The Ministry for the Future

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  And it was despite all a sobering sight to see how the poorest people on Earth still lived. Time travel to the twelfth century, for sure. That we ourselves had no bathrooms and were a bit hungry no doubt added to the effect of this footage, even when it was completely obvious that this was why they were doing it to us, the intended point of their pointless exercise, some kind of sick aversion therapy.

  Often statistics appeared on the big screen; yes, PowerPoint shows, a true punishment. That a tenth of one percent of the human population owned half humanity’s wealth— that was us, yay! That half the human population alive at that moment had no assets except their own potential labor power, which was much weakened by poor health and education, that was definitely too bad. But blaming this on capitalism was wrong, we told these non-listening boring people; there would be eight billion poor people if it weren’t for capitalism! But whatever. The figures kept coming, graph after graph, repeated in ways that were not even close to compelling. Bored, sleepy, hypnotized, we tried to figure out which ideological or ethnic group had assembled such a stew. And the soundtrack! Sad music, jaunty music; horribly unforgettable earworms destined to stick in your head forever; tragically depressing music, like dirges played at one-third their intended speed; and so on.

  By now the stresses of living rough and watching PowerPoint were getting to a lot of us, we were about to go into full Lord of the Flies mode. I encouraged people to suck up and deal, to enjoy it as a kind of vacation, it was still glamping I told them, who cares about this shit? But turns out quite a lot of them did care.

  These people are communists, they declared loudly. So what, I said. We were in a fucking commie glamping reeducation camp, it was going to be a story we could tell in the bars for years to come.

  The finale to all the propaganda was a long lecture telling us that the current world order was only working for the elites, and even for us it wouldn’t work for long. We were simply strip-mining the lifeworld, as one Germanic voice from the screen put it, sounding like Werner Herzog to a lot of us, and I have no doubt he could have been involved, and that in German words like lifeworld would be real words already. Those of us with some German had fun making more examples of this Herzogian English, backtranslating so to speak, Ich bin zu herzgerschrocken! Ich bin zu rechtsmüde! Ich habe grossen Flughafenverspätungsschmerz! which last, for the unGermanic among us, was explained to mean “big airport delay sadness,” a word every modern language should definitely have.

  An hour of film was then devoted to young people with wealthy parents. Earnestly apologetic or brashly arrogant, these made a sad fucking crew. It had to be a skewed sample, they had selected for awfulness no doubt about it, and the crowd around me murmured objections, My kids aren’t like that, no way. Although as it went on and on, all kinds of pathetic angry supercilious kids, the room got quieter, and actually it became clear somehow that some of the whining faces onscreen had an actual parent right there in the room. And the graphed statistics charting these rich kids were disheartening as well. If the various kinds of anti-depressants used by them were aggregated, it could be made to look like well over one hundred percent of them were on anti-depressants. Which though clearly artifactual was indeed depressing.

  Another chart graphed individual happiness in relation to personal wealth, and as so often that week, and in life generally, it was another damn bell curve. This one showed that poverty made for unhappiness, duh, then people got quickly happier once adequacy was reached; then, at a high middle class income, the very income that scientists usually demanded for themselves— having studied their own graphs maybe, the guy next to me muttered darkly, as if to imply they were rigging either their study or the system of compensation, or both— you got the highest happiness; then, as wealth rose, happiness decreased— not to the level of the poorest people, but far below the happiness of the middle peak. That middle income was the Goldilocks zone, the happy median ha ha, or so the PowerPointers claimed, but we shook our heads knowingly. Statistics can “prove” anything, but they could never beat the obvious truth that more is better. The soundtrack here toggled between “All You Need Is Love” and “Can’t Buy Me Love,” to add ridiculous Beatles wisdom to this part of the show.

  It was actually getting pretty annoying at this point. How could it go on for so long? Where were the fucking Swiss police? Were they in on this? Was this a Swiss plot, like the Red Cross or something?

  You are one of the Davos Hostages, a voice said at the end of this income comparison film. You will have been a participant at the Captured Davos. What will you do with that? We will be interested to watch you live the rest of your lives.

  With that the incarceration ended. The drones in the airspace overhead flew away, our helmeted guards were suddenly nowhere to be seen.

  We cheered when we realized this, and told each other that our indoctrination had been a complete failure and a sad example of bankrupt leftist notions that couldn’t get purchase in the great marketplace of ideas. It had been like getting flown in a time machine back to 1917 or 1848 or 1793, though few of us knew why these years in particular were named by those with history degrees. 1848?

  The real Swiss police finally appeared, to loud boos. Interpol was ordered to find the perpetrators, and the Swiss government came in for huge amounts of criticism, not to mention lawsuits for personal damages and emotional distress. They did their best to defend themselves from all this, saying it had been an unprecedented new form of hostage taking, which could not be defended against in advance of knowing it could exist. A new thing! And none of us had died, nor even been hurt much, except in our feelings. So much criticism of our lifeway! But we all had a lot of practice ignoring that kind of yelling, the dogs bark the caravan moves on, and indeed we all caravanned away as fast as we could. Back home we found ourselves minor celebrities, and opportunities to tell our story would last forever. Some of us took that opportunity, others slipped back into comfortable anonymity. I myself decided to decompress in Tahiti.

