The people being greedy point is a good one Kev.
I think your viewing the problem from a capitalist slant which is understandable.
Q .Why do we need more advanced machinery?
A. To make the product cheaper to produce and increase profit.
Q. If we paid all our workers (In a co-operative set up as mentioned in my post) a reasonable wage or simply returned to them the value they add to the product then why do we need to increase profit? There are no shareholders to keep happy, only ourselves.
The R&D question is one of necessity. New innovations would come about from a social perspective rather than a commercial one.
As an example think about your T.V. Over the years the picture has got better, the style has become more appealing the screen has got flatter, new storage devices for recordings have appeared etc etc. The advances would be quite astonishing
to people only 10 years ago. The R&D that goes into these projects exists because the company wants to sell you an item that you are going to throw away in 5 years in order to buy the next one.
Yeah well all that's good stuff you might say.
Well its a shame that the advancements in consumer electricals cannot be matched by advances in cures for cancers, heart disease etc etc.
Ask any man who is going to die tomorrow if he'd swap all of that stylish Sony crap for a cure to his illness.
Yet cancer research, and other disease research relies largely on charity!
The kind of commercial (Big Pharma companies) research that goes into drugs at the minute produces drugs that are very expensive and come with effectiveness studies which have had their figures scuffed in favour of drug effectiveness.
The expense can come from the time taken to bring a drug to market because of lengthy trials which rightly need to be carried out.
Therefore companies are not going to try for the really hard solutions which may become the cure for everything because of the risk of failure and wasted investment. Easier to go for the safe drug which is likely to pass trials.
Also when these drugs are invented they have a 10 year patent. This makes the drugs ridiculously expensive and forces NHS patients to go without. A drugs company I recently worked for were persuing a legal case in india to try and stop them making generics (The same drug manufactured by someone else usually sold for a fraction of the cost of the original). So people die when the drug exists to save them. All in the name of profit.
You may say that the company deserves maximum return for bringing the drug to market. I say that people deserve to live instead of being held to ransom
A planned economy could make a conscious choice to pursue these things at the cost of consumerist garbage. If push came to shove people would bin their i-pod nanos in a milli second in favour of a cure to their illness. Their free market sympathies would be flushed down their designer bog.
2 comments:
You put "Q .Why do we need more advanced machinery?
A. To make the product cheaper to produce and increase profit." What about to make the product better, cleaner and safer?
Other then that, because I agree with 99% of what you say, I am finding it increasingly difficult to argue against you!
The human race evolves within its social set-up. Advanced machinery is only needed to make people fat and lazy. Do you think that we are here now because the TV was invented? or the mobile phone?
We are here due to cultivating our surroundings to meet the needs to survive. Technology has yin/yang alike all, thus having a robot to make a sandwich is all well and good but this means that the sandwich cost also has to incorporate the machine/robot running costs, aswell as those who own the robot making their profit.
Co-oparative could be replaced by the word commune. This is the only way you will get you dream.
The big companies are only employing people because they are big companies: money buys money in the capitalist ideal.
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