Ezra Klein argues that Professor X was wrong to dream of peace when the dream of “shared prosperity” would be stronger. I don’t entirely agree, because although prosperity doesn’t have to be zero-sum, the nature of mutant powers would place them frequently into competition with basic labour.
Ezra rightly identifies that a power set like Storm’s would provide a unique and indispensable service to businesses and governments, but that’s because Storm has a power that’s both fairly rare (weather control) and dramatically useful in a way that regular human business can’t easily duplicate. Most mutants, though, don’t have powers of that sort. How many mutants are just big strong dudes? Answer: lots of them. And in the real world, if you’re a big strong dude with no other skills (assuming these mutants wish to use their powers for profit), you’ll end up in manual labour of some sort, and then you will see resentment. How many normal-human construction jobs does a Colossus or a Strong Guy replace? For that matter, how can professional couriers be able to compete with mutants who can fly under their own power?
I strongly suspect that unions would, in these circumstances, put strict hiring quotas on mutants (and most likely gene-wide, because how can you prove that you aren’t strong or can’t fly?) and then we’re just back to square one – and that’s before you get to the psychics, who would inevitably be barred from any number of professions, and genome-based resentment on either side of the coin would almost certainly follow. And with that, the dream of shared prosperity becomes restricted to those outliers, the mutants who don’t potentially threaten human prosperity and who can provide useful services to humans. That’s not equality, and in the real-world scenario it’s why Magneto is right.
EDIT TO ADD: In comments Fistfulloffists says: “Even a society made up entirely of mutants would, realistically, suck.” Which isn’t entirely inaccurate, because all-mutant societies would almost certainly have some degree of labour immobility. Are you a big strong guy? Then society most likely demands – either explicitly or simply through cultural conditioning – that you go be a labourer. Energy blasts? Welcome to the energy sector. Indeed, there were more than a few hints in the comics that Genosha (pre-genocide) was somewhat like this. Which could arguably make mutant societies less able to progress – what happens when an Einstein or an Edison just happens to be a being of living steel and therefore most immediately and obviously useful at manual landscaping? As another example, Hank McCoy’s mutation isn’t that he’s a smart guy – it’s that he’s physically agile and powerful, and his brains are sort of a genetic non-mutation bonus. Hank is an example of what existing in a non-power-normative – e.g., human – society can do for a mutant.
Related Articles
31 users responded in this post
Even a society made up entirely of mutants would, realistically, suck.
I think that’s probably why Xavier was fighting for a big, vaguely defined goal of basic co-existence. “Not being exterminated by a species that’s highly organized with very powerful weapons” is the only pragmatic step for mutants, and both Magneto and Xavier go for that. It’s the methods where they disagree, as Magneto would rather carve out a place by force than try to integrate into society.
If mutants really existed, the free market wouldn’t matter that much even in the short term, and neither would courts and laws in the long term.
Realistically, mutants would all be ‘enticed’ to work for the government, be it as soldiers, bodyguards, spies, living WMDs or as general ‘national assets’. Even truckloads of really strong, durable guys would be more useful for disaster relief and peacekeeping missions (at home or abroad) than working in the private sector, especially since you could always have them do that during slow periods, a la the Army Corps of Engineers. There’d be a massive worldwide human arms race between all the nations to get as many omega-level mutants as possible, who would eventually become the new ruling elites of their respective countries.
Presumably the talent pool of mutants is much smaller than the rest of population. If their skill set is so useful that it’s indispensable, then you could see them command a higher pay than a regular employee (lest said mutant leaves and the employer gets screwed over by his/her departure).
If not, then how is it any different than a regular human?
Also, your addendum presumes a lack of free will. Just because your well suited to a particular field doesn’t mean you need to stay in it. Niels Bohr was well suited to athletics, but he didn’t necessarily stay in that field.
@Prowler The government provides stable and consistent work but it doesn’t pay as well as big business. Assuming that no laws have restricted their skills, what would inspire you to go effectively sit in a silo as a threat “for Amer’ca!” when you could punch million-dollar oil pipes in the ground daily?
@MGK To play the devil’s advocate, imagine this as the current society stretched to a hyperbolic extent. You seem to be suggesting that just because someone is big and strong, they can’t find work as a scientist, or if you can fly you’d be a minimum wage courier. In the real world I’m big and strong but I work on computers. You are great at logical debate but you still made the choice to go into law. If we’re still talking about cultures that aren’t socialist then mutants should be able to choose their path in life just as normals do. They’ll make more money if they find the best way to use their talents but how is that not true now? There may be a wider range of possible talents and advantages in the pool but in the end I would suspect that the free market would find a balance right up until laws or hate groups or something else interfered.
Sure, people would get mad. Look at help desk lines. Of course people get pissed that their call center jobs are done more efficiently by someone on another continent but (some of) those people find other jobs and customers still call and use the service and life goes on. The people with more talent or power or willingness to be dicks or whatever will probably end up wealthy and others won’t but that’s the way it is right now.
My mutant ability to always be right about everything hasn’t done me any damn good in a society full of normal wrong people. Professor X was a chump.
