31
India is now leading the way on so many issues! We remain horrified by the memory of the heat wave, galvanized, and if not unified then nearly so, in a broad coalition determined to re-examine everything, to change whatever needs changing. You see it all around you!
This situation is partly an accident of history, admittedly, in that BJP was in power when the heat wave hit and so they were associated with it, with whatever justice who can say, and yet as a result they were thrown out of power and discredited forever, such that hopefully they will never come back, and likewise good riddance to their RSS fake-traditional Hinduistic ethnic-nationalist triumphalism. It was not the true Indian way, as all see now, or most. The heat wave made the revulsion against that pernicious nonsense very great. The true Indian way has always been syncretic, right from the very beginning of our civilization.
Meanwhile the Congress party was clapped out, a thing of the past, its heroic era buried by decades of corruption. Possibly a cleaning-up can someday happen for the party that did so much for India, but that’s for another time, a work in progress; in any case, the upshot post–heat wave was a complete loss of faith in both Congress and BJP, such that the world’s biggest democracy was left with no nationally dominant party. This was an opportunity, as many realized, and the work being done now has been accomplished by the creation of a broad coalition of forces, many of them representing very large Indian populations which never had much political power before, or even very good political representation. The energy from this new coalition is palpable everywhere. Things are changing.
And there are good models to study and use, Indian models. Kerala has been big in this regard as a high-functioning state for almost a century now, devolving power to the local, and the state government alternating in a scheduled way between Left and Congress leadership. Much has been taken from Kerala and applied nationally. Then also Sikkim and Bengal have been developing an organic regenerative agriculture that, at the same time it provides more food than before, also sequesters more carbon in the soil, and this too has been taken up across the country. Indian agriculture moving into its post–green revolution is also a giant step toward independent subtropical knowledge production, achieved in collaboration with Indonesian and African and South American permaculturists, and its importance going forward cannot be over-emphasized.
Land reform is part of that, because with land reform comes a return to local knowledge and local ownership and thus political power. The new agriculture is also labor intensive, as to a certain extent people must replace the power of fossil fuels and pay close attention to small biomes, and of course we have that labor power and that close attention. Especially as the caste system is once again acknowledged to be a bad remnant of our past, a remnant also very associated with BJP, who along with selling our country to global financial predators also demonized so many ethnicities, and told so many Indians that they weren’t really Indian. Now it’s time to wipe that slate clean, and you see all the castes, including Dalits, joining society fully— also all the languages put on the same footing legally, as well as all the ethnic groups and religions across the country. Now we are all Indian together. It is truly a coalition. Which makes the name of the party very apt. May the Coalition hold!
Certainly its work so far has been admirable. Since sweeping the elections, the national Coalition government has completed the nationalization of all the country’s energy companies, and set to work decommissioning all coal-fired plants. Completing the clean electrification of the country is being accomplished by construction of massive solar power arrays, and then electricity-storing facilities, and a refurbished national grid. This again has been labor intensive, but India has lots of people. And lots of sunlight. And lots of land.
The Coalition was very willing to take ideas from elsewhere, even from the Chinese, who have much to teach us about nationalization. It’s a very strong feeling now, that India belongs to Indians— that Indians are not to be sold by other Indians as cheap labor to fill the economic needs of global capital— that the colonial and even now the post-colonial days are over. It is the New India now, and everything is to be reconsidered. Many a time we now say to each other, when the arguments get intense, as they always do, Look, my friend— never again. Never again. This reminds us of the heat wave and the stakes involved, but it is also a more general rejection of the bad parts of the past. Never again, we remind each other, and then go on to consider, So what must we do here, to get to an agreement and act on it?
And so India is coming into its own. We are the new force. People around the world have begun to take notice. This too is new— no one elsewhere has been used to thinking of India as anything but a place of poverty, a victim of history and geography. But now they are looking at us with a little bit of confusion and wonder. What is this? A sixth of humanity on one big triangular patch of land, caught under the blazing sun, cut off by a mighty range of mountains: who are these people? A democracy, a polyglot coalition— wait, can it be? And what can it be? Do we make the Chinese, who so decisively stepped onto the world stage at the start of this century, look dictatorial, monolithic, brittle, afraid? Is India now the bold new leader of the world?
We think maybe so.
32
Mary: Dick, what are you and your team doing to make current economics more helpful to the people of the future?
Dick: We’ve been looking at discount rates. We’re studying what India is doing to their discount rate, it’s very interesting.
Mary: How does that relate to future people?
Dick: It’s very central. We discount the future generations. It works by analogy to how we treat money. With money, a euro you own now is worth somewhat more than the promise of a euro that will come to you a year from now.
Mary: How come?
Dick: If you have it now, you can spend it now. Or you can bank it and earn interest on it. Like that.
