But man is a working animal. He likes to work. And his work is infernally productive. Even if he is bribed to stay out of the labor market and out of production by a fat monthly dividend, he is quite likely to spend his spare time working out some gadget which will displace labor and increase productivity.
Very few people have the imagination and the temperament to spend a lifetime in leisure. The itch to work overtakes them. It behooved the planners to find as many means as possible to distribute purchasing power through wages in spheres in which the work done would not add to the flood of consumption goods. But there is a reasonably, if not an actual, limit to the construction, for example, of non-productive public works. Subsidizing scientific research is an obvious way to use up credit, but one, however, which only postpones the problem, for scientific research, no matter how “pure” and useless it may seem, has an annoying habit of paying for itself many times, in the long run, in the form of greatly increased productivity.
“The surplus,” Thorgsen went on, “have they figured out what they intend to do with it?”
“Not entirely, I am reasonably sure,” Monroe-Alpha told him. “I haven’t given it much heed. I’m a computer, you know, not a planner.”
“Yes, I know. But you’re in closer touch with these planning chappies than I am. Now I’ve got a little project in my mind which I’d like the Policy Board to pay for. If you’ll listen, I’ll tell you about and, I hope, get your help in putting it over.”
“Why don’t you take it up with the Board directly?” Monroe-Alpha suggested. “I have no vote in the matter.”
“No, but you know the ins-and-outs of the Board and I don’t. Besides I think you can appreciate the beauty of the project. Offhand, it’s pretty expensive and quite useless.”
“That’s no handicap.”
“Huh? I thought a project had to be useful?”
“Not at all. It has to be worthwhile and that generally means that it has to be of benefit to the whole population. But it should not be useful in an economic sense.”
“Hmmm…I’m afraid this one won’t benefit anybody.”
“That is not necessarily a drawback. ‘Worthwhile’ is an elastic term. But what is it?”
Thorgsen hesitated a moment before replying. “You’ve seen the ballistic planetarium at Buenos Aires?”
“No, I haven’t. I know about it, of course.”
“It’s a beautiful thing! Think of it, man-a machine to calculate the position of any body in the solar system, at any time, past or future, and give results accurate to seven places.”
“It’s nice,” Monroe-Alpha agreed. “The basic problem is elementary, of course. ” It was-to him. To a man who dealt in the maddeningly erratic variables of socio-economic problems, in which an unpredictable whim of fashion could upset a carefully estimated prediction, a little problem involving a primary, nine planets, a couple of dozen satellites, and a few hundred major planetoids, all operating under a single invariable rule, was just that-elementary. It might be a little complex to set up, but it involved no real mental labor.
“Elementary!” Thorgsen seemed almost offended. “Oh, well, have it your own way. But what would you think of a machine to do the same thing for the entire physical universe?”
“Eh? I’d think it was fantastic.”
“So it would be-now. But suppose we attempted to do it for this galactic island only.”
“Still fantastic. The variables would be of the order of three times ten to the tenth, would they not?”
“Yes. But why not? If we had time enough-and money enough. Here is all I propose,” he said earnestly. “Suppose we start with a few thousand masses on which we now have accurate vector values. We would assume straight-line motion for the original set up. With the stations we now have on Pluto, Neptune, and Titan, we could start checking at once. Later on, as the machine was revised, we could include some sort of empirical treatment of the edge effect-the limit of our field, I mean. The field would be approximately an oblate ellipsoid.”
“Double oblation, wouldn’t it be, including parallax shown by our own stellar drift?”