Realistically, you’d end up with people hiding their mutant abilities, because Comrade Colossus Einstein is tired of picking up everybody’s heavy trash.
Or maybe it wouldn’t suck that hard. How many construction workers has Magnus ver Magnusson put out of business? He’s a real-life mutant, and he just owns an awesome gym.
I bloody love this. I’ve spent the last 20 minutes reading nationally renown writers talk about the effect of mutant powers in politics and economics and people in the comments sections talk about canon. Now all they need to do is write fanfic and they’ll be just like the scifi & comic forums I’ve spent years involved in. Hilarious.
The blog Ecocomics likes to delve into these issues regularly.
http://www.eco-comics.blogspot.com/
One mitigating factor you’d expect to see in the Marvel comics universe is that superhumans were around for generations before super-powered mutants became common knowledge.
There were likely the same problems and fears and prejudices involved with public acceptance of early superhumans as later happened with mutants. (Has this been explored at all?) Or were people first too busy marveling (sorry about that) then being distracted by wars to worry about super heroes and villains taking their jobs?
Yes, there are differences. However, presumably some of the measures – good or bad – created to deal with superhumans in general would also apply to mutants.
I think you discount the suitability of mutants to high-end niches. In-comic, Quicksilver and Guido/Strong Guy worked as a high-end courier and an elite bodyguard, respectively. Unless you can entirely staff with Colossi, you’re better off getting a forklift for heavy lifting, but in those situations where a super-strong person is perfect, Colossus can be called in as a contractor. Labor organization works when you have a number of workers with a given skillset, and I don’t think that there are enough mutants of a given labor-useful power to organize themselves or distort the general labor market.
Yes, precogs and telepaths would be bared by law from certain occupations and places of business.
Y
Oddly enough, I would tend to think that mutants and other superbeings openly working in normal jobs would tend to improve their profile – sure, in the short term, there’d be upset (and to a politically insignificant extent, in the long run) but the simple matter is that companies are going to do what makes them the most money. And that’s going to be openly acknowledging their hiring of mutants – which means they’ll need the PR to survive it, which means in turn mutants will. And mutants are a small enough group that it’ll be the highest bidders who succeed. So you’ll have the likes of Coke or Fox putting their cash up to improve the reputation of mutants. Public opinion is as little against that kind of moolah.
You are great at logical debate but you still made the choice to go into law.
This was a fantastic burn and deserves to be acknowledged as such.
you know, big strong guys like Colossus and Strong Guy would actually probably spend more time replacing heavy machinery than individual laborors. After all unless he’s really fast too, there’s only so many places a person can be at a time. One guy lugging stuff around instead of multiple people doing it slows you down. However if you’re talking demolition he’d be much faster than a bulldozer.
Yes, precogs and telepaths would be bared by law from certain occupations and places of business.
Precogs and telepaths provide way, way too big of an advantage for the people in those occupations and businesses for such legal restrictions to ever be put into place or, if they are, to be enforced in any meaningful capacity.
The record of attempts to legislate away massive disparities in power and influence is pretty soft just when it comes to boring old money and political power, I suspect it would have an even poorer record when it came to people with actual superpowers at their disposal.
Prowler gets it right; within a couple of generations, mutants simply become our ruling class.
I wish Ezra hadn’t mentioned Civil War in a way that indicated he both hadn’t read it and didn’t understand it. It makes him look silly enough that his other, more valid points seem less valid by comparison.
I’m not sure what to make of Iceman’s use in Utopia. He’s one of the few mutants who can actually function in the real world since he has marketable job skills (accounting). He’s also one of the most powerful beings on the planet.
What did they do with him? They had him provide clean drinking water. Sure it’s a vital resource but I can’t help but feel he could have been easily replaced by a Forge-built filtration system or something.
Technology building superheroes are a huge problem in the Marvel U, in that they circumvent a lot of the problems mutants could solve with powers–maybe, if they were born the right way. It’s a problem that’s plagued the Marvel U for years, as in ‘how did Reed Richards not make Storm irrelevant at the request of the US’ at some point, because plot has made it obvious that he totally could, but he’s a dick? Or something like that.
If one assumes MiR is using mutants alone then he is totally right and a mutant-only labour economy would be awful.
“I strongly suspect that unions would, in these circumstances, put strict hiring quotas on mutants”
No slight intended, but that’s because you’re accustomed to the American union model, in which the union movement is affiliated with organised crime, and hand-in-glove with the employers. In the European model, the big, strong guy would be a highly paid independent contractor (as BSD suggested) specialising in activities too hazardous for normal workers, and probably working only a few weeks a year.
Storm would be a really serious problem in the the real world, legally speaking. No matter how careful she is, somebody is going to blame her for their drought/flood/tornado/hurricane or whatever. If she is workng for a government, that makes her a weapon of mass destruction.
And she’d never be allowed to work privately in the U. S. In Colorado, for example, there are laws against using barrels to hold roof runoff for later use. In theory, that water is part of somebody’s downstream water rights, and the Colorado River Compact allocations were already based on century high water levels. Whiskey is for drinking, water’s for fighting over.
