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
