what allows Facebook to build a (nearly) billion-node graph of multiple, sometimes overlapping, friend networks. So when looking at a friends-of-friends mappings, we can sort of visualize this spiderweb of networks. The beauty of hypergraph is that these are connected by hyperedges and thus, much easier to query, rank (perhaps by number of connections/hyperedges), and recommend new friends. Therefore they can use whatever metrics they would like to create a ranking system."
Inspired by Facebook's social graph, LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner set a goal in 2012 to create an "economic graph" within a decade. The goal is to create a comprehensive digital map of the world economy and the connections within it. The economic graph was to be built on the company's current platform with data nodes including companies, jobs, skills, volunteer opportunities, educational institutions, and content. They have been hoping to include all the job listings in the world, all the skills required to get those jobs, all the professionals who could fill them, and all the companies (nonprofit and for-profit) at which they work. The ultimate goal is to make the world economy and job market more efficient through increased transparency. In June 2014, the company announced its "Galene" search architecture to give users access to the economic graph's data with more thorough filtering of data through user searches. This may be a useful tool for understanding the relationship between the basic needs within a community and the essential workers who are meeting them. Deeper analysis of the workforce model thus created could also indicate vulnerabilities, strengths, and ways to increase "generalized synchrony" between social and environmental processes.
If indeed the fabric of society is woven in the hypergraph of objects, services, and relationships (see Stephen Wolfram) that correspond to essential services and workers engaged in promoting and maintaining generalized synchrony, then we could use an economic hypergraph of Alaska to help realize the dream of a Just Transition. In contrast to the calls from the far right for private "free market principles" to dominate the economy, we could counter with a public "hypergraphed market" to expose the metabolism of Alaska in vivid detail. It is the difference between secrecy and transparency. The difference between the "good old boys club" of privilege and the unbiased application of law. Between a system closed to outsiders and one that is open to the inclusion of everyone. The panopticon-like features (which we have already begun to see through social media) would be available for anyone, and not only those in the "central tower". This leads toward the further realization of the "sousveillance" recommendation of Steve Mann.
Peter Corning noted that our collective survival enterprise is that of a superorganism. Thomas Metzinger called society a "suprapersonal model". And just recently Dennett and Levin extended the metaphor, describing how selves can scale into a "superagent" and thereby extend their teleological capacity. (Note: there is a "Scalable Cooperation Group" at MIT.) They said that "the key dynamic" for this to occur is "access of agents to the same information pool" which "kickstarted the continuum of increasing agency". This broadly corresponds to what Eörs Szathmáry said is required for major evolutionary transitions. So, where are we at in regard to sharing information? The development of models and simulations, the hypergraphs of social and ecological relationships, is currently active in capitalist (exploitative) spheres, like the ERP software used at Walmart, and political (power) spheres, like GRP software and more secretive global surveillance programs (exposed by Snowden and others). In many ways, these are two sides of the same coin. Yet for justice to obtain, technology must be democratized for use by everyone. Here the promise and peril of social media and the "Internet of things" is most keenly felt. Martha Nussbaum noted that, in areas where it matters most, politically progressive voices have too often ceded the terrain. We must continue to advocate for our collective interests.
Can we create an interactive economic hypergraph to query, rank results, and inform policy? Most of the data is already out there, ready to be collected using web scraping methods. Alex Pentland, Hai Zhuge, Stephen Wolfram, Avi Schiffmann, Jennifer Gabrys (and to some extent Iyad Rahwan, Tim O'Reilly, David Lazer, Molly Crockett... the list is long), not to mention numerous social theorists... many people know how to do this. There are also many levels of governance that would find such real-time information useful, and certainly the Fairbanks Economic Development Corporation (FEDC) would as well. These projects exist at various levels of implementation today. But let's dispense with too much grandiose ambition, on account of which many well intentioned projects flounder and fail. Returning to Dennett and Levin, extending teleological capacity is simply a matter of scaling selves via increased access to a shared pool of information, in the form of a model (hypergraph or otherwise). This is possible at the microlevel by each of us, individually. If we combine numerous interoperable models together, teleological capacity could quickly scale. And that is exactly what the moment requires. Global problems require global agency.
Economic Planning
The move from economic descriptions to economic prescriptions could be called social engineering and economic planning. But then again, when locating and describing the essential workers within existing economic systems appears to be a virtually intractable problem, examining smaller toy problems (a village or family structure) and simply defining essential workers within these more controlled social frameworks can yield some useful results, at least until such a time that the data for a purely descriptive model is possible. In "Economic planning is back" Durand and Keucheyan write: "When it comes to thinking about sustainable development, many consider planning without using the word. Nowadays experts rather refer to environmental “scenarios”, that will deliver a carbon-free future. In the “Green new deal” debate sparked by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s endorsement of the project, the word “planning” is rarely used. But the idea of subjecting productive choices and investment to long-term goals other than profit is clearly there. It amounts to economic planning. ...In the past decades, enterprise resource planning (ERP) software became a major governance device, in the industrial sector as well as services. The most powerful ERPs allow for a panoptic, real-time, vision of the ecosystem the firms find themselves in. This greatly reinforces their capacity of control and transformation.”
