The Worth of a Life -- Part I -- AL, CPS, Soc, $$$
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Barbara Ehrenreich has written a new book entitled Bait and Switch, a sequel to her bestseller Nickel and Dimed, about the struggles of white collar workers who are between jobs and have, in their own way, fallen between the cracks in society. Nickel and Dimed, of course, explores just how difficult and precarious life is in America if you're trying to get by on minimum wage jobs.
One thing I find fascinating about such reported experiences is the simple idea that human beings are not valued more than they are by corporations or by society. No, I'm not talking about "valued for their intrinsic worth" or "valued because it's the right thing to do." Important as those perspectives are, I'm really surprised that in this day and age we don't value people more for their immense potential financial worth.
Accelerated learning researchers such as Dr. Win Wenger and Paul Scheele have many techniques demonstrating enormous untapped human abilities generally accessible by virtually everyone, and biotech research is thundering forward at such breakneck speed that it likely has already developed methods for optimizing human mental performance, and has created further, revolutionary augmentations in animals that may well be usable in humans.
Why then, do we persist in seeing "the common man" as, well, common? It seems that we could be stimulating tremendous levels of talent and creativity in our country's talent pool, encouraging many more people to invent, create and/or found companies, while also supplying those people with tons of gifted workers capable of supporting such endeavors. But instead we're grinding people down with unaffordable slave wages and sudden layoffs that can easily dead end in destroyed careers. Common human decency aside, what sense does it make to treat our most valuable resources in that fashion?
Future Imperative
Barbara Ehrenreich has written a new book entitled Bait and Switch, a sequel to her bestseller Nickel and Dimed, about the struggles of white collar workers who are between jobs and have, in their own way, fallen between the cracks in society. Nickel and Dimed, of course, explores just how difficult and precarious life is in America if you're trying to get by on minimum wage jobs.
One thing I find fascinating about such reported experiences is the simple idea that human beings are not valued more than they are by corporations or by society. No, I'm not talking about "valued for their intrinsic worth" or "valued because it's the right thing to do." Important as those perspectives are, I'm really surprised that in this day and age we don't value people more for their immense potential financial worth.
Accelerated learning researchers such as Dr. Win Wenger and Paul Scheele have many techniques demonstrating enormous untapped human abilities generally accessible by virtually everyone, and biotech research is thundering forward at such breakneck speed that it likely has already developed methods for optimizing human mental performance, and has created further, revolutionary augmentations in animals that may well be usable in humans.
Why then, do we persist in seeing "the common man" as, well, common? It seems that we could be stimulating tremendous levels of talent and creativity in our country's talent pool, encouraging many more people to invent, create and/or found companies, while also supplying those people with tons of gifted workers capable of supporting such endeavors. But instead we're grinding people down with unaffordable slave wages and sudden layoffs that can easily dead end in destroyed careers. Common human decency aside, what sense does it make to treat our most valuable resources in that fashion?
Future Imperative
posted by Ralph Cerchione | Tuesday, October 18, 2005
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