For the Win, Cory Doctorow [free reads .TXT] 📗

is in hospital, unconscious. The Mighty Krang said he thought it was one of the Chinese factory owners -- they've been getting meaner, sending in threats. And they've got lots of contacts in Singapore."
Yasmin finished her chai. Her hair itched with dust and sweat, and she slid a finger up underneath it and scratched at a bead of sweat that was trickling down her head. "All right," she said. "What had you hoped for from those old people?"
"Money," he said. "Support. They have the ear of the press. If their members demanded justice for the workers in Shenzhen, rallied at the Chinese consulates all around India..." He waved his hands. "I'm not sure, to be honest. It was supposed to happen weeks from now, after I'd done a lot more whispering in their ears, finding out what they wanted, what they could give, what we could give them. It wasn't supposed to happen in the middle of a strike." He stared miserably at the floor.
Yasmin thought about Sushant, about his fear of leaving Mala's army. As long as soldiers like him fought for the other side, the Webblies wouldn't be able to blockade the strikes in-game. So. So she'd have to stop Mala's army. Stop all the armies. The soldiers who fought for the bosses were on the wrong side. They'd see that.
"What if we helped ourselves?" she said. "What if we got so big that the unions had to join us?"
"Yes, what if, what if. It's so easy to play what if. But I can't see how this will happen."
"I think I can get more fighters in the games. We can protect any strike."
"Well, that's fine for the games, but it doesn't help the players. Big Sister Nor is still in hospital. The Webblies in Shenzhen are still in jail."
"All I can do is what I can do," Yasmin said. "What can you do? What do economists do?"
He looked rueful. "We go to university and learn a lot of maths. We use the maths to try to predict what large numbers of people will do with their money and labor. Then we try to come up with recommendations for influencing it."
"And this is what you do with your life?"
"Yes, I suppose it all sounds bloody pointless, doesn't it? Maybe that's why I'm willing to take the games so seriously -- they're no less imaginary than anything else I do. But I became an economist because nothing made sense without it. Why were my parents poor? Why were our cousins in America so rich? Why would America send its garbage to India? Why would India send its wood to America? Why does anyone care about gold?
"That was the really strange one. Gold is such a useless thing, you know? It's heavy, it's not much good for making things out of -- too soft for really long-wearing jewelry. Stainless steel is much better for rings." He tapped an intricate ring on his right hand on the arm of the chair. "There's not much of it, of course. All the gold we've ever dug out of the ground would form a cube with sides the length of a tennis court." Yasmin had seen pictures of tennis courts, but she wasn't clear how big this actually was. Not very large, she supposed. "We dig it out of one hole in the ground and then put it in another hole in the ground, some vault somewhere, and call it money. It seemed ridiculous.
"But everyone knows gold is valuable. How did they all agree on this? That's where I started to get really fascinated. Because gold and money are really closely related. It used to be that money was just an easy way of carrying around gold. The government would fill a hole in the ground with gold, and then print notes saying, 'This note is worth so many grams of gold.' So rather than carrying heavy gold around to buy things, we could carry around easy paper money.
"It's funny, isn't it? We dig gold out of holes in the ground, weigh it, and then put it in another hole in the ground! What good is gold? Well, it puts a limit on how much money a government can make. If they want to make more money, they have to get more gold from somewhere. "
"Why does it matter how much money a country prints?"
"Well, imagine that the government decided to print a crore of rupees for every person in India. We'd all be rich, right?"
Yasmin thought for a moment. "No, of course not. Everything would get more expensive, right?"
He waggled his chin. He was sounding like a schoolteacher again. "Very good," he said. "That's inflation: more money makes everything more expensive. If inflation happened evenly, it wouldn't be so bad. Say your pay doubled overnight, and so did all the prices -- you'd be all right, because you could just buy as much as you could the day before, though it 'cost' twice as much. But there's a problem with this. Do you know what it is?"
Yasmin thought. "I don't know." She thought some more. Ashok was nodding at her, and she felt like it was something obvious, almost visible. "I just don't know."
"A hint," he said. "Savings."
She thought about this some more. "Savings. If you had money saved, it wouldn't double along with wages, right?" She shook her head. "I don't see why that's such a problem, though. We've got some money saved, but it's just a few thousand rupees. If wages doubled, we'd get that back quickly from the new money coming in."
