Review: The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson

The good

• Terrific opening. Starts off with a grim narrative on the possible effects of climate change. Although it starts the story on a dark note, I found it very gripping.

• Beautiful final few chapters. They are overly optimistic (more on that below), but do a nice job of wrapping up the story.

• Has a few interesting characters in Mary, Frank, Badim, and the Children of Kali.

• Covers some deeply interesting themes and ideas related to climate change, government policy, fiscal policy, and so on. See the quotes below for a few of my favorite.

The not so good

• This book needed better editing. While the opening is very strong, the rest of the book is more mixed. For one thing, it is way too long. Some parts are deeply fascinating, and contribute greatly to the overall story, whereas others are pointless, boring tangents that I often skimmed over. Also, the writing style is all over the place. One chapter is written as a gripping, exciting thriller novel; the next is a technical essay on climate change; then you get a chapter written as a series of meeting notes, in a sort of shorthand style; another chapter is written like a stream of consciousness, and any dialog between characters is not wrapped in quotes; then you get a short chapter that’s written in the form of a children’s puzzle (I am X, but I am not Y, what am I?); then you get a tangental chapter that seems little more than the author’s political opinions (e.g., on relations between China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan), which has nothing to do with the rest of the book; some chapters focus on the main characters, whereas others are from anonymous characters, so you don’t really know who is speaking or thinking; and so on.

• While the characters are fascinating, they don’t all get equal attention. Mary has a great story arc; Frank’s arc seems to fizz out after an amazing opening; Badim (and his black ops) and the Children of Kali (and their ecoterrorism) get only scant mentions, even though arguably, these are some of the most interesting and controversial parts of the book (will black ops and ecoterrorism be necessary to get people to take climate change seriously?).

• Most of the book, and especially the final third, is overly optimistic on the future, and overly positive on leftie ideals, to the point of being almost comically unrealistic/unlikely. You have all your usual tropes about how we’ll all be saved by hippie communes, how billionaires shouldn’t exist, how crypto/blockchain will give us a currency that is fair and transparent, how people will accept degrowth and be totally OK going from jet travel back to airships and from combustion-powered ships to sailships, and so on. After seeing how humanity could barely come together to fight a freaking pandemic, which was an imminent, clear, and visible threat, I am highly doubtful we’ll have any of the successes mentioned in this book when fighting climate change, which always feels far off and nebulous.

Quotes

I saved a few quotes from the book:

Wealth disparity

“Also, note that these disparities in wealth have been increasing since 1980 to the present, and are one of the defining characteristics of neoliberalism. Inequality has now reached levels not seen since the so-called Gilded Age of the 1890s. Some angles of evidence now suggest this is the most wealth-inequal moment in human history, surpassing the feudal era for instance, and the early warrior/priest/peasant states. Also, the two billion poorest people on the planet still lack access to basics like toilets, housing, food, health care, education, and so on. This means that fully one-quarter of humanity, enough to equal the entire human population of the year 1960, is immiserated in ways that the poorest people of the feudal era or the Upper Paleolithic were not.”

How much fossil fuel we can burn

“Humans are burning about 40 gigatons (a gigaton is a billion tons) of fossil carbon per year. Scientists have calculated that we can burn about 500 more gigatons of fossil carbon before we push the average global temperature over 2 degrees Celsius higher than it was when the industrial revolution began; this is as high as we can push it, they calculate, before really dangerous effects will follow for most of Earth’s bioregions, meaning also food production for people

Some used to question how dangerous the effects would be. But already more of the sun’s energy stays in the Earth system than leaves it by about 0.7 of a watt per square meter of the Earth’s surface. This means an inexorable rise in average temperatures. And a wet-bulb temperature of 35 will kill humans, even if unclothed and sitting in the shade; the combination of heat and humidity prevents sweating from dissipating heat, and death by hyperthermia soon results. And wet-bulb temperatures of 34 have been recorded since the year 1990, once in Chicago. So the danger seems evident enough.

Thus, 500 gigatons; but meanwhile, the fossil fuels industry has already located at least 3,000 gigatons of fossil carbon in the ground. All these concentrations of carbon are listed as assets by the corporations that have located them, and they are regarded as national resources by the nation-states in which they have been found. Only about a quarter of this carbon is owned by private companies; the rest is in the possession of various nation-states. The notional value of the 2,500 gigatons of carbon that should be left in the ground, calculated by using the current price of oil, is on the order of 1,500 trillion US dollars.

It seems quite possible that these 2,500 gigatons of carbon might eventually come to be regarded as a kind of stranded asset, but in the meantime, some people will be trying to sell and burn the portion of it they own or control, while they still can. Just enough to make a trillion or two, they’ll be saying to themselves—not the crucial portion, not the burn that pushes us over the edge, just one last little taking. People need it.

The nineteen largest organizations doing this will be, in order of size from biggest to smallest: Saudi Aramco, Chevron, Gazprom, ExxonMobil, National Iranian Oil Company, BP, Royal Dutch Shell, Pemex, Petróleos de Venezuela, PetroChina, Peabody Energy, ConocoPhillips, Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, Kuwait Petroleum Corporation, Iraq National Oil Company, Total SA, Sonatrach, BHP Billiton, and Petrobras.

Executive decisions for these organizations’ actions will be made by about five hundred people. They will be good people. Patriotic politicians, concerned for the fate of their beloved nation’s citizens; conscientious hard-working corporate executives, fulfilling their obligations to their board and their shareholders. Men, for the most part; family men for the most part: well-educated, well-meaning. Pillars of the community. Givers to charity. When they go to the concert hall of an evening, their hearts will stir at the somber majesty of Brahms’s Fourth Symphony. They will want the best for their children.”

