Red Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [149]
“Sounds about right to me,” John joked, but Vlad and Marina ignored him.
“Anyway that’s a large part of what economics is— people arbitrarily, or as a matter of taste, assigning numerical values to non-numerical things. And then pretending that they haven’t just made the numbers up, which they have. Economics is like astrology in that sense, except that economics serves to justify the current power structure, and so it has a lot of fervent believers among the powerful.”
“Better just to concentrate on what we’re doing here,” Marina put in. “The basic equation is simple, efficiency merely equals the calories you put out, divided by the calories you take in, times one hundred to put it in the form of a percentage. In the classic sense of passing along calories to one’s predator, ten percent was average, and twenty percent doing really well. Most predators at the tops of food chains did more like five percent.”
“This is why tigers have ranges of hundreds of square kilometers,” Vlad said. “Robber barons are not really very efficient.”
“So tigers don’t have predators not because they’re so tough, but because it’s not worth the effort,” John said.
“Exactly!”
“The problem is in calculating the values,” Marina said. “We have had to simply assign certain calorie-equivalent numerical values to all kinds of activities, and then go on from there.”
“But we were talking about economics?” John said.
“But this is economics, don’t you see, this is our eco-economics! Everyone should make their living, so to speak, based on a calculation of their real contribution to the human ecology. Everyone can increase their ecological efficiency by efforts to reduce how many kilocalories they use— this is the old Southern argument against the energy consumption of the Northern industrial nations. There was a real ecologic basis to that objection, because no matter how much the industrial nations produced, in the larger equation they could not be as efficient as the South.”
“They were predators on the South,” John said.
“Yes, and they will become predators on us too, if we let them. And like all predators their efficiency is low. But here, you see— in this theoretical state of independence that you speak of—” she grinned at John’s look of consternation—”you do, you have to admit that that is ultimately what you talk about all the time, John— well, there it should be the law that people are rewarded in proportion to their contribution to the system.”
Dmitri, coming in the lab, said, “From each according to his capacities, to each according to his needs!”
“No, that’s not the same,” Vlad said. “What it means is, You get what you pay for!”
“But that’s already true,” John said. “How is this different from the economics that already exists?”
They all scoffed at once, Marina most persistently: “.
.
. there’s all kinds of phantom work! Unreal values assigned to most of the jobs on Earth! The entire transnational executive class does nothing a computer couldn’t do, and there are whole categories of parasitical jobs that add nothing to the system by an ecologic accounting. Advertising, stock brokerage, the whole apparatus for making money only from the manipulation of money— that is not only wasteful but corrupting, as all meaningful money values get distorted in such manipulation.” She waved a hand in disgust.
“Well,” Vlad said, “we can say that their efficiency is very low, and that they predate on the system without having any predators, so that they are either the top of the chain or parasitical, depending on how you define it. Advertising, money brokering, some types of manipulation of the law, some politics. . . .”
“But all of these are