  So, effect of this event on the real world: zero! So fuck you!

  40

  Jevons Paradox proposes that increases in efficiency in the use of a resource lead to an overall increase in the use of that resource, not a decrease. William Stanley Jevons, writing in 1865, was referring to the history of the use of coal; once the Watt engine was introduced, which greatly increased the efficiency of coal burning as energy creation, the use of coal grew far beyond the initial reduction in the amount needed for the activity that existed before the time of the improvement.

  The rebound effect of this paradox can be mitigated only by adding other factors to the uptake of the more efficient method, such as requirements for reinvestment, taxes, and regulations. So they say in economics texts.

  The paradox is visible in the history of technological improvements of all kinds. Better car miles per gallon, more miles driven. Faster computer times, more time spent on computers. And so on ad infinitum. At this point it is naïve to expect that technological improvements alone will slow the impacts of growth and reduce the burden on the biosphere. And yet many still exhibit this naiveté.

  Associated with this lacuna in current thought, perhaps a generalization of its particular focus, is the assumption that efficiency is always good. Of course efficiency as a measure has been constructed to describe outcomes considered in advance to be good, so it’s almost a tautology, but the two can still be destranded, as they are not quite the same. Examination of the historical record, and simple exercises in reductio ad absurdum like Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal,” should make it obvious that efficiency can become a bad thing for humans. Jevons Paradox applies here too, but economics has normally not been flexible enough to take on this obvious truth, and it is very common to see writing in economics refer to efficiency as good by definition, and inefficient as simply a synonym for bad or poorly done. But the evidence shows that there is good efficiency and bad efficiency, good inefficiency and bad inefficiency. Examples of all fou
r can easily be provided, though here we leave this as an exercise for the reader, with just these sample pointers to stimulate reflection: preventative health care saves enormous amounts in medical costs later, and is a good efficiency. Eating your extra children (this is Swift’s character’s “modest proposal”) would be a bad efficiency. Any harm to people for profit is likewise bad, no matter how efficient. Using an over-sized vehicle to get from point A to point B is a bad inefficiency, and there are many more like it; but oxbows in a river, defining a large flood plain, is a good inefficiency. On and on it goes like this; all four categories need further consideration if the analysis of the larger situation is to be helpful.

  The orienting principle that could guide all such thinking is often left out, but surely it should be included and made explicit: we should be doing everything needed to avoid a mass extinction event. This suggests a general operating principle similar to the Leopoldian land ethic, often summarized as “what’s good is what’s good for the land.” In our current situation, the phrase can be usefully reworded as “what’s good is what’s good for the biosphere.” In light of that principle, many efficiencies are quickly seen to be profoundly destructive, and many inefficiencies can now be understood as unintentionally salvational. Robustness and resilience are in general inefficient; but they are robust, they are resilient. And we need that by design.

  The whole field and discipline of economics, by which we plan and justify what we do as a society, is simply riddled with absences, contradictions, logical flaws, and most important of all, false axioms and false goals. We must fix that if we can. It would require going deep and restructuring that entire field of thought. If economics is a method for optimizing various objective functions subject to constraints, then the focus of change would need to look again at those “objective functions.” Not profit, but biosphere health, should be the function solved for; and this would change many things. It means moving the inquiry from economics to political economy, but that would be the necessary step to get the economics right. Why do we do things? What do we want? What would be fair? How can we best arrange our lives together on this planet?

  Our current economics has not yet answered any of these questions. But why should it? Do you ask your calculator what to do with your life? No. You have to figure that out for yourself.

  41

  In the twelfth year of continuous drought our city ran out of water. Of course we had been warned it would happen, but even in droughts some rain occasionally falls, and with conservation and fallowing of agriculture and construction of new reservoirs, and pipelines to distant watersheds, and digging of deeper wells and all the rest of those efforts, we had always squeaked through. And that in itself made us think it would keep on going that way. But one September there was an earthquake, not a very strong one, but apparently enough to shift something in the aquifer below us, and very quickly all the wells went dry; and the reservoirs were already dry; and the neighboring watersheds connected to us by pipeline were dry. Nothing came out of the taps. September 11, 2034.

  Our city is home to about a million people. About a third of those had moved to town in the last decade, and were living in cardboard shacks in the hilly districts on the west side; this was partly another result of the drought. They were already living without running water, buying it in hundred-liter barrels or just cans and jugs. The rest of us were in houses and used to water coming out of the tap, of course. So on this day there was no question that the housed residents were most distressed by the change; for the poor in the hills it wasn’t a change, except in this sense: there was no longer any water to buy either.

