The Ministry for the Future

“Yes. And of the same empire too. It’s funny how England never seemed to pay too much of a price for its crimes.” “No one does. You pay for being the victim, not the criminal.”

These calculators had existed from the start of the century or before, but as far as Frank could tell, no one used them. It was like avoiding the scale when you

“No one is safe until all are secure”

Having debunked the tragedy of the commons, they now were trying to direct our attention to what they called the tragedy of the time horizon. Meaning we can’t imagine the suffering of the people of the future, so nothing much gets done on their behalf. What we do now creates damage that hits decades later, so we don’t charge ourselves for it, and t

wasn’t a very big fraction, but then again there were poisons that worked in the parts-per-billion range, so it wasn’t entirely unprecedented for such a small agent to change things.

monocausotaxophilia, the love of single ideas that explain everything, one of humanity’s most common cognitive

Jevons Paradox proposes that increases in efficiency in the use of a resource lead to an overall increase in the use of that resource, not a decrease.

That this debate was a clear sign that macroeconomics as a field was ideological to the point of astrology was often asserted by people in all the other social sciences, but economists were still very skilled at ignoring outside criticisms of their field, and now they forged on contradicting themselves as confidently as ever.

Mary regarded them, thinking it through. Because money ruled the world, these people ruled the world. They were the world’s rulers, in some very real sense. Bankers. Non-democratic, answerable to no one. The technocratic elite at its most elite: financiers. Mary thought of her group back in Zurich. It was composed of experts in the various fields i