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Notes -
Pointwise vs Uniform "badness"
Note: This post assumes the axiom that some people are better than others, and that we can to some degree of accuracy say whether someone is a net contributor to the world or not.
Often when it is pointed out that people who are in group X are a net negative to society (e.g. low paid cleaners who consume a lot more in benefits and general wear and tear on public goods like roads than they put in) others are quick to point out that actually these people are the lifeblood of the country and if they suddenly disappeared the country would collapse within a week (e.g. truck drivers refuse to work, thereby causing collapse as food doesn't get to where it needs to be etc.). This is then followed by the conclusion that therefore these people are not bad for society but rather good for it, and so we shouldn't complain about them at all.
I am completely convinced that they are correct that the country would indeed collapse in short order if truck drivers went on strike, cleaners stopped working etc. However this fact is a statement about the group as a whole, instead of individual members of it. For example: If a factory needs 5 people to work the machines but union regulations require them to hire 25 people instead of 5 then yes, each and every single member of the group of "workers" is a parasite sucking on the teat of the group of people who are "factory owners", even though the "factory owners" need the group "workers". In this case it is not the individuals who are indispensable to society, but rather the group as a whole, and the example above shows, it's possible for the group to be a net positive while every single individual in it is a net negative.
Of course not all groups of people are like this. The group of people who are criminals is a net negative to society full stop (restrict criminals to those who commit non-state sanctioned violence+thieves if your worried about how exactly criminal is defined). The individual members of this group are a net negative to society and the whole group is a net negative too. This is probably why "criminals bad" is a much less controversial statement compared to "street cleaners bad" even though someone who earns enough to be a net contributor plus does some light burglary on the side is probably much less of a drain on public welfare.
To be clear here: the people who are members of a net positive category but themselves are net negative are still those who society would be better off without on the margins. And since all economic decisions are made on the margin it is perfectly valid to say that ceteris paribus the world as a whole would be better off without them in expectation.
I think it makes sense to distinguish these two types of a group being bad for society. Firstly we have pointwise badness as an individual which we define as a person who is on their own a net negative to society ceteris paribus holding everything else the same (i.e. we remove them and just them from society and ask if the result if better or worse in expectation). From this we can define pointwise badness for groups where a group is given this label if most of its members are pointwise bad as individuals (note: here we depart from the mathematical definition, every group has it's saints, I'm sure there are some net positive criminals so we don't require every single member of the group to be a net negative).
As examples the group of Criminals are pointwise bad for society, equally street cleaners are pointwise bad for society because they are easily replaceable and consume more than they output.
Then you have uniform badness, which is when the group as a whole is a negative influence on the world and if we could somehow Thanos snap every single member of it away the rest of society would be better off. Criminals are uniformly bad for the world, while street cleaners, truck drivers and steel mill workers are not. Note that uniform badness sort of implies pointwise badness in the real world (not exactly: a group with 10 good people but 1 Literally Hitler is uniformly bad for the world, while it wouldn't be pointwise bad, the Literally Hitler is pointwise bad as an individual, but none of the others are) much more than pointwise badness implies uniform badness.
There are lots of pointwise bad groups but much much fewer uniformly bad groups. Generally when people are talking about how members of a group are bad, especially when they want something to be done they're talking about pointwise badness rather than uniform badness.
If you fire an entire group based on this heuristic, then congratulations, your factory no longer runs. If you can extract profit from the factory and people still buy the product for cheap, then you aren't losing anything by having some excess.
Some vague morality points, perhaps.
I don't understand how you can say that "having some excess" (paying 20 extra people) costs nothing but morality points. It costs economy points, however many it takes to compensate 20 people to work for you.
I suspect I'm missing something here.
Those economy points (err, dollars) could be used to pay the remaining workers more, to buy the owner a yacht, to invest in the business (new machine, new/expanded building, lowered sale price of produced good, whatever).
Allow me to break down my argument further for you, hopefully it will elucidate the meaning.
Assumption: A business existing is better than a business not existing. They provide some good to the market that satisfies some vague demand. Assumption: Per the OP's framing it is better to fire all 25 workers in order to get rid of the excess, because you evaluate the group as a whole, not individuals in the group.
Under these assumptions, and within the OP's thought experiment, would it be better to put the factory out of business to get rid of the 20 parasites, or would it be better to keep the business still running, when the only option is to fire the entire group in order to be rid of the union workers?
My response:
If profit is still being extracted, and the factory is able to continue to run, it is better to keep the factory running, even with the excess. Is it better for a factory to run with an optimal crew-number? Sure, that is not under dispute. In a less contrived thought experiment, you fight the union and reduce the number of workers until you hit a "true"/safe/optimal minimum for your goals, or if demand is high, expand the factory so you can utilize those 20 excess workers and ensure they're producing value.
The thought experiment has a lot of assumptions baked into it. The other issue perhaps, is that I don't use profit or money as an equivalent to calculating utility.
Right, I misunderstood. That makes sense. Thanks for clarifying.
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