The Ministry for the Future

and capping personal annual income at ten times that minimum amount, as they had done in many countries, had immediately crushed Gini figures down. The EU had led the way, the US and China had followed, and then everywhere else had begun to leak their most educated young people to these flatter countries, until the countries losing educated people also instituted it. Guaranteed jobs, yes, but also universal basic services, and supported social reproduction, along with infrastructure and housing construction projects, had completed the rise out of poverty at the low end of the world income scale. Capping individual income and wealth had flattened the top of the scale. Of course many rich people had attempted to abscond to a safe haven with their riches, but currency controls, and the fact that all money was now blockchained and tracked, meant that all the old havens and shelters were being rooted out and eliminated. Money was now simply a number in the global banking system, so even if one shifted money into property, that property got listed, with an asset price on it, and then got taxed accordingly, and often therefore sold to avoid property taxes that had gone sharply progressive. Some land was surrendered in order to keep the owners solvent in the new tax regimes, which meant there was now more and more public land, defined as such and used as a commons. State-owned enterprises using a lot of big data and Red Plenty algorithms became less lumbering than they had been, avoiding the old bad inefficiencies, while keeping the good inefficiencies in ways that were important for resilience and justice.

A whole new economics was springing up to describe and analyze these new developments, and inevitably this new kind of economics included a lot of new measuring systems, because economics was above a system of quantified ethics and political power that depended on measurement. So now people were using older instruments like the Inclusive Prosperity Index, the Genuine Progress Indicator, the UN’s Human Development Index Inequality Adjusted, and the Global Footprint Index. And they were also making up many new ones as well. All these new indexes for economic health were often now amalgamated to a new comprehensive index of indexes, called the Biosphere and Civilization Health Meta-Index. BCHMI.

The carbon coin had played its part in all of this. For a while, in its earliest days, it had looked like the creation of carbon coins would simply make the rich richer, as some of the largest fossil carbon companies declared their intention to sequester the carbon they owned, and took the corresponding pay-out in carbon coins, and then traded most of those coins for US dollars and other currencies, and then made investments in other capital assets, in particular property, thus becoming richer than ever— as if all their future profits were going to be paid to them at once, at a hundred cents on the dollar, even though their assets were now stranded as toxic to the biosphere and thus to human beings.

But the central banks had worked out a scheme to deal with this. The fossil fuel companies were being paid, yes, and even at par, if that meant one carbon coin per ton of carbon sequestered, as certified by the Ministry for the Future’s certification teams, just like any other entity doing the same sequestration. But pay-outs above a certain amount were being amortized over time, and would be paid out, when the time came, at zero interest; zero interest, but not negative interest; and with guarantees, thus becoming a kind of bond. And then the companies were required by law and international treaty to do carbon-negative work with the initial use of the carbon coins they were given, in order to keep qualifying for their pay-outs, because if they merely invested in other biosphere-destroying production, especially carbon-burning production, then they wouldn’t be sequestering carbon at all in the larger scheme of things. The upshot of these policy implementation decisions was that the oil companies and petro-states were being paid in proportion to their stranded assets, but over time, and only for doing carbon-negative work, as defined and measured by the Paris Agreement standards and certification teams. The young staffs of the central banks were all quite proud of this arrangement, which they had concocted over the years in an effort save the carbon coin, and then watched as their bosses approved and implemented it. Those staff reunion parties were raucous to the point of almost scandalizing staid old Zurich.

What the success of the carbon coin meant was a huge amount of money was now going to landscape restoration, regenerative ag, reforestation, biochar and kelp beds, direct air capture and storage, and all the rest of the efforts described elsewhere in the hall. A banner over one of the rooms put it this way:

“Revolution comes; not the expected one, but another, always another.”

The people under the banner who had put it up told Mary it was a phrase from one Mario Praz, which had been quoted by a John P. Farrell, who had then been quoted by a Christopher Palmer. They were pleased with it, these Swiss staffers.

The second day, their final day, devoted to “outstanding problems,” was a sobering reminder that they were still in the thick of it. And yet, given what had been revealed and celebrated the day before, there was a sense in the hall that these problems, as wicked as they were, were impediments to a general movement, to history itself, and thus susceptible to being overwhelmed, or solved piecemeal, or worked around, or put off to a later time when even more momentum would be available for deployment against them.

That day’s banner over the entryway proclaimed the motto:

“Overcome difficulties by multiplying them.”

This the staffers attributed to Walter Benjamin, who apparently when he wrote it had added that this was “an old dialectical maxim,” though no one could find it anywhere earlier in the relevant literatures.