LITMIR.BIZ

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proprietarial air, as if he were curating the weather. He liked the wild stuff, and enjoyed sharing news of it, especially if it seemed to support his contention that the heat added anthropogenically to the atmosphere had been enough to change the Indian Ocean monsoon patterns for good, triggering global repercussions; this meant, in practice, almost everything that happened. This week for instance it was tornadoes, previously confined almost entirely to North America, as a kind of freak of that continent’s topography and latitude, but now appearing in east Africa and in central Asia. Last week it had been the weakening of the Great World Ocean Current in the Indian Ocean rather than the Atlantic.

      ‘Unbelievable,’ Frank would say.

      ‘I know. Isn’t it great?’

      Before leaving for home at the end of the day, Frank often passed by another source of news, the little room filled with file cabinets and copy machines informally called ‘The Department of Unfortunate Statistics’. Someone had started to tape on the beige walls of this room extra copies of pages that held interesting statistics or other bits of recent quantitative information. No one knew who had started the tradition, but now it was clearly a communal thing.

      The oldest ones were headlines, things like:

       World Bank President Says Four Billion Live on Less Than Two Dollars a Day

      or

       America: Five Percent of World Population, Fifty Percent of Corporate Ownership

      Later pages were charts, or tables of figures out of journal articles, or short articles of a quantitative nature out of the scientific literature.

      When Frank went by on this day, Edgardo was in there at the coffee machine, as he so often was, looking at the latest. It was another headline:

       352 Richest People Own As Much as the Poorest Two Billion, Says Canadian Food Project

      ‘I don’t think this can be right,’ Edgardo declared.

      ‘How so?’ Frank said.

      ‘Because the poorest two billion have nothing, whereas the richest three hundred and fifty-two have a big percentage of the world’s total capital. I suspect it would take the poorest four billion at least to match the top three hundred and fifty.’

      Anna came in as he was saying this, and wrinkled her nose as she went to the copying machine. She didn’t like this kind of conversation, Frank knew. It seemed to be a matter of distaste for belabouring the obvious. Or distrust in the data. Maybe she was the one who had taped up a brief quote, ‘72.8% of all statistics are made up on the spot.’

      Frank, wanting to bug her, said, ‘What do you think, Anna?’

      ‘About what?’

      Edgardo pointed to the headline and explained his objection.

      Anna said, ‘I don’t know. Maybe if you add two billion small households up, it matches the richest three hundred.’

      ‘Not this top three hundred. Have you seen the latest Forbes 500 reports?’

      Anna shook her head impatiently, as if to say, Of course not, why would I waste my time? But Edgardo was an inveterate student of the stock market and the financial world generally. He tapped another taped-up page. ‘The average surplus value created by American workers is thirty-three dollars an hour.’

      Anna said, ‘I wonder how they define surplus value.’

      ‘Profit,’ Frank said.

      Edgardo shook his head. ‘You can cook the books and get rid of profit, but the surplus value, the value created beyond the pay for the labour, is still there.’

      Anna said, ‘There was a page in here that said the average American worker puts in 1950 hours a year. I thought that was questionable too, that’s forty hours a week for about forty-nine weeks.’

      ‘Three weeks of vacation a year,’ Frank pointed out. ‘Pretty normal.’

      ‘Yeah, but that’s the average? What about all the part-time workers?’

      ‘There must be an equivalent number of people who work overtime.’

      ‘Can that be true? I thought overtime was a thing of the past.’

      ‘You work overtime.’

      ‘Yeah but I don’t get paid for it.’

      The men laughed at her.

      ‘They should have used the median,’ she said. ‘The average is a skewed measure of central tendency. Anyway, that’s …’ – Anna could do calculations in her head – ‘sixty-four thousand three hundred and fifty dollars a year, generated by the average worker in surplus value. If you can believe these figures.’

      ‘What’s the average income?’ Edgardo asked. ‘Thirty thousand?’

      ‘Maybe less,’ Frank said.

      ‘We don’t have any idea,’ Anna objected.

      ‘Call it thirty, and what’s the average taxes paid?’

      ‘About ten? Or is it less?’

      Edgardo said, ‘Call it ten. So let’s see. You work every day of the year, except for three lousy weeks. You make around a hundred thousand dollars. Your boss takes two thirds, and gives you one third, and you give a third of that to the government. Your government uses what it takes to build all the roads and schools and police and pensions, and your boss takes his share and buys a mansion on an island somewhere. So naturally you complain about your bloated inefficient Big Brother of a government, and you always vote for the pro-owner party.’ He grinned at Frank and Anna. ‘How stupid is that?’

      Anna shook her head. ‘People don’t see it that way.’

      ‘But here are the statistics!’

      ‘People don’t usually put them together like that. Besides, you made half of them up.’

      ‘They’re close enough for people to get the idea! But they are not taught to think! In fact they’re taught not to think. And they are stupid to begin with.’

      Even Frank was not willing to go this far. ‘It’s a matter of what you can see,’ he suggested. ‘You see your boss, you see your paycheck, it’s given to you. You have it. Then you’re forced to give some of it to the government. You never know about the surplus value you’ve created, because it was disappeared in the first place. Cooked in the books.’

      ‘But the rich are all over the news! Everyone can see they have more than they have earned, because no one earns that much.’

      ‘The only things people understand are sensory,’ Frank insisted. ‘We’re hardwired to understand life on the savannah. Someone gives you meat, they’re your friend. Someone takes your meat, they’re your enemy. Abstract concepts like surplus value, or statistics on the value of a year’s work, these just aren’t as real as what you see and touch. People are only good at what they can think out in terms of their senses. That’s just the way we evolved.’

      ‘That’s what I’m saying,’ Edgardo said cheerfully. ‘We are stupid!’

      ‘I’ve got to get back to it,’ Anna said, and left. It really wasn’t her kind of conversation.

      Frank followed her out, and finally headed home. He drove his little fuel-cell Honda out along Old Dominion Parkway, already jammed; over the Beltway, and then up to a condo complex called Swink’s New Mill, where he had rented a condominium for his year at NSF.

      He parked in the complex’s cellar garage and took the elevator up to the fourteenth floor. His apartment looked out towards the Potomac – a long view and a nice apartment, rented out for the year from a young State Department guy who was doing a stint in Brasilia. It was furnished in a stripped-down style that suggested the man did not live there very often. But a nice kitchen, functional spaces,

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