Is economic planning back? Jack Ma, the founder of China’s Alibaba Group, thinks so. He said "Over the past 100 years, we have come to believe that the market economy is the best system, but in my opinion, there will be a significant change in the next three decades, and the planned economy will become increasingly big." What is enabling that shift isn't necessarily increasing the scale of coordination, or strengthening the role of intergovernmental bodies (like the UN). Certainly these are all important things. But the reason economic planning will increase is because we now have better tools to deal with the "economic calculation problem", and these tools are improving with each passing year. Logistics software like "enterprise resource planning" (ERP) and "government resource planning" (GRP) can integrate numerous processes in real time at any scale. Walmart and many other businesses use them. The military relies upon logistics planning and analysis to ensure continuous operations. With these, an organization can more easily identify the services and workers essential for maintaining their "collective survival enterprise" under a variety of external conditions, and begin to anticipate what consequences are likely to occur if these degrade. That information is good to have when planning for the next pandemic, or merely trying to survive the current one. Glen Weyl urges caution, lest such aspirations become conflated with technocracy and forget the important lessons of democracy. All plans must build in democratic processes at the ground level to ensure they remain responsive, fitted to their time and social circumstances and accountable to those they serve. Planning an economy that has a greater capacity to anticipate and respond to change, that operates with democratic feedback, and reduces social injustices and inequality seems more necessary today, after the disastrous events of 2020, than at any other time in recent memory. So how does economic planning and ecological sustainability relate to one another?
Interlude: Manufacturing
Fred Lambert writes: "Over the last few years, Musk has developed an admiration for good manufacturing and he has been trying to communicate it frequently. He has said on several occasions that he wants Tesla to become a manufacturing company at its core, and he has encouraged smart people to go into manufacturing." This is interesting in the context of Universal Basic Services. During the first months of the Covid-19 pandemic, the manufacturing of personal protective equipment was a priority, specifically masks and ventilators were in short supply. So we know that manufacturing is important. At the same time Musk is right that "there’s a lack of appreciation for manufacturing". Why is this? Manufacturing takes raw materials and transforms them into products (or parts that are assembled into products). After farmers lost their occupations to Big Agribusiness, many workers entered manufacturing, until a lot of those jobs were sent overseas where labor was cheaper. Where are workers today? Resource extraction, human services, health, education, consumer retail, finance, business management, transportation and postal services, construction and maintenance, fire and police services, defense industry… The usual complaint is that there is no more "made in America", and having lost our experience in this field, that which we do still make isn't as durable or comparable in quality and price. There is certainly some truth in that. But as a "basic service", the essential act of "making things" will always be a part of any healthy, diversified, and holistic local economy. That applies to any nation or state (like Alaska). We can and should be asking, what does the manufacturing economy in Alaska look like? Moving from engineering to efficient production, and across the scale from handicraft to high-tech, while merging the field of “industrial ecology” with UBS, what value added things do we need to make? How would it integrate into the larger global goods economy?
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| "blankets of blankets" (euglena) |
We cannot have sustainability without planning; these are inseparable processes. But planning is never arbitrary, it is done in reference to particular goals. For sustainability to obtain, this requires a carefully articulated understanding of organism-environment harmony. Karl Friston's process theory of "active inference" is probably the best example of this. Can we define essential workers in terms of the process theory of active inference? If so, then we could consider any entity (person, family, city, ecosystem, etc.) as a single agent that must engage with the external environment in certain characteristic ways in order to maintain its integrity and avoid existential threats. Those phenotypic features of an entity that enable such processes and “basic needs or services” would thereby correspond to the notion of “essential workers”. So for example, if we consider the scale of a city, what does it need in order to maintain its functions? How are these provided? This line of questioning illuminates various needs, each of which can be rated according to the relative ease or difficulty of maintaining within a viable range. In practice, the consideration of essential workers is relevant only at scales above the family where contractual relationships and employment makes sense, but below that level we can still generalize about roles and relationships; active inference processes exist at all scales of life from subcellular to planetary. I haven’t seen anyone specifically address the essential workers question from this perspective yet, however I do think it could shed more light on that, as well as the larger related issues of economic planning and universal basic services (UBS).
