CHAPTER 8
Growth Fails
"Capitalism of course has always been a means of channeling individual greed and ambition in a way that ideally benefits society as a whole as well as the richest capitalists," the CUNY Baruch College speaker was saying. "Strong and stable government is needed to provide a suitable environment for capitalism to flourish in. Of course from the diehard capitalist point of view healthy capitalism is needed to provide an environment for the nurturing of nations.
"From society's wider point of view government is needed to set the rules for capitalism and ensure that the ensuing benefits are shared by society as a whole, and not simply the owners of capital. Throughout the history of capitalism there have always been delicate balances to maintain that can easily get out of kilter. And of course the unending world crisis that is climate change adds enormous stress to all forms of economies and governments."
Ed was tuning out most of the economics 101 presentation. He could depend on Mary to record and analyze the lectures for any clues. It was a warm, sunny, breezy day and Ed was at the moment sharing his consciousness with that of a high-soaring Peregrine falcon. Right now he let the bird hunt for food while he merely shared its sharp super senses. From a dizzying height the bird was watching pigeons roosting on the College buildings far below.
The sun was warming the buildings and the sidewalks below where students walked and sometimes intentionally scattered old bread, popcorn, and birdseed for hungry birds including fat pigeons. The falcon watched the pigeons fly about looking for human-provided food. Only after the raptor fed well on pigeon would Ed turn it over to jants as he had already done with two others.
The two jant/med-tick-controlled raptors were already surveilling the urban Baruch campus area, looking for Egborg and the girls using visual recognition. What else should they be looking for? Egborg looked like a normal human zombie, presumably his cohorts also looked normal. Spotting them visually seemed highly unlikely. But med-ticks they carried were also listening for odd jant chatter. Perhaps that would prove to be a more effective means of identifying the kidnappers.
Dozens of police drones also circled the area, identifying people and vehicles. NYPD officers were also highly visible, stopping people and checking identifications. If Egborg showed up here he would surely be spotted by drone or bird or cop.
From the hundreds of pigeons that dwelled in and about the old buildings of Baruch College, Ed's falcon picked a likely victim that was flying and thereby drawing attention to itself. Ed's falcon folded back its wings and dove at it at over two hundred miles an hour - nearly twice the terminal velocity of a human falling from a great height. The dive was a dizzying, frightening experience for Ed, but he stuck with the bird through the dive, the strike with its talons, and even through the subsequent feeding phase involving tearing apart the pigeon with a sharp beak, and the sweet taste of fresh flesh.
He then calmed the well-fed bird as its roosting spot high in a campus tree was approached by an odd acting squirrel, and a three-inch long med-tick climbed from squirrel to falcon, onto its back, and under its warming feathers. Atop it a dozen jants rode, relaying thoughts between med-tick and jant colony. The bird hardly flinched as the tick drove it's abnormally tough and elongated chelicera into its spine and the specialized hypostome sheathed within it tapped into the bird's neural senses and thoughts as well as its blood.
"YOUR FIRST RESPONSIBILITY IS TO NOT HARM THE BIRD," Ed reminded the jants.
"WE MONITOR ITS WELL BEING, CHIEF ED," the jants replied. "LIKE THE OTHERS, IT WILL BE RETURNED HERE UNHARMED."
"With economic growth stifled by word-wide disruption, the capitalism has necessarily radically transformed itself from what it was a century ago," the current speaker was saying, as Ed returned his attention to the lectures.
The speaker was from the nearby CUNY Graduate Center, which had expanded in recent decades to occupy most of the nearby ancient Stone-Coat renovated Empire State Building. In the audience were many researchers from other nearby schools, including most prominently New York University.
"Economic, political, and social systems once predicated on the myth that endless economic expansion is possible have had to adapt to difficult limiting realities. Of course it has long been obvious that Earth resources are finite and could not sustain endless population growth and resource-consuming economic growth, but climate change and related crisis events have at last forced reality to be finally be squarely faced up to by humanity.
"Some democracies in which capitalism once flourished have been replaced or transformed due to domestic and world crises into regimes that appear to be democracies but are in reality are under the surface hidden autocracies, oligarchies, or sometimes outright out-of-the-closet tyrannies that satisfy overriding needs for stability in a crisis laden world. Fear has influenced many to sacrifice democracy and freedoms and return to less representative, more repressive forms of government that they feel are more stable, even though extensive empirical evidence argues that is not typically the case. Many studies have shown that it is a common sense of purpose and unifying culture that provides the greatest stability, regardless of the particular form of overlying government, but that democracies provide the best environment for nurturing a healthy unifying culture."
"However over the last two decades participatory democracies have been making a comeback as economy and political stability has improved. That is due in large part to a strengthening of the United Nations, improved health outcomes attributed largely to the jants, infrastructure improvements accomplished largely by Stone-Coats, and dramatic international Space Program successes led by the United States. There are also some encouraging environmental efforts led by Stone-Coats. All of these positive developments are doubtlessly familiar to our esteemed guest Chief Ed Rumsfeld and his esteemed wife Ambassador Ann Richards."
The statement dumbfounded Ed, and he was equally stunned when the man started clapping, an act that was soon joined by the two hundred students and faculty in the room. "CUNY is therefore proud on this occasion to present to both you and your wife honorary PhDs in our interdisciplinary program of Human, Stone-Coat, and Jant studies."
