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

has ever talked to or fought with? And then someone will have to go over all those transactions, one by one, every time we bust a player, to make sure we're getting real confederates and not innocent by-standers. Where are all those people going to come from?"
Someone in the audience -- it was Baird, the lawyer Connor hated the least -- said, "What about the Mechanical Turks?"
Connor and Bill stared at each other, mouths open. The lawyer looked slightly nervous. "I mean --"
"Of course," Connor said. "And we could do it for free. Just let the Turks keep any gold from the accounts of busted players."
One of the other economists was young Palmer, and he reminded Connor of himself a few years back. Connor hated him. His eager hand shot up. "I thought the point was to keep all that gold out of the market," he said. "How can we control the monetary supply if these goombas are allowed to flood the market with cheap money?"
Connor waved his hands. "Yes, theoretically these cats are outside our monetary planning, but even going flat out, they just don't move the market that much. And if they do, we can restrict the supply at our side, or adjust the basic in-game costs up or down... And it's not as if the Turks will turn around and spend the gold right away, or dump it through one of the official exchanges, especially if we keep the exchange rate low through that period."
Young Palmer opened his mouth again and Connor stopped him. "Look, this is all model-able. Let's stipulate that we can take care of the monetary supply and move on." In the back of his mind, he knew that he was dismissing a potentially explosive issue with a lot more cavalier abandon than was really warranted, but the fact was this was his chance to take care of the gold farmers once and for all, with the full weight of the company behind him, and if that screwed up the economy a little, well, they'd fix it later. They controlled the economy, after all.
Later, at his desk in Command Central, he looked up from his feeds and saw a room full of the smartest, toughest people in the company -- in the world -- bent to the same task, ferreting out the parasites that he'd been chasing for months. And if he himself had once been a kind of gold-farmer, a speculator of in-game assets, well, so what? He graduated to something better.
The fact was, there wasn't room on earth for a couple million gold-farmers to turn into high-paid video-game executives. The fact was, if you had to slice the pie into enough pieces to give one to everyone, you'd end up slicing them so thin you could see through them. "When 30,000 people share an apple, no one benefits -- especially not the apple." It was a quote one of his economics profs had kept written in the corner of his white-board, and any time a student started droning on about compassion for the poor, the old prof would just tap the board and say, "Are you willing to share your lunch with 30,000 people?"
And hell, there were at least three million gold-farmers in the world. Let them get their own goddamned apples.
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"Sea-level" is a term that refers to the average level of all the world's oceans. Think of the world as a giant bed-pan, filled halfway with water. You can blow on one part of the surface and induce some tiny waves whose crests are higher than the rest of the water. You can tip the bed-pan from side to side and cause the water to slosh around, making it higher at one end than another. But overall, there's a single level to that water, a surface height that you can easily discern.
Same with the oceans. Though the tides may drag the water from one edge of the sea to the other -- and really, there's only one sea, a single, continuous jigsaw-puzzle-piece-shaped body of water that wraps around all the continents -- though the storms may blow up waves here and there, in the end, there's only so much water in the ocean, and it more or less comes to an easily agreed-upon height. Sea level.
Same with money. There's only so much value in the world: only so much stuff to buy. If you got all the money in the world, you could exchange it for all the stuff on earth (at least all the stuff there is for sale). It doesn't matter, really, whether the money is in dollars or gold pieces or mushrooms or ringgits or euros or yen. Add it all together and what you've got is the ocean. What you've got is sea level.
So what happens if someone just prints a lot more money? What happens if you just double the amount of money in circulation? Will the monetary seas rise, drowning the land?
No.
Printing more money doesn't make more money. Printing more money is like measuring the ocean in liters instead of gallons. Converting 343 quintillion gallons of ocean into 1.6 sextillion liters (give or take) doesn't give you any more water. Gallons and liters are measurements of water, not water itself.
And dollars are measures of value, not value itself. If you double the amount of currency in circulation, you double the price of everything on Earth. The amount of stuff is fixed, the amount of currency isn't. That's called inflation, and it can be savage.
Say you're a dictator of a tin-pot republic. For decades, you've lined your pockets at the peoples' expenses, taxing the crap out of everyone and embezzling it into your secret off-shore bank-account in Honduras. Eventually, you've moved so much wealth out of the country that people are ready to eat their shoes. They start to get angry. At you.