Mary: So how much is the discount? How does it work?
Dick: The rate varies. It works like this: if you would take ninety euros now rather than the promise of a hundred euros a year from now, that discount rate is point nine (0.9) a year. Applying that rate, a hundred euros coming to you in twenty years is worth the same as about twelve euros today. If you go out fifty years, that hundred euros you would get then is worth about half a euro today.
Mary: That seems like a steep rate!
Dick: It is, I’m just using it to make it clear to you. But steep rates are pretty common. Someone once won the pseudo-Nobel in economics for suggesting a four percent discount rate on the future. That’s still quite high. All the different rates and time intervals get traded, of course. People bet on whether the value will go up or down relative to what got predicted. The time value of money, it’s called.
Mary: But this gets applied to other things?
Dick: Oh yes. That’s economics. Since everything can be converted to its money value, when you need to rate the future value of an action, to decide whether to pay to do it now or not, you speak of that value using a discount rate.
Mary: But those future people will be just as real as you and I. Why discount them in the same way you do money?
Dick: It’s partly to help decide what to do. See, if you rate all future humans as having equal value to us alive now, they become a kind of infinity, whereas we’re a finite. If we don’t go extinct, there will eventually have been quite a lot of humans— I’ve read eight hundred billion, or even several quadrillion— it depends on how long you think we’ll go on before going extinct or evolving into something else. Whether we can outlast the death of the sun and so on. Even if you take a lower estimate, you get so many future people that we don’t rate against them. If we were working for them as well as ourselves, then really we should be doing everything for them. Every good project we can think of would be rated as infinitely good, thus equal to all the other good projects. And every bad thing we do to them is infinitely bad and to be avoided. But since we’re
in the present, and trying to decide which projects to fund, with limited resources, you have to have a finer instrument than infinity when calculating costs and benefits. Assuming you’re going to only be able to afford a few things, and you want to know which of them get you the most benefits for the least cost.
Mary: Which is what economics is for.
Dick: Exactly. Best distribution of scarce resources and so on.
Mary: So given that, how do you pick a discount rate?
Dick: Out of a hat.
Mary: What?
Dick: There’s nothing scientific about it. You just pick one. It might be a function of the current interest rate, but that shifts all the time. So really you just choose.
Mary: So the higher the discount rate, the less we spend on future people?
Dick: That’s right.
Mary: And right now everyone chooses a high rate.
Dick: Yes.
Mary: How does that get justified?
Dick: The assumption is that future people will be richer and more powerful than we are, so they’ll deal with any problems we create for them.
Mary: But now that’s not true.
Dick: Not even close to true. But if we don’t discount the future, we can’t quantify costs and benefits.
Mary: But if the numbers lie?
Dick: They do lie. Which allows us to ignore any costs or benefits that will occur more than a few decades down the line. Say someone asks for ten million to enact a policy that will save a billion people in two hundred years. A billion people are worth a huge number of dollars, if you take a rough average of the insurance companies’ monetary valuations for a human life. But using the point nine discount rate, that huge number might equal only five million dollars today. So do we spend ten million now to save what is calculated as being worth five million after the discount rate is applied? No, of course not.
Mary: Because of the discount rate!
Dick: Right. Happens all the time. Regulators go to government budget office to get a mitigation project approved. Budget office uses the discount rate and says, absolutely no. Doesn’t pencil out.
Mary: All because of the discount rate.
Dick: Yes. It’s a number put on an ethical decision.
Mary: A number which can’t be justified on its merits.
Dick: Right. This often gets admitted. No one denies future people are going to be just as real as us. So there isn’t any moral justification for the discounting, it’s just for our own convenience. Plenty of economists acknowledged this. Robert Solow said we ought to act as if the discount rate were zero. Roy Harrod said the discount rate was a polite expression for rapacity. Frank Ramsey called it ethically indefensible. He said it came about because of a weakness of the imagination.
Mary: But we do it anyway.
Dick: We kick their ass.
Mary: Easy to do, when they’re not here to defend themselves!
Dick: True. I like to think of it as a rugby match, with present-day people as the New Zealand All Blacks, playing against a team of three-year-olds, who represent the people of the future. We kick their ass. It’s one of the few games we’re good at winning.
Mary: I can’t believe it.
Dick: Yes you can.
Mary: But what do we do?
Dick: We’re the Ministry for the Future. So we step in and play for the three-year-olds. We substitute for them.
Mary: We play rugby against the All Blacks!
Dick: Yes. They’re pretty good.
Mary: So they’ll kick our asses too.
Dick: Unless we get as good as they are.
Mary: But can we do that?
Dick: We may be sticking with this analogy a little too far here, but let’s do that for the fun of it. So now I’m thinking about that movie about the South African football team, when the World Cup was held in South Africa. They were a beginner team, but they ended up winning it all.