He looked surprised, then laughed. "I'm sorry," he said. "Of course. But there are some people and companies and governments that have a lot of savings. Rich people might save crores of rupees -- those savings would be cut in half overnight. Or a hospital might have many crores saved for a new wing. Or the government or a union might have crores in savings for pensions. What if you work all your life for a pension of two thousand rupees a month, and then, a year before you're supposed to start collecting it, it gets cut in half?"
Yasmin didn't know anyone who had a pension, though she'd heard of them. "I don't know," she said. "You'd work, I suppose."
"You're not making this easy," Ashok said. "Let me put it this way: there are a lot of powerful, rich people who would be very upset if inflation wiped out their savings. But governments are very tempted by inflation. Say you're fighting an expensive war, and you need to buy tanks and pay the soldiers and put airplanes in the sky and keep the missiles rolling out of the factories. That's expensive stuff. You have to pay for it somehow. You could borrow the money --"
"Governments borrow money?"
"Oh yes, they're shocking beggars! They borrow it from other governments, from companies -- even from their own people. But if you're not likely to win the war -- or if victory will wipe you out -- then it's unlikely anyone will voluntarily lend you the money to fight it. But governments don't have to rely on voluntary payments, do they?"
Yasmin could see where this was going. "They can just tax people."
"Correct," he said. "If you weren't such a clearly sensible girl, I'd suggest you try a career as an economist, Yasmin! OK, so governments can just raise taxes. But people who have to pay too much tax are unlikely to vote for you the next time around. And if you're a dictator, nothing gets the revolutionaries out in the street faster than runaway taxation. So taxes are only of limited use in paying for a war."
"Which is why governments like inflation, right?"
"Correct again! First, governments can print a lot of money that they can use to buy missiles and tanks and so on, all the while borrowing even more, as fast as they can. Then, when prices and wages all go up and up -- say, a hundred times -- then suddenly it's very easy to repay all that money they borrowed. Maybe it took a thousand workers' tax to add up to a crore of rupees before inflation, and now it just takes one. Of course, the person who loaned you the money is in trouble, but by that time, you've won the war, gotten reelected, and all without crippling your country with debt. Bravo."
Yasmin turned this over. She found it surprisingly easy to follow -- all she had to do was think of what happened to the price of goods in the different games she played, going up and down, and she could easily see how inflation would work to some players' benefit and not others. "But governments don't have to use inflation just to win wars, do they?" She thought of the politicians who came through Dharavi, grubbing for the votes the people there might deliver. She thought of their promises. "You could use inflation to build schools, hospitals, that sort of thing. Then, when the debt caught up with you, you could just use inflation to wipe it out. You'd get a lot of votes that way, I'm quite sure."
"Oh yes, that's the other side of the equation. Governments are always trying to get re-elected with guns or butter -- or both. You can certainly get a lot of votes by buying a lot of inflationary hospitals and schools, but inflation is like fatty food -- you always pay the price for it eventually. Once hyperinflation sets in, no one can pay the teachers or nurses or doctors, so the next election is likely to end your career.
"But the temptation is powerful, very powerful. And that's where gold comes in. Can you think of how?"
Yasmin thought some more. Gold, inflation; inflation, gold. They danced in her head. Then she had it. "You can't make more money unless you have more gold, right?"
He beamed at her. "Gold star!" he said. "That's it exactly. That's what rich people like about gold. It is a disciplinarian, a policeman in the treasury, and it stops government from being tempted into funding their folly with fake money. If you have a lot of savings, you want to discipline the government's money-printing habits, because every rupee they print devalues your own wealth. But no government has enough gold to cover the money they've printed. Some governments fill their vaults with other valuable things, like other dollars or euros."
"So dollars and euros are based on gold, then?"
"Not at all!" No, they're backed by other currencies, and by little bits of metal, and by dreams and boasts. So at the end of the day, it's all based on nothing!"
"Just like game-gold!" she said.
"Another gold star! Even gold isn't based on gold! Most of the time, if you buy gold in the real world, you just buy a certificate saying that you own some bar of gold in some vault somewhere in the world. The postman doesn't deliver a gold-brick through your mail-slot. And here's the dirty secret about gold: there is more gold available through certificates of deposit than has ever been dug out of the ground."
"How is that possible?"
"How do you think it's possible?"
"Someone's printing certificates without having the gold to back them up?"
"That's a good theory. Here's what I think happens. Say you have a vault full of gold in Hong Kong. Call it a thousand bars. You sell the thousand bars' worth of gold through the certificate market,