No matter. All of the complex of transactions appeared in the answer in Hamilton’s hand. A child in Walla Walla broke its piggy bank (secretly, with one eye on the door), gathered up the slowly accumulated slugs and bought a perfectly delightful gadget, which not only did things, but made the appropriate noises as well. Some place down in the innards of the auto-clerk which handled the sale for the Gadget Shoppe four holes were punched in a continuous roll of paper; the item appeared in the owner’s cost accounting, and was reflected in the accounting of the endless chain of middle distributors, transporters, processors, original producers, service companies, doctors, lawyers, merchants, chiefs-world without end.
The child (a bad-tempered little blond brat, bound to prove a disappointment to his planners and developers) had a few slugs left over which he exchanged for a diet-negative confection (“Father Christmas’ Psuedo-Sweets-Not a tummy ache in a tankful”); the sale was lumped with many others like it in the accounts of the Seattle Vending Machine Corporation.
The broken piggy bank and its concatenations appeared in the figures in Hamilton’s hand, as a sliver of a fragment of a super-microscopic datum, invisible even in the fifth decimal place. Monroe-Alpha had not heard of this particular piggy bank when he set up the problem-nor would he, ever-but there are tens of thousands of piggy banks, a large but countable number of entrepreneurs, lucky, and unlucky, shrewd and stupid, millions of producers, millions of consumers, each with his draft book, each with printed symbols in his pouch, potent symbols-the stuff, the ready, the you-know-what, jack, kale, rocket juice, wampum, the shekels, the sugar, the dough.
All of these symbols, the kind that jingle and the kind that fold and, most certainly, the kind that are only abstractions from the signed promise of an honest man, all of these symbols, or more correctly, their reflected shadows, passed through the bottle neck formed by Monroe-Alpha’s computer, and appeared there in terms of angular speeds, settings of three-dimensional cams, electronic flow, voltage biases, et complex cetera. The manifold constituted a dynamic abstracted structural picture of the economic flow of a hemisphere.
Hamilton examined the photostat. The reinvestment of accumulated capital called for an increase in the subsidy on retail transfers of consumption goods of three point one percent and an increase in monthly citizens’ allowance of twelve credits-unless the Council of Policy decided on another means of distributing the social increment.
“‘Day by day, in every way, I’m getting richer and richer, ‘” Hamilton said. “Say, Cliff, this money machine of yours is a wonderful little gadget. It’s the goose that lays the golden egg.”
“I understand your classical allusion, ” Monroe-Alpha conceded, “but the accumulator is in no sense a production machine. It is merely an accounting machine, combined with an integrating predictor.”
“I know that, ” Hamilton answered absently. “Look, Cliff — what would happen if I took an ax and just beat the bejasus out of your little toy?”
“You would be examined for motive.”
“Don’t be obtuse. What about the economic system?”
“I suppose, ” Monroe-Alpha told him, “that you want me to assume that no other machine was available for replacement. Any of the regional accumulators could — ”
“Sure. Bust the hell out of all of them.”
“Then we would have to use tedious methods of actuarial computation. A few weeks delay would result, with accumulated errors which would have to be smoothed out in the next prediction. No important result.”
“Not that. What I want to know is this. If nobody computed the amount of new credit necessary to make the production-consumption cycle come out even-what would happen?”
“Your hypothetical question is too far-fetched to be very meaningful,” Monroe-Alpha stated, “but it would result in a series of panics and booms of the post-nineteenth century type. Carried to extreme, it could even result in warfare. But of course it would not be-the structural nature of finance is too deeply imbedded in our culture for pseudo-capitalism to return. Any child understands the fundamentals of production accounting before he leaves his primary development center.”
“I didn’t.”
Monroe-Alpha smiled tolerantly. “I find that difficult to believe. You know the Law of Stable Money.”