Normally, you'd just have your soldiers go and make examples of a few hundred dissidents and leave their grisly, carved up remains by the roadside in shallow graves as a means of informing your loyal subjects of what they can expect if they keep this kind of thing up.
But soldiers -- even the real retarded sadists -- don't work for free. They want paying. And if you've taken all the money out of the country and put it in your bank account, you need something to pay them with.
No problem. You're a dictator. Just call up the treasury department and order them to print up a couple trillion ducats or gold certificates or wahoonies or whatever you call your money, and you start paying the troops. It works -- for a while. The troops take their dough into town and use it to buy drinks and snazzy clothes and big meals. They send it home to their families, who use it to buy lumber and tile and steel and cement to improve their houses, or to buy farm implements and pay the hired hands to help them bring up the next crop.
But as the amount of money in circulation grows, it gradually becomes worth less. The bar raises its drink prices because the landlord has raised the rent. The landlord has raised the rent because the cost of feeding his family has gone up, because the farmer isn't willing to sell his crops for the old prices, because she's paying double for diesel for the tractor and triple for water.
And then the soldiers show up at the dictator's palace and explain, pointedly, with bayonets (if necessary), why their old wages are no longer sufficient.
No problem. Just call up the treasury and order up another trillion wahoonies. And watch it all happen again.
This is called inflation, and it's the cheap sugar high of governments. Like a cramming student sucking down energy beverages, a government can only print money for so long before they have to pay the price. It's not pretty, either. Families that carefully saved all their lives for their retirement suddenly find their tidy nest-egg is insufficient to cover the price of a dinner out. Every penny of savings is wiped out in the blink of an eye, and suddenly you need a lot more soldiers on the job to keep your loyal subject from gutting you like a fish and hanging you upside down from your own palace's tallest chimney.
If you're a very cheeky dictator, you'll go one further: take all the savings in the banks that are denominated in real money -- euros or dollars or yen -- and convert them into wahoonies at today's exchange rate. Use all that real money to pay the army for a day or two more, but you'd better save enough to pay for airfare to some place very, very far away.
If you think inflation is scary, try deflation. As people get poorer -- as less and less money is in circulation -- the value of money goes up. This is good news for savers: the wahoonie you banked last year is worth twice as much this year. But it's bad news for everyone else: only an idiot borrows money in deflationary times, since the wahoonie you borrow today will be worth twice as much next year when you repay it. Deflation is uneven, too: the cost of food may crash because of some amazing new fertilizer, which means you can buy twice as much cassava per wahoonie. But this means that farmers are only earning half as much, and won't pay as much for cable TV. The cable company hasn't had its costs go down, though, so the reduced payment means less profits. Businesses start to fail, which means more people have less money, which drives prices down and down and down. Before long, no one can afford to make or buy anything.
In other words, the amount of money in circulation is a big deal. Theoretically, this amount is watched carefully by clever, serious economists. In practice, all the world's money is in one big swirling, whirling pool. Dollars and ducats and wahoonies and euros, blended together willy nilly, and when one government goes to the press and starts to churn out bales of bank-notes, everyone gets the sugar high. And when things crash, and peoples' savings go up in smoke, the deflationary death-spiral kicks in, and prices sink, and more companies fail -- and governments go back to the printing press.
So in practice, this big engine that determines how much food is grown, whether you'll have to sell your kidneys to feed your family, whether the factory down the road will make Zeppelins, whether the restaurant on the corner can afford the coffee beans, all this important stuff has no one in charge of it. It is a runaway train, the driver dead at the switch, the passengers clinging on for dear life as their possessions go flying off the freight-cars and out the windows, and each curve in the tracks threatens to take it off the rails altogether.
There is a small number of people in the back of the train who fiercely argue about when it will go off the rails, and whether the driver is really dead, and whether the train can be slowed down by everyone just calming down and acting as though everything was all right. These people are the economists, and some of the first-class passengers pay them very well for their predictions about whether the train is doing all right and which side of the car they should lean into to prevent their hats from falling off on the next corner.
Everyone else ignores them.
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"Hey, Connor!" his broker said, his voice tight