"Mmmnot quite."

"How would you describe it?"

"It wouldn't be better than starving. But I don't think it would keep being bad for a long time."

"Huh. Anyway, the rules we agreed on about pollution are not the only possible rules, I can imagine a society that had different rules and wasn't miserable, but breaking them in this world makes people miserable. And breaking them on the scale that Voan blue did can cause millions of people to die, so it's important to - know how other people feel about pollution even if you do not feel it."

Nod.

"Did you like the Tapa book?"

"I think a lot of books think I know more things already than I do."

"Oh? Like what?"

"Like..." She flips back through the book. "How big Anitam is or how much power kings have or stuff like that. But if I read enough books it fills in."

"Ah. I don't know why they assume that, lots of one-year-olds wouldn't know that. Anitam has six hundred million people. Tapa has more than a billion - quite a bit more than a billion since the war, they got some people in the war."

"Got them?"

"Tapa wanted to control enough territory that they could feed their own people no matter what Voa was doing. That involved taking some territory from Voa. It would have been very unkind of them to make all of those people flee into Voa, and also not very smart since those people worked on the farms Tapa wanted and knew how to make those farms produce food. So Tapa gave all of them citizenship."

"Oh."

"Kings usually have a lot of power. In most places with Kings, the King makes the law."

"Do a lot of places have them?"

"Not anymore! Lots of places used to but it turns out king systems are not very stable - there are often wars over who the next king should be, and they are not very resilient if the king is incompetent or bad. Most places have transitioned to systems that transfer power stably and are more resilient to individual people being stupid or bad."

"Why did it use to be common then?"

"Kinds of government take inventing just like kinds of train. We hadn't thought of a stable kind of government and even if some place tried it, it took a while for there to be significant evidence it was stabler."

"So there could be better kinds that aren't invented yet."

"There could! And democracies vary a lot in details, it is not clear what details make democracies work best."

"Have they not been watched long enough yet?"

"They have been watched a pretty long time but countries are very different from each other in many ways, for things less obvious than monarchies not working very well it can be really hard to tell where the problem is a detail of democracy and where the problem is something else."

"Like what else?"

"Well, permissions systems, those are bad and cause lots of problems with your country running smoothly no matter what kind of government it has. Being small makes lots of things harder, because you need the backing of a big country to be safe and so there are lots of external constraints on what kinds of things you can do. Some countries have overfarmed their land and are very dependent on high-tech patented ways of making food and the patent-owners have a lot of power. Some countries have too many greys and have periodic threatened coups. Voa was doing great until that blue did that but now they are struggling economically because they lost that territory and had a long expensive war."

"What do permissions systems do?"