  In our part of the world you can only live a couple of days without water. I suppose that’s true everywhere. And this cessation of water, despite all the warnings and preparations, was sudden. Taps running, perhaps weakly, but running; then on September 11, not.

  Panic, of course. Hoarding, for sure— if one could do it! Many of us had already filled our bathtubs, but that wasn’t going to last long. A rush to the city’s river, but it was still dry, in fact drier than ever. And then, no other choice, none at all: a rush to the public buildings. To the football stadium, the government house, and places like that. We needed a solution.

  In from the coast came trucks with water from the desalination plants. Also a convoy appeared from inland; these vehicles included water trucks, also mobile machines that could suck water from the air, even dry air like ours. Humidity of ten percent feels dry as bone on the skin, but that air still has a lot of water in it. Luckily for us.

  It had to be done in an orderly way. That was clear to everyone. You could fight your way to the front of the line, but to what effect? There was nothing there to grab; whatever water there was in the city was guarded by the military. The army and police were out in force. They directed people to stadiums and indoor assembly places like gymnasiums and libraries, and assembly halls of all kinds, and ordered us to get into lines, and water was brought to these places in heavily guarded trucks, and there was nothing to do then but wait your turn with your containers, and receive your allotted amount and then start conserving it.

  Everything relied on the whole system working. If it didn’t we would die, one way or the other, from thirst or from fighting each other. This was all completely clear to everyone but the crazies among us. There are always such people, but in this case they were outnumbered a hundred to one at least, and subdued by the police if they made trouble. For the rest of us, it came down to this: we had to trust our society to work well enough to save us. As it had never worked very well before, this was a big leap of faith, for sure. No one was confident. But it was the system or death. So we congregated in the places announced over the radio and online and on the streets themselves, and waited our turn.

  Water kept coming into the city on trucks, or was dragged out of the air by the machines. The initial allotments were ridiculously small. We had enough to drink, but not enough to cook with. Quickly we learned to drink any water we did use for cooking, treating it as a soup. Conservation was taken to ridiculous levels; many bought filters said to clarify urine back to potable water. Sure, why not; we bought some too. But other methods of conservation were a bit more practical. Those filters don’t last very long.

  It was sobering in all this to see how many we were. You congregate the whole population into just a few places, you see how many you are. And all of them strangers. In a city of a million you know something like, what, a hundred people? And maybe five hundred faces, at most a thousand. So you know at most one person in a thousand. Walk into a full football stadium, where you all have come to file through the line with your water jugs in hand or on dollies, water being so amazingly heavy— and you see that everyone there is a stranger. You are alone in a city of strangers. That’s every day of your life! We saw that undeniably, right there with our own eyes. Alone in the city. Just a few friends, a family of sorts, these friends make, but so few, and them all lost in the larger crowd, doing business elsewhere. Well, people hung together with those they knew, sure, to go get water. Possibly to protect each other from the crazies, if someone lost it or whatever. But that seldom happened. We were so afraid that we behaved well, that was how bad it was. Mostly we went with friends just for the company. Because it was very strange to see with your own eyes that you live among strangers. Even though every night of your life, when you go to a restaurant and don’t see anyone you know, that’s the same thing— those are strangers.

  But they are your fellow citizens! This is what makes it less than desolating— your fellow citizens are a real thing, a real feeling.

  Seeing this, my friend Charlotte pointed something out to me one day as we stood in line waiting for a refill, feeling unwashed and parched and apprehensive, Charlotte’s usual cynical sardonic attitude now almost jaunty, almost amused— she gestured at the line in front of us and said, Remember what Margaret Thatcher said? There is no such thing as society!

  We laughed out loud. For a w
hile we couldn’t stop laughing. Fuck Margaret Thatcher, I said when I could catch my breath. And I say it again now: fuck Margaret Thatcher, and fuck every idiot who thinks that way. I can take them all to a place where they will eat those words or die of thirst. Because when the taps run dry, society becomes very real. A smelly mass of unwashed anxious citizens, no doubt about it. But a society for sure. It’s a life or death thing, society, and I think people mainly do recognize that, and the people who deny it are stupid fuckers, I say this unequivocally. Ignorant fools. That kind of stupidity should be put in jail.

  Then on the twenty-third day of our crisis, on October 4, it rained. Not just the ambivalent sea mist we often get in the fall, but a real storm, out of nowhere. How we collected that rainwater! Individually and civicly, the rain fell on our heads and in our containers, and I don’t think a single drop of it made it downstream in our little river out of the city limits. We caught it all. And we danced, yes, of course. It was carnival for sure. Even though we knew it wasn’t the total solution, not even close, as the drought was forecast to continue, and we still didn’t have a good plan— nevertheless, we danced in the rain.

  42

  Asked Mary for a meeting with her and Dick Bosworth, to go over some of the economic plans the software team was developing. She cleared an hour at the end of a Friday and meeting convened in her seminar room.