Imagine A Mars Boom
Most who think they like the future really just like where their favorite stories took place. As a result, much future talk focuses on space, even though prospects for much activity beyond Earth anytime foreseeable seem dim. Even so, consider the following hypothetical, with three key assumptions:
Mars boom: An extremely valuable material (anti-matter? glueballs? negative mass?) is found on Mars, justifying huge economic efforts to extract it, process it, and return it to Earth. Many orgs compete strongly against one another in all of these stages to profit from the Martian boom.
A few top workers: As robots just aren’t yet up to the task, a thousand humans must be sent to and housed on Mars. The cost of this is so great that all trips are one-way, at least for a while, and it is worth paying extra to get the very highest quality workers possible. So Martians are very impressive workers, and Mars is “where the action is” in terms of influencing the future. As slavery is rare on Earth, most all Mars workers must volunteer for the move.
Martians as aliens: Many, perhaps even most, people on Earth see those who live on Mars as aliens, for whom the usual moral rules do not apply – morality is to protect Earthlings only. Such Earth folks are less reluctant to enslave Martians. Martians undergo some changes to their body, and perhaps also to their brain, but when seen in films or tv, or when talked to via (20+min delayed) Skype, Martians act very human.
Okay, now my question for you is: Are most Martians slaves? Are they selected for and trained into being extremely docile and servile?
Slavery might let Martian orgs make Martians work harder, and thereby extract more profit from each worker. But an expectation of being enslaved should make it much harder to attract the very best human workers to volunteer. Many Earth governments may even not allow free Earthlings to volunteer to become enslaved Martians. So my best guess is that in this hypothetical, Martians are free workers, rich and high status celebrities followed and admired by most Earthlings.
I’ve created this Mars scenario as an allegory of my em scenario, because someone I respect recently told me they were persuaded by Bryan Caplan’s claim that ems would be very docile slaves. As with these hypothesized Martians, the em economy would produce enormous wealth and be where the action is, and it would result from competing orgs enticing a thousand or fewer of the most productive humans to volunteer for an expensive one-way trip to become ems. When viewed in virtual reality, or in android bodies, these ems would act very human. While some like Bryan see ems as worth little moral consideration, others disagree.
I don't dispute that, but I can't see this effect being especially large. The greater the difference between what a meek docile person is getting paid and their market rate, the greater the incentive for competing employers to seek them out and make them a better offer. For this docility factor to pose a great obstacle to using wages to determine productivity would require huge deviations from market rates that just don't seem plausible to me.
Perhaps the people who would produce the most successful ems would tend to be drawn from those top earners who are slightly more docile than the rest, all else equal. But perhaps not - as Robin argued there are disadvantages to docility too, in that a docile person is less likely to provide useful criticisms or make decisions they know are correct but that their boss might disagree with.
EDIT: Additionally, if you think you know by how much docility reduces a person's wages, you can work what their wage would have been if they weren't docile. It could well be that even making this adjustment would still result in most counterfactual high earners being non-docile, if docility does actually have negative effects on productivity separate to its hypothesised wage-lowering effect.
Do you dispute that, all else being equal, docile workers will get paid less for the same work? (By definition, they fail to assert their interests. Since wages are the result of a conflict in interest, this is bound to be significant. - See "The Dismal Employment Picture: A Social-Status Theory Explanation - http://juridicalcoherence.b... ; concerning docility as a cause of the low wages in the service sector ]
Then, if you increase the availability of docile workers, you will find it easier to find enough docility to compensate for more of its adverse correlates. This will lower your wage bill.