Ezra has appeared to, like most libertarians (don’t know if Ezra is one, and don’t care), confused Economic Wealth with Social Worth.
Greed is as much an economic factor as paranoia is a social factor and both are just as abusive to the socioeconomic health of a nation. Being able to generate economic wealth does not mean one should automatically be trusted.
No way! I’m all for mutants!
When CEO’s and board of directors pay is between 250 and 500 times the average worker, who cares if Colossus displaces the pay of 37 construction workers.
I’d be much happier personally too, if The Leader was hired to BE the senate for $5M a year. That would save us a bundle.
Flying couriers would probably deliver rush mail, wish, lets face it, are impossible in Toronto. It takes me thirty minutes just to drive from markham to markham.
Oh oh! And if we can get moleman working on a subway system, just digging the tunnels, that would be cake!
Yet another reason why Earth X is marvels best series
in the “4” series, wherein the Fantastic Four have a situation where their entire fortune of the Foundation is stolen, they have to move out of the Baxter Building and get real jobs, Ben “The Thing” Grimm gets a job as a construction worker.
At one point, the foreman explains to him that he’s doing too good a job and could he slow down, cause the other guys get paid hourly too and Ben’s strength lets him do things they cannot… and thus much faster.
On the bright side with that, Ben has the brains to be apologetic and makes a point to be the guy that goes and gets the coffee for a while, moving himself down the ladder.
(It also has Johnny becoming a fireman, Sue becoming a substitute teacher, Reed getting a job as tech support for a law office, a really great Namor/Reed fight, a snarling Uatu, a really scary Puppet Master story… I don’t know how much is Marvel Canon nowadays but some of it was very good.)
I have to disagree, even if it means I’m agreeing with Klein.
Take the power of Colossus, a few hundred, or thousand of similar persons. The demand for their service would be worth millions. Like Pro sports. The building would go up faster, but employing 100 strong mutants to build it is stupid. Why should a guy that can carry 20 tons of steel up the building be bolting and welding? The economics of building would drop, allowing for lower prices for rent, allowing lower prices for products sold there, etc. Imagine a Magneto, or Forge, or Jeffries and what they could do for the world by using their powers generously and getting paid millions to do it. Japan would pay billions for a Magneto to come right now.
The problem only arises when political entities start using people like Mystique, or Wolverine, to ramp up their desire for conquest.
People that respect the boundaries and property of others are peaceful because they want to trade and live to make life better. Politicians, and their corporate symbiotes, are parasites on the productive class that kill and steal at will.
Respectfully,
Dale Fitz
I’m inclined to think that what Xavier really needs to do to increase mutant acceptance is to switch his team from a semi-secret private paramilitary organization to a very public disaster-relief or similar charity organization. Sure, people bent on grinding an axe would still find it suspicious and scary, but I think enough other people would be impressed by the good PR to make things at least a little easier for the mutants who did want to join the public labor force.
Wait a minute… wouldn’t big machines and technology make most of these mutations irrelevant to the labor market? They wouldn’t be tuk anybody’s jerbs. Robots and the intert00bz done did tha deed.
Storm and others like her would form part of the global elite (or become the abused tools of some government). Hmm, sounds a lot like the comic books, doesn’t it?
In the old GURPS Supers RPG there was a company called “Supertemps” that basically acted as a clearing house/temp agency to hook up powered individuals with people who wanted to pay them to use their powers. Supers with powers very suited to industrial work and such could pretty much make a living going from gig to gig, while people with more narrow power sets might have normal jobs, but be registered with Supertemps in case something came up. (In that setting an accountant who could shrink himself went down the well to rescue baby jessica.) Supertemps was also in effect a Private Military Contractor, contracting with cities and such to place “Defense teams” in places like Minneapolis that did not have any organized super teams. (that particular bit came about after several villains took over a town in south dakota and held it for something like a week because all the heros on the coasts were slow to realize that no, there really isn’t anybody in a cape who considers SD to be their “territory”)
Even 20 years later, that remains in my mind a pretty decent idea for how things might play out if you introduced supers to real work economics.
Years and years ago a friend ran a CHAMPIONS campaign based on the idea “you wake up with superpowers” and one of the things that became clear is that if you give a group of Canadians superpowers, one of the first things they’ll do with them is look for the commercial applications. This may explain the relative lack of traditional supergroups in Canada in comics; fighting crime isn’t the first thing that comes to mind for us.
OK, in retrospect “I am a telepath who can learn your darkest secrets; would you like to buy an affordably-priced mind-shield to stop me from doing this?” was a bit of a skeevy business model but working as an experimental medical tool and the waste disposal company were perfectly cromulent business models.
Wasn’t “House of M” about a society where almost everyone was a mutant? And didn’t it suck?
@Amy Coates:
Kind of what Morrison had him do, actually.
When you get right down to it, the real barrier to mutant acceptance is the intermittent tendency of this or that mutant to massively rewrite reality / devour a planet / be retconned into Xorn pretending he was Magneto pretending he was Xorn, or whatever else serves to once again reboot to the tired old status quo.
Oh wow, you know what, it’d actually be just like Ubik! AWESOME.