Discount rates

“Mary: Dick, what are you and your team doing to make current economics more helpful to the people of the future?

Dick: We’ve been looking at discount rates. We’re studying what India is doing to their discount rate, it’s very interesting.

Mary: How does that relate to future people?

Dick: It’s very central. We discount the future generations. It works by analogy to how we treat money. With money, a euro you own now is worth somewhat more than the promise of a euro that will come to you a year from now.

Mary: How come?

Dick: If you have it now, you can spend it now. Or you can bank it and earn interest on it. Like that.
Mary: So how much is the discount? How does it work?

Dick: The rate varies. It works like this: if you would take ninety euros now rather than the promise of a hundred euros a year from now, that discount rate is point nine (0.9) a year. Applying that rate, a hundred euros coming to you in twenty years is worth the same as about twelve euros today. If you go out fifty years, that hundred euros you would get then is worth about half a euro today.

Mary: That seems like a steep rate!

Dick: It is, I’m just using it to make it clear to you. But steep rates are pretty common. Someone once won the pseudo-Nobel in economics for suggesting a four percent discount rate on the future. That’s still quite high. All the different rates and time intervals get traded, of course. People bet on whether the value will go up or down relative to what got predicted. The time value of money, it’s called.

Mary: But this gets applied to other things?

Dick: Oh yes. That’s economics. Since everything can be converted to its money value, when you need to rate the future value of an action, to decide whether to pay to do it now or not, you speak of that value using a discount rate.

Mary: But those future people will be just as real as you and I. Why discount them in the same way you do money?

Dick: It’s partly to help decide what to do. See, if you rate all future humans as having equal value to us alive now, they become a kind of infinity, whereas we’re a finite. If we don’t go extinct, there will eventually have been quite a lot of humans—I’ve read eight hundred billion, or even several quadrillion—it depends on how long you think we’ll go on before going extinct or evolving into something else. Whether we can outlast the death of the sun and so on. Even if you take a lower estimate, you get so many future people that we don’t rate against them. If we were working for them as well as ourselves, then really we should be doing everything for them. Every good project we can think of would be rated as infinitely good, thus equal to all the other good projects. And every bad thing we do to them is infinitely bad and to be avoided. But since we’re in the present, and trying to decide which projects to fund, with limited resources, you have to have a finer instrument than infinity when calculating costs and benefits. Assuming you’re going to only be able to afford a few things, and you want to know which of them get you the most benefits for the least cost.

Mary: Which is what economics is for.

Dick: Exactly. Best distribution of scarce resources and so on.

Mary: So given that, how do you pick a discount rate?

Dick: Out of a hat.

Mary: What?

Dick: There’s nothing scientific about it. You just pick one. It might be a function of the current interest rate, but that shifts all the time. So really you just choose.

Mary: So the higher the discount rate, the less we spend on future people?

Dick: That’s right.

Mary: And right now everyone chooses a high rate.

Dick: Yes.

Mary: How does that get justified?

Dick: The assumption is that future people will be richer and more powerful than we are, so they’ll deal with any problems we create for them.

Mary: But now that’s not true.

Dick: Not even close to true. But if we don’t discount the future, we can’t quantify costs and benefits.

Mary: But if the numbers lie?

Dick: They do lie. Which allows us to ignore any costs or benefits that will occur more than a few decades down the line. Say someone asks for ten million to enact a policy that will save a billion people in two hundred years. A billion people are worth a huge number of dollars, if you take a rough average of the insurance companies’ monetary valuations for a human life. But using the point nine discount rate, that huge number might equal only five million dollars today. So do we spend ten million now to save what is calculated as being worth five million after the discount rate is applied? No, of course not.

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.”

Markets vs central planning

“Started this time with rehearsal of Hayek’s argument that markets deliver spontaneous value, and are therefore the best calculator and distributor of value, because central planning can’t collect and correlate all the relevant information fast enough. So planning always got things wrong, and the market was just better as a calculator. The Austrian and Chicago schools had run with that opinion, and thus neoliberalism: the market rules because it’s the best calculator. But now, with computers as strong as they’ve gotten, the Red Plenty argument has gotten stronger and stronger, asserting that people now have so much computing power that central planning could work better than the market. High-frequency trading has been put forth as an example of computers out-achieving the market proper, but instead of improving the system it’s just been used to take rents on every exchange. This a sign of effective computational power, but used by people still stuck in the 1930s terminology of market versus planning, capitalism versus communism. And by people not trying to improve system, but merely to make more money in current system. Thus economists in our time.”

Dignity as a central human need

“So what we have now, I would say, is not money (very short), nor freedom (we are still registered as Ausländer), but dignity. And this is what I think everyone needs. After the basics of food and shelter that we need jus as animals, first thing after that: dignity. Everyone needs and deserves this, just as part of being human. And yet this is a very undignified world. And so we struggle. You see how it is. And yes, dignity is something you get from other people, it’s in their eyes, it’s a kind of regard. If you don’t get it, the anger rises in you. This I know very well. That anger can kill you. Those young men blowing things up, they’re angry because they don’t have dignity. Which is something other people give you, so it’s tricky. I mean you have to deserve it, but ultimately it’s something other people give you. So the angriest of our young men blow things up because they aren’t given it, and mostly they blow up their own people’s chances in this world.”

Rating: 3.5 stars