David Gerrold - A Matter for Men

His eyes sparkled as he spoke; he was very much enjoying himself. I edged into the crowd and found a place to stand. One of the women at his feet was saying, "But I don't see how it's possible to inflate a labor economy, Professor. . . . I mean, I thought that everything was fixed. "

"It's really quite simple," Fromkin said. "Just devalue your counters."

"But that's what I mean. I thought the point of the whole thing was to create an economy that couldn't be devalued."

"Sure. But-oh, hell, it requires too much explanation. Wait a minute, let me see if I can boil it down. Look, the theory of money is that it's a tool to allow a social organism to manipulate its energy-that is, money units are the corpuscles of the cultural bloodstream; it has to flow for the system to be able to feed itself. You like that, huh? What we think of as money is really only counters, a way of keeping score which organ in the social body-that means you-is presently using or controlling this piece of energy. It's when we start thinking that the counter is valuable that we confuse ourselves. It's not-it's only the symbol."

"I could use a few of those symbols," one wag remarked.

Fromkin looked at him with withering gentleness. "So create some," he said. Suddenly, I knew who he reminded me of-Whitlaw!

"I'd love to. How?" said the wag.

"Easy. Create value-for others. The truth is that you can only measure your wealth by the amount of difference you make in the world. That is, how much do you contribute to the people around you? And to how many people do you contribute?"

"Huh?" The wag had stopped being funny. Now he was honestly curious.

"All right, stick with me. The physical universe uses heat to keep score. Actually, it's motion, but on the molecular level we experience it as heat. Just know that it's the only way one object ever affects another, so it's the only way to measure how big a difference an object really makes. We measure heat in BTUs. British Thermal Units. Calories. We want our money to be an accurate measure, so we use the same system as the physical universe: ergo, we have the KC standard, the kilocalorie."

A chubby woman in a bright-flowered dress giggled nervously. "I used to think we were spending pieces of fat. I thought I'd be rich." Fromkin acknowledged her attempt at humor with a noncommittal smile, and she gushed happily.

The man next to her asked, "How much is a pound of flesh these days?"

"Um, let's see-a pound is two-point-two kilograms. . . ."

"It'd be three caseys," I said. "A pound of flesh is three thousand calories." I looked back to Fromkin.

He was ignoring the interruption. He took a final sip from his drink and put it down. Someone immediately moved to refill it, a thin, bony-looking woman with basset-hound eyes.

Fromkin returned his attention to the brunette who had asked the original question. "Still with me? Good. Okay, this is what the casey teaches us about the law of supply and demand. The purchase price of an object is determined by how much of your labor you're willing to trade for it. The difference between the purchase price and its actual value is called profit. Stop wrinkling your nose, my dear; profit is not a dirty word. Profit is a resource. It is a necessary part of the economic process; it's what we call the energy that the organism uses for reinvestment if it is to continue to thrive and produce. This apple, for instance, is the apple tree's profit-the meat of it is used to feed the seeds inside, and that's how an apple tree manufactures another apple tree. So you cannot charge less than an item costs in energy, but you can charge more; in fact, you must. "

"So why does a kilo of Beluga cost more than a kilo of soya?" someone asked. "The soya has more protein."

Fromkin smiled. "Isn't it obvious? As soon as you have one unit less than the number of willing buyers, you have an auction going. The price will rise until enough people drop out and you have only as many buyers as units to sell; it's called `whatever the market will bear.' "

He stood up then and stepped to a nearby buffet table and started loading a plate. But he kept talking. The man was incredible. "Under the labor standard, a nation's wealth is determined by its ability to produce-its gross national product. Cut the population and you cut the wealth of a country. Automatically. But the amount of counters still in circulation remains high. And there's no easy way to cut back the coinage; it can't help but inflate-and even if you could cut back all the excess cash in circulation, it wouldn't be enough. The system is still pegged to its history. Bonds, for instance-a government sells bonds on the promise of paying interest on them. Interest can only be paid when the system is in a growth situation. If there's no growth, then interest is only a promise by the government to continue inflating the economy and further reduce the value of the counters-the money. That's why I oppose letting the government borrow money-under any circumstances. Because it sets a bad precedent. If it can't pay it back, then it has to borrow more, and the inflationary spiral is endless. Let the government go into debt and we're mortgaging our own future incomes. This country-the whole world, in fact-is in an extreme no-growth situation, yet the interest will still be paid on all outstanding bonds. It has to be; it's the law. So ... the more cash in circulation, the less each bill is worth. Thank God we still have the dollar-that's at least backed by paper, and it can't inflate as fast as the casey can under these circumstances-and it'll continue that way for a long time. It was a commodity; someday soon it'll be money again. We're at the beginning of a long recede-"

"Beginning-?" said the brunette. "I thought-"

"Nope." Fromkin was sitting again, eating. He paused to chew and swallow. "You're wrong. That was a population crash. When four and a half billion people die in two years, that's a crash. The U.N. definition of a recede specifies seven percent or more over an eight-month period-but when it's seventy percent, that's a crash. We're just coming out of the crash now; the curve is finally starting to level off. Now we're going into the recede. The real recede. It's the aftershock of the crash. But it's a lot more than that too. Believe it or not, the human race may have been knocked below the threshold of viability. There may not be enough of us left to survive."

"Huh?" That was a newcomer to the group. His posture was military even though he was wearing a dress jacket. He was standing with a plate in one hand and a drink in the other. "Are you serious? Fromkin, I think you're ignoring the fact that the human race has survived a long time-and we've only been above one billion individuals for a little more than a century."

Fromkin looked up. He recognized the man and grinned. "You'd better stick to your spaceships, Colonel Ferris. Someone make room for the colonel here, thank you. You're right about your figures, of course-I saw the same report-but the figures alone don't tell the whole story. You need to know the demographic cross section. Right now, we are not functioning from a stable population of family or tribal groups. The human network is mostly disjointed-we're all individual atoms, swirling in chaos.

"We haven't reformed into molecules-although that process has begun-let alone crystals and lattices. We're still a very long way from the creation and operation of the necessary social organisms that a self-generating society needs to survive-and I'm still only talking about survival; I haven't even touched upon anything beyond that-like celebration."

Ferris looked unhappy. Some of Fromkin's other listeners looked puzzled.

"Okay, let me put that in English for you. We are not a population yet. We are just a mish-mash of people who've been lucky enough-or perhaps I should say unlucky enough-to survive." He looked at Ferris as he said it. "Each of us has his own horror story."