"That would be good. We won't tell people what to do after they learn, they are free. Even if we would like it if they worked in Exodus, making things. I think people who learn and then teach might not know as much as the first people who teach. Or it might take a long time. Most engineers study for nine years of basic education as a child, the things every child learns, and then four or six years of specialized education in a university- A town of learning and teaching. We want to build a university."

"Elves can learn thing and then give to other elves... memory of learn. Not weak words, and not strong learn like person does thing and knows thing strong... I think that you think that person go to university, go back, has weak words. This is wrong. Correct is: has memory of learn. Do you want that elves don't go to university, learn? You say this, people think that you like FD, don't like Allheart and Lei, this is big."

"...I have not received specific instructions on the matter of elves in universities. If a decision on university attendance for elves could make countries upset and worried, we want to know more and talk and think more before making a university. We generally don't want to cause more fighting."

"I understand, you need to think, you don't say now.

Now, I want to ask: many small trades, what do you think? One town, one university... suppose a person from Orocide goes to the one university and fights there. You say no more trade with Ansaf? You say no more trade with Allheart? You say no more trade with Orocide?"

"I think we say, we want people to agree to the rules of Exodus before going to university, and then we want to have Security talk to the person as if they are a person of Exodus if they break the rules and fight someone. Maybe no more trade with Orocide, or less trade with Orocide. Only really bad things like hurting a lot of people, or breaking important machines on purpose, or breaking an important deal would mean no more trade with Allheart. I don't think we will ever say no more trade with Ansaf."

"I understand, I am happy.

So one person goes to the university, a number of people work for you in the Exodus town. Those people, the number plus the one, do trade with you? If the number of people don't work, or if people fight, then this trade is finished, but other people can trade?

Those people maybe they live in a town together, maybe they are a family, maybe they work for a magistrate, maybe they aren't like that and they talk and do trade with you... What do you think?"

"We can do many trades. We can say all our ideas for trades and pick the best ones. A lot of these things we are still thinking about. One step at a time. On our home planet we used money and credit to make trade simpler, and many people of Exodus like that and want to do that for some things or maybe all things, when we are more established. If we did that, people would be traded money for doing work for Exodus and then trade money to go to university. But maybe that's a bad idea for people from Ansaf. There are ways that kind of trading can go bad and some of them happened to people of Earth, like speculation bubbles or abuse of debt, so we know better now if we are careful. Maybe we trade another way, no money just deals like 'Orocide builds a town according to these drawings, and then 100 people from Orocide can go to university for six years and learn'."

He pauses.

"We would also trade useful machines for money, and trade money for metal or food- More kinds of food is nice to have even if we aren't going to starve without it because of hydroponics. If Nivis can support itself by trading, however, we can spend more time teaching and making machines. I think the world will look very different in fifty years, when people have learned, when we have more machines, when people make the machines that make machines. More food, more good things for eberyone. But maybe it could be forty years, instead, if Exodus trades for food and metal and magic, and teaches people, and builds a few more towns maybe in the drydark and maybe in the drybright and other helpful things. One idea for later we have is a railroad, a way of moving people and things very fast like airplanes, but much cheaper than airplanes."

He will show a video of the venerable and still well-functioning shinkansen on his PDA.

"It's quiet and comfortable inside, relatively few people could operate and maintain it on busy paths that a lot of people and goods travel on, allowing people to travel without needing an equartier, leaving equartiers the chance to run more flexible routes to different places."

"We use money on Ansaf, but a single person doesn't usually use money. In countries with elves, the elves use money, and families, and groups of people of one species in a town, and - this is rare - groups who go to many towns. In the FD, a single person can use money but only a little bit of money.

Only elves use 'debt'. In the FD we could but we don't. How does debt work without magic? How can you abuse debt? What is a speculation bubble?"

"There is a town where individual people use money a lot. I think it works good but this is a new experiment."

"A railroad is like a cargo sled. Faster, but is there another benefit? Is faster important? We know how to make a cargo sled. All of werewolves, if they see a cargo sled, they know how to make it. A railroad is not like that."

"Trains are faster, carrying more at once, requiring fewer people to operate it. Maybe you don't need trains, but something else. Most of the benefits of machines is doing work that people once did. There are many types but I do not know what is best, just like we don't know the best ways to use magic I suppose. There are machines that help with farming of course, hydroponics, and ones that weave cloth, or make fiber from things that are not hair called 'polyester fiber'. There are machines that lift or move things, and the PDAs, and machines that help cook food, and machines that make things cold, and machines that move water or air, and many more kinds."

"A speculation bubble is a little complicated... It's about people getting too excited and buying and selling things for prices that are way too high, and then people panicking and defaulting on debts - they can't pay it back even if they worked their whole lives, and the people who gave them money have to deal with that, and the whole money system sort of - breaks. It can be a problem if you use money that is fiat, just a number and not a thing, and aren't careful with it, and let people hold debt... I could talk for a while about ways to use money but I'm not sure it is relevant right now. I would say abuse of debt is mostly about ways that some people trick others into making bad decisions with money and agreeing to things that are unfair without realizing it, like 'you can borrow 1000 and if you pay back 1000 within a month we're done, but if you wait longer you owe me one in five more each extra month'."

Ooh polyester and making things cold! Is polyester like the fiber stuff in the 3d printer?

Traveling merchants sometimes buy things that turn out to be