"For Pete sakes!" Ed mumbled as smiling he made his way to the podium to accept the degrees for himself and Ann, and stumble his way through a few words of sincere gratitude. "YOU SET ME UP FOR THIS!" he accused Mary as he returned to his seat amid more applause.
"YOU AND ANN HAVE REFUSED THESE SORTS OF REWARDS FOR FAR TOO LONG," said Mary quietly. "I FIGURED THIS WAS AN OPPORTUNITY THAT COULDN'T BE PASSED UP, AND CUNY AGREED. CONGRATULATIONS."
"WE NEED TO FOCUS ON TRACY AND MOUSE, MARY," said Ed.
"Back to work now!" said the next speaker. "However I remind everyone that though the global economy has thankfully been stabilized and is growing again, Gross Domestic Product and Gross National Product as measured by material production and services is very poor as a single measure of what should constitute a 'good life' for humanity.
"Further, far more even than human population growth, rampant growth in resource consuming material goods and services has long been steering us towards ecological disaster. Put simply, the simplistic prescription of capitalistic growth has failed. Both population and material growth must be constrained or at least become much more ecologically friendly for humanity to sustain itself on this finite planet and sustain bio diversity. Working with the UN, we have defined non-monetary value metrics as part of the effort to a rebalance human progress towards a better yet more sustainable future.
"Technology including automation should be a good thing, not something that destroys us. Also, some practical balance between greed for monetary gain and other important values needs to be struck. Our new metrics will help steer us in a new direction."
"Friendship, love, empathy, kindness and generosity, good conversation, a sense of beauty, a sense of physical well-being and actual good health, contentment, intimacy, humor, and wonder are examples of things that cannot be adequately
reflected by GDP and similar purely economic measures, though serious material shortages can indeed prevent the attainment of a good life. Broader, more ecology-friendly material and non-material metrics have been defined. A basic set of freedoms has also been defined. All of those things and more have been integrated into a comprehensive set of 'wellness' metrics that are being used to manage UN initiatives and to assess the progress of nations. In addition to driving the world towards a more prosperous yet sustainable future the metrics are driving us towards better general living conditions for all."
"We are already beginning to see results. For example the growing world-wide movement to decrease the standard human work-week from thirty hours to 24 hours is associated with corresponding UN metrics.
"We at CUNY are pleased to have worked with the UN to define the metrics set. Not one of us will claim it to be perfect but we all claim it to be a vast improvement over policy based purely on traditional capitalism and monetary gain. Using these more appropriate measures of over-all societal wellness we seek improved non-material as well as material well-being for everyone. The new more comprehensive value-driven metrics have been integrated into the new more inclusive economic model that has been emerging to replace traditional capitalism. Capitalism remains, but it is better harnessed to more broadly benefit the masses and the environment. Paradoxically of course, it is primarily monetary advantages that are used to motivate forces of capitalism to pay serious attention to the new metrics."
Driscal was so bored he could hardly stand it. His jants had long finished their search of attending zombie jant colonies and found nothing suspicious, and communicated with Consortium jants controlling area zombies and animals that were searching the area. There were no reports of the girls, Egborg, or anything suspicious.
"THE BIRD-RIDING JANTS REPORT A SUDDEN ABSENCE OF POLICE DRONES," Ed interrupted silently. "THE DRONES ABRUPTLY ALL FLEW NORTHEAST. THAT DOESN'T SEEM RIGHT."
Driscal's police phone started beeping and the detective put it to his ear. He listened quietly for a time before muttering "Crap" and standing up to silence the speaker and loudly make a public announcement: "The UN is reported to be under attack by terrorists. The City has declared a state of emergency for Midtown Manhattan east of Third Avenue along the East River between 34th and 55th Streets. There is also a ban against flying vehicles altogether for all Manhattan and North-West Brooklyn. The area we are in is not yet declared to be at risk, but that may be coming, and I suggest that we end this meeting now."
Ed was momentarily stricken dumb until he realized that Ann wasn't at the UN, she was home in Brooklyn and hopefully safe. "The police drones that had been covering this area were probably called to the scene," he said, as the lecture hall erupted in worried voices and people began to quickly exit the lecture hall.
"Worse!" said Driscal. "The drones are destroying themselves by crashing into ground-based police surveillance cameras that are at and near the UN."
"The UN attack may not be an unrelated event," said Mary. "It could also be orchestrated by our adversary. It is of course a cyber-attack similar to the earlier ones."
"For sure!" said Driscal.
In the hallway outside the lecture hall students were gathered into small anxious groups and milling about, unsure as to what they should do. Rushing out of the building into the cold and onto streets that held some unknown deadly menace on reflection didn't seem like the best choice. Some of them wondered back into the lecture hall and sat down.
When the trio returned to the Humvee there was another note under the windshield wiper:
'Continue your useless tour,' was all that it said, ending in an Omega symbol.
"I suppose that we might as well do just that," said Driscal, as the Humvee pulled out into traffic and headed north. "Hunter College is a bit northwest of the reported danger zone."
****
Huddled in their little prison, late morning brought good news to the captives.
"Are you sure?" asked Tracy in a whisper.
"Positive," said Mouse. "Our little digging friend found some of our food bits under the crack and ate them before resting. After resting it will resume digging. We should try to make the hole bigger. She has almost reached us."
"She?"
"Definitely."
"Then what?" Tracy asked.
"Exactly," said Mouse. "Then what?"