As Karl Friston pointed out, "One of the most remarkable aspects of the brain is its connectivity. Why does the brain have this architecture? The answer is straightforward. If the brain is making inferences about the causes of its sensations, then it must have a model of the relationships in the world. It follows that neural connections encode the causal connections that produce sensory information." In order to predict the future and support decision-making, processes in the brain must be able to "re-present" (to model) processes in the world. Now this is where it stops being straightforward and we begin to run into problems. We could say there are at least two kinds of paradigms for models: "harmony/conflict" and "gain/loss". Roughly speaking, the first is organized around relationships, interaction, roles, attunement, etc., and the second is organized around power, growth, exploitative potential, optimalization, etc.. It is interesting to see more or less of each of these perspectives as they are reflected in the implicit assumptions and philosophy of researchers who are engaged with questions about how life operates. I've noticed that researchers with a background in psychology (Friston, Deacon) or biology (Rosen, Hoffmeyer) tend to emphasize the harmony/conflict or expectation/surprise dynamic, while researchers who come from, for example, a non-life science background, like machine learning, tend to work with the gain/loss or reward/punishment dynamic, and each sees their focus as being either more tractable or fundamental than the other (with significant overlap in methods nonetheless). This contrast of perspectives may seem purely academic, but there are also places in which it affects our daily lives.
The gain/loss paradigm is the operating of market fundamentalism and unlimited economic growth.1 It has no desire or need to account for harmony/conflict, as either condition is acceptable so long as economic growth continues in the near term. Notably, within the last few years, a very narrow focus and shallow understanding of the gain/loss (winner/loser) paradigm led to the dismantling of public institutions designed to preserve social health and respond to possible existential threats, like pandemics. And the resulting social disruption that has occurred now has society re-evaluating critical services and essential workers. Which brings us back to the paradigm we have been ignoring lately. Essential workers must engage with the dynamics of harmony/conflict, not gain/loss. Why is this? The simplest explanation is that any service that addresses basic human needs should not be privatized or turned into a profit making industry. Privatized health insurance and the pharmaceutical industry have been a disaster for millions of American citizens who, with no public alternative available, cannot afford the cost of care.
We can model the dynamics of harmony/conflict and understand how these shape ecological processes. Reconceptualizing essential workers as engaged in promoting and maintaining social harmony through the delivery of critical services is important. Part of this is practicing a 'language of harmony' and finding effective narrative tools to describe our roles in the harmonious development of social and ecological communities. Previously I've described how Confucian role ethics (per Rosement and Ames) can provide some of this perspective. Ethical frameworks and beliefs are a source of many other examples. We can contrast Aristotelian ethics, Buddhist ethics like the brahmavihārās, and a contemporary "ethics of care" that values shared human capacities. Ethical beliefs can help orient us within the harmony/conflict paradigm toward greater social/ecological health, and therefore can be of some use to essential workers as they seek to provide basic needs and form rich mental models of social harmony (that require prosocial prior beliefs).Keywords: essential workers, universal basic services (UBS), network science, dynamic/narrative/social network analysis, logistics, data science, data visualization, economy, combinatorial optimization
Researchers: Andrew Percy, Anna Coote, Peter Corning, Ian Gough, Hai Zhuge, Alex Pentland, Avi Schiffmann, Stephen Wolfram, Glen Weyl
Footnotes:
1. The logic of market fundamentalism rests upon harnessing the dynamics of conflict and competition to produce greater social prosperity for everyone. But as David Roberts noted “real-life markets are failures all the way down — irrational behaviors, asymmetrical information, barriers to entry, monopoly control, the distorting influence of status quo interests, and more... believing a single tool will accomplish everything requires seeing the economy as a frictionless machine, a spreadsheet, not what it is: a path-dependent accretion of past decisions and sunk costs, to be tweaked and unwound." Western civilization has allowed an idealized version of the market to infect our cultural psychology and social norms. The result has been growing wealth inequality and class conflict (ironically expressed through identity politics today). Instead of worshipping the idealized marketplace, we need to reflect on this assumption, update our prior beliefs, and realize that market distortions, whether intentional or not, mean that we can never trust the operation of economic processes without a keen understanding of their contextual limitations.
Andrew Percy's seven "basic categories of essential services":
Housing
Food
Health care
Education
Access to digital information and communication systems
Access to a transport system
Access to the institutional mechanisms of democracy and society
Peter Corning's fourteen "primary needs domains":
Adequate nutrition
Fresh water
Physical safety
Physical health
Mental health
Waste elimination
Thermoregulation (body temperature)
Mobility
Healthy respiration
Adequate sleep
Reciprocal Communications (information exchange)
Positive social relationships
Reproduction
Nurturance of offspring
National Conference of State Legislatures, "Covid-19: Essential Workers in the States"
Betterteam, "What is an Essential Employee?"
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