Forty Minutes

Working paper 1 — Output, all sectors, Fairweather settlement, year 61

By every measure the Bureau kept, Fairweather was dying. Twenty-two years without measured growth. Services inflation compounding at nine per cent, so that an hour of nursing now cost what a week of it had cost at the founding. Gross settlement product per head: below the intervention threshold for the third consecutive year, which under the Concord meant administration — an appointed board, an austerity schedule, the charter suspended until the numbers came right.

The numbers themselves arrived at the Bureau automatically, as numbers did from everywhere. Marit Solheim was sent because the statute required a signature, and the statute required the signature to belong to a person who had physically attended the settlement under assessment. She had asked once, early in her career, why that clause survived every revision. Her director had said: because the member states won’t let a settlement be dissolved by telemetry. Somebody has to have stood in it.

So she stood in it. Fairweather occupied the floor of a lava tube under the Marius Hills, a kilometre of pressurised twilight with terraced gardens up both walls and nine thousand people who, according to her briefing, produced almost nothing.

The settlement’s statistician met her at the lift. Daniel Obuya, sixty-ish, in a jumper that had been mended at both elbows with visible, deliberate stitches.

“You’ll want the plant first,” he said. “Everyone wants the plant first.”

Working paper 2 — Fabrication, agriculture, power: value added, ₡0

The plant was four storeys of quiet at the tube’s north end. Fusion bottle, print halls, the wet stacks where the settlement’s food grew in racked kilometres. It had been designed in the last decade of the founding generation and it maintained itself, which was the fashionable engineering of that decade; it even mined its own feedstock from the tube wall, a metre a year.

“Headcount?” Marit asked, though she knew.

“Nobody’s worked here in thirty years. There’s a woman, Priya, who walks through on Thursdays because she likes the sound. We did ask her if she’d accept a wage, for the accounts. She said it would spoil the walk.”

Here was the arithmetic she had come to verify, and it verified. Output was to be valued at market price, and nothing here had a price: food, power, fabrication, housing, all of it drawn freely, none of it sold. Failing a market price, the manual fell back to cost of production — wages plus materials plus capital consumption — and the wages were zero, the materials were the wall, and the machines repaired themselves. The largest physical economy she had ever walked through entered the accounts at nothing. It was not an error. She checked the metering for two days, and it was not an error. Fairweather’s entire measured product was its people doing things to one another for pay, and that product was small, and the price of it was climbing like a fever chart.

Working paper 3 — Education: cost per pupil-year, index 100 → 4,100

“At the founding we schooled two hundred children per teacher,” Daniel said. They were standing at the back of a classroom cut into the tube wall, twelve children and a woman with an abacus of all things, its beads worn pale. “Adaptive tutors, one supervising adult. Cheapest education in the system, and genuinely good — I had it, I can’t complain. Then the plant came up to capacity, and nobody needed to work, and the first thing this place voted to spend itself on was smaller classes. Then smaller ones. We’re at twelve now. The tutors are still in the archive if anyone wants them. Nobody’s wanted them in twenty years.”

“Your cost per pupil is forty-one times the founding figure.”

“Yes,” he said, with what she slowly recognised as pride. “Teaching’s the same work it always was. That’s the whole trouble with it. A tutor programme improves every year. A woman with twelve children improves nothing — she was at the frontier of the technology the day the technology was invented, four thousand years ago.” He nodded at the teacher, who was letting a boy get a long division catastrophically wrong, on purpose, all the way to the end. “We got rich, so we bought the expensive version. The expensive version is a person.”

In the corridor he showed her the sector accounts on his slate, and they were immaculate, and they described a catastrophe: productivity in education falling by design, year on year, as far back as the series ran.

Working paper 4 — Health and care: cost per death, uncapped

The hospice was the dearest institution in the settlement and did the least, by throughput. One nurse to one patient, hours at a stretch, and most of the hours were nothing a metric could see: sitting, listening to a man named Aurelio explain the same regatta from his boyhood four times, holding a cup.

“The cheapest death in the system is fully automated,” Daniel said quietly, in the corridor. “Monitored, medicated, notified. Ninety minutes of skilled labour, most of it after. I’ve seen the benchmark — your Bureau publishes it. Ours are the most expensive deaths ever recorded, and the price is still rising, because the only input is somebody’s afternoon and afternoons don’t improve.”

Marit wrote: No inefficiency found. The hours are the product. Then she crossed it out, because the second sentence was not a finding, and wrote the schedule reference instead.

Working paper 5 — Recreation and culture

On her last evening they went to a concert, because Daniel insisted the concert was the exhibit. Four players, two violins, viola, cello, in a bay of the tube where the gardens were let to go wild. Schubert. Forty minutes.

“There was an economist,” Daniel said afterwards, while the players packed up their own chairs, “twentieth century, Baumol, who noticed that a string quartet takes the same four people the same forty minutes it took when it was written, and it always will. No productivity growth in two hundred years — in ever. In any normal economy that’s a disease, that’s his word for it, because the quartet has to hire its players out of the same wage pool as the factories, and the factories improve every year, so the quartet gets relatively dearer every year, forever. Concert halls die of it. Schools and hospitals sicken with it.”

“And here?”

“Here we cured the factories. Cured them completely — you’ve seen, they cost nothing at all. So everything that’s left in the accounts is the disease.” He handed her his slate a last time: the whole measured economy of Fairweather, nine thousand souls, sorted by line. Teaching. Nursing. Cooking done by hand for people who could have printed it. Adjudication. Barbering. Sitting with Aurelio. “Stagnation and inflation, top to bottom, exactly like your flag says. Except look at it. Look at what the lines are.”

Determination

The manual allowed her one discretion, and she spent the night of the crossing home reading it again. Non-market output could, where a near equivalent traded elsewhere, be imputed at the equivalent’s market price — the same convention that put a rent on every owner-occupied house on Earth. Priced at import parity, the plant’s unmetered torrent of food and power and fabricated goods made Fairweather’s product per head the highest the Bureau had ever recorded, for any settlement, in any year. Without the imputation it was the lowest. The same kilometre of twilight, the same year, the poorest place in the system or the richest, on the application of one paragraph.

She applied the paragraph. Her justification ran to a single sentence, because long justifications invited review, and she did not intend this one to be reviewed: Goods sector valued at import parity per §9.4; no intervention warranted. It was lawful, it was arguable, and it was, she was aware, not really the truth. The truth was that the Bureau’s instruments measured scarcity, and had reported, accurately, that nothing in Fairweather was scarce any more except the people, who were busy spending one another as fast as the years allowed. There was no line for that. She had looked.

Her own timesheet she filed last. Sixty-one hours at Bureau assessment scale, invoiced to the settlement under the Concord as costs of certification — priced hours, the genuine article, scarce and unimprovable, performed in person as the statute required. In Fairweather’s accounts for year sixty-one it stood as the largest single import of the year, and the only one with a price.

She billed the hours. Somebody had to be the price.