Mary: How did they do that?
Dick: You should watch the movie. Basically, they were playing for more than the game. The other teams were playing because that’s what they did. It was their profession. But those South Africans, they were playing for Mandela. They were playing for their lives.
Mary: So … is there a way we can make the calculations better?
Dick: This is where India comes into it. Since the heat wave, they’ve been leading the way in terms of re-examining everything. So regarding this issue, you could just set a low discount rate, of course. But Badim tells me that in India it was traditional to talk about the seven generations before and after you as being your equals. You work for the seven generations. Now they’re using that idea to alter their economics. Their idea is to shape the discount rate like a bell curve, with the present always at the top of the bell. So from that position, the discount rate is nearly nothing for the next seven generations, then it shifts higher at a steepening rate. Although they’re also modeling the reverse of that, in which you have a high discount rate but only for a few generations, after which it goes to zero. Either way you remove the infinities from the calculation, and give a higher value to future generations.
Mary: Good idea.
Dick: We’ve been running modeling exercises to see how various curves play out in the creation of new cost-benefit equations. It’s pretty interesting.
Mary: I want to see that. Run with that.
Dick: The All Blacks will be trying to tackle us, I warn you. They tackle to hurt. They’ll be trying to get us to cough up the pill.
Mary: When you get hit, pass the ball to me. I’ll be on the inside to receive I will.
Dick: Good on ya mate.
33
They killed us so we killed them.
Everyone in our cell had helped to clean up after the heat wave. You don’t forget a thing like that. I myself didn’t speak for three years. When I did I could only say a few things. It was like I was two years old. I was killed that week, and had to start over again. Lots of the Children of Kali had gone through similar experiences. Or worse. Not all of my comrades were human.
It was a question of identifying the guilty and then finding them and getting to them. The research and detective work was done by another wing. A lot of the guilty were in hiding, or on fortress islands or otherwise protected. Even when identified it wasn’t easy to get near them. They knew the danger.
Methods were worked up over many iterations. We took a lot of losses at first. Of course suicide bombing is often effective, but this is a crude and ugly way to go about it, and uncertain. Most of us didn’t want to do it. We weren’t that crazy, and we wanted to be more effective than that. Much better to kill and disappear. Then you can do it again.
For that, drones are best. Much of the job becomes intelligence; finding the guilty, finding their moments of exposure. Not easy, but once accomplished, boom. The drones keep getting faster and faster. The guilty often have defenses, but these can often be overwhelmed by numbers. A swarm of incoming drones the size of sparrows, moving at hundreds or even thousands of meters per second— these are hard to stop. The guilty died by the dozens in those years.
Eventually they stayed indoors for the most part. At that point, a decade into the campaign, they knew they were in trouble. Security redoubled. It became a question, or several questions. Were there still people left so guilty they deserved to die? Yes to that one. Could we get to them? Harder.
We sometimes joined domestic staffs or landscaping crews, and worked for years. Other times it was a matter of breaking and entering. Sometimes they could be caught during transit, while less protected. Sometimes their bodyguards would have to be killed too. They shouldn’t have taken work like that. Protecting mass murderers makes you complicit in mass murder. So we didn’t worry about them.
The only thing we worried about was what the guilty ones always call “collateral damage.” In other words, the accidental killing of innocents to kill your target. The guilty do it all the time, it’s one sign of their guilt, but we don
’t. It’s a principle. Kali is very fair and very meticulous. If to kill a hundred guilty you had to kill one innocent, no. It’s against the law.
So it was often very tricky. One time I had to crawl in through air ducts. One intake had been left unmonitored, a mistake. All in the dark, but the building’s plan was clear in my mind. I got to the intake not monitored. Broke into it and crawled and crawled. Left right, up down. I had with me a plastic knife, pliers, and screwdriver. So. Unscrew the screws holding the master bedroom’s ceiling vent screen in place, from above using the pliers, in silence and moving very slowly. Took two hours. Then get to feet, making sure feet have not gone to sleep, confirm location of guilty one by night vision goggles and micro-periscope looking through vent slots. This one was a weapons manufacturer. There are a lot of them, but the ones at the top, who own majority shares, they aren’t so many. Several hundred identified at this point. All death dealers. Mass murderers for cash. You may know some.
Leap in the air, come down on the vent, crash down into room right on bed, trailing rope ladder. Stab the guilty one in the torso quickly four times, then the neck, several times. Night vision goggles make blood look black. Guilty one dead for sure.
Back up rope ladder, ignoring the other person also in bed, now on floor, shocked into immobility, or perhaps trying to avoid attention. Good idea. Back through air ducts, crawling fast. Out onto compound wall, up to roof, drone waiting to carry me up and away like packaged goods.
The Ministry for the Future Page 13
