Sixty days and counting - Kim Stanley Robinson [56]
One day when she was visiting with Frank and Edgardo after a task force meeting in the Old Executive Offices, she showed some of what she had found to them. Edgardo happily pored over the relevant pages of the book she had brought along, chuckling at the graphs and charts. “Wait, I want to Xerox this page.” He was the happiest broadcaster of bad news imaginable, and indeed had recently confessed that he was the one who had started the tradition of taping especially bad news to the walls of the copy room called the Department of Unfortunate Statistics over at NSF—a revelation that was no surprise to his two friends.
“See?” Anna said, pointing to the top of the diagram he was looking at now. “It’s a decision tree, designed to map what a consumer does when faced with shortages.”
“A shopping algorithm,” Frank said with a short laugh.
“And have we made these choices?” Edgardo asked.
“You tell me. Shortages start because of excess demand—a disequilibrium which leads to a seller’s market, which creates what Kornai calls suction.”
“As in, this situation sucks,” Edgardo said.
“Yes. So the shelves empty, because people buy when they can. Then the queuing starts. It can be either a physical line in a store, or a waiting list. So for any given item for sale, there are three possibilities. It’s either available immediately, or available after a queue, or not available. That’s the first split in the tree. If it isn’t available at all, then the next choice comes. The shopper either makes a forced substitution, like apples for artichokes, or else searches harder for the original item, or else postpones the purchase until the item is available, which Kornai also calls ‘forced saving’—or else abandons the purchasing intent entirely.”
“I like this term ‘investment tension,’ ” Edgardo said, reading ahead on the page. “When there aren’t enough machines to make what people want. But that’s surely not what we have now.”
“Are you sure?” Frank said, paging through the paper. “What if there’s a shortage of energy?”
“It should work the same,” Anna said. “So see, in a ‘shortage economy’ you get shortages that are general, frequent, intensive, or chronic. The classical socialist systems had all these. Although Kornai points out that in capitalism you have chronic shortages in health care and urban housing. And now we have intensive shortages too, during the blackouts. No matter what the product or service is, you get consumers who have a ‘notional demand,’ which is what they would buy if they could, and then ‘completely adjusted demand,’ which is what they really intend to buy knowing all the constraints, using what he calls ‘expectation theory.’ Between those you have ‘partially adjusted demand,’ where the consumer is in ignorance of what’s possible, or in denial about the situation, and still not completely adjusted. So the move from notional demand to completely adjusted demand is marked by failure, frustration, dire rumors, forced choices, and so on down his list. Finally the adjustment is complete, and the buyer has abandoned certain intentions, and might even forget them if asked. Kornai compares that moment to workers in capitalism who stop looking for work, and so aren’t counted as unemployed.”
“I know some of those,” Frank said. He read aloud, “ ‘A curious state of equilibrium can arise,’ ” and laughed. “So you just give up on your desires! It’s almost Buddhist.”
“I don’t know.” Anna frowned. “ ‘Forced adjustment equilibrium’? That doesn’t sound to me like what the Khembalis are talking about.”
“No. Although they are making a forced adjustment,” Frank mused. “And they would probably agree we are forced to adjust to reality, if we want equilibrium.