The Ministry for the Future

My 19 highlights

• Anyway people were fighting. Although not just for the good, but also against the good— fighting tooth and claw to forestall their efforts, to hamstring them. Thus in effect there were people trying to kill every living thing on Earth, in some awful genocidal murder-suicide. Here they were, walking a tightrope over the abyss, and these fuckers were jumping all over the balancing pole they were holding, doing their best to cast them all down to disaster and death.

• I wanted the world to suffer like we had.

• That act of climate justice along with newly scheduled payments to the Brazilian federal government meant a few trillion more carbon coins were added to the general circulation, and now mainstream economists everywhere were fearful that this sudden flood of new currency was going to cause massive deflation. Or perhaps inflation: macroeconomics was no longer so very clear on the ultimate effects of quantitative easing, given that the evidence from the past half century could be interpreted either way. 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.

• The current rate of extinctions compared to the geological norm is now several thousandfold faster, making this the sixth great mass extinction event in Earth’s history, and thus the start of the Anthropocene in its clearest demarcation, which is to say, we are in a biosphere catastrophe that will be obvious in the fossil record for as long as the Earth lasts.

• “The rentier class.” Keynes meant by this the people who made money simply by owning something that others needed, and charging for the use of it: this is rent in its economic meaning. Rent goes to people who are not creators of value, but predators on the creation and exchange of value.

• 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.

• Then a bad time came in the kitchens. Less food every week, and the water tasted of iron and made people sick. Finally one of the dorms got up one morning and sat down outside the kitchens. Feed us right or we won’t work, they chanted together in a chant.

• At lunch he sat with us and ate. Sometimes at meals he sat there looking at us with his eyes moving back and forth, side to side, as if he was tracking a bird or having a thought.

• The space for these meals was some kind of civic hall, as far as he could tell, near the first bridge over the Limmat downstream from the Hauptbahnhof bridge. There were mini parks at both ends of this bridge, to give Zurchers the no doubt satisfying spectacle of their tamed river flowing under them, through the gateway created by one of their massively over-engineered bridges. It was indeed pretty mesmerizing. Frank watched for a long time as the water purled over a drop downstream from the bridge, like some kind of cake batter flowing in a giant mixer.

• Old European joke: in heaven the cooks are French, the police British, the engineers German, the lovers Italian, while in hell the cooks are British, the police German, the engineers Italian. The Swiss are in the joke somehow too, but I forget as what. Maybe the same job in both heaven and hell? Schedulers? Bankers? Security force? I can’t remember. Maybe it’s a Swiss joke.

• her head she staged conversations with him that were completely unlike what really happened when they were together

• In essence, as she had been saying, creating a way to invest in survival, to go long on civilization, as opposed to the many ingenious ways that finance had found to short civilization, thus in the process shifting most of the surplus value created in the last four decades to the richest two percent of the population, making those few so rich that they could imagine surviving the crash of civilization, they and their descendants living on into some poorly imagined gated-community post-apocalypse in which servants and food and fuel and games would still be available to them.

• Although still, in the months that followed, people’s biases emerged. It was the South where it had happened. It was mostly poor people, in particular poor people of color. It couldn’t happen in the North. It couldn’t happen to prosperous white people. And so on. Arizona’s part in it was forgotten, except in Arizona. This was yet another manifestation of racism and contempt for the South, yes, but also of a universal cognitive disability, in that people had a very hard time imagining that catastrophe could happen to them, until it did. So until the climate was actually killing them, people had a tendency to deny it could happen. To others, yes; to them, no. This was a cognitive error that, like most cognitive errors, kept happening even when you knew of its existence and prevalence.

• everywhere. Not that Jacob Salzman was being looked for, apparently. Someone had posted a map of all the cameras in the city, supposedly, but there were newer cameras that were much smaller than the previous ones. The bigger ones were there to remind you that you were under surveillance, whereas the smaller ones were there to surveil

• 1694: Charles II and William III had been borrowing money from private banks and not paying them back, or else levying taxes on all kinds of activities to be able to afford to make their debt payments, and thus making life more expensive for everyone, except for the royals involved, who were less and less liable for their profligate spending. So a Scottish merchant, William Patterson, proposed that 1,268 creditors lend the English king 1.2 million pounds for a guaranteed rate of interest of eight percent, and once William III signed off on that, a big piece of the system of the current world fell into place. The capitalizing of state power now had its roots in private wealth; thus the rich and the state became co-dependents, two aspects of the same power structure.

• The paradox is visible in the history of technological improvements of all kinds. Better car miles per gallon, more miles driven. Faster computer times, more time spent on computers.

• A tax on burning fossil carbon, which could be called not a tax but rather paying the true cost, could be set progressively, or offset by feebates, to avoid harming the poorest who burn less carbon but also need to burn what they burn to live. A fossil carbon tax set high enough would create a strong incentive to quit burning it. It could be set quite high, and on a schedule to go even higher over time, which would increase the incentive to quit burning it. Tax rates on the largest uses could be made prohibitive, in the sense of blocking all chance of profits being made from any derivative effects of these burns.

• While discussing inequality, it should be noted that the Gini coefficient for the whole world’s population is higher than for any individual country’s, basically because there are so many more poor people in the world than there are rich ones, so that cumulatively, globally, the number rises to around 0.7.

• Demonstrations are parties. People party and then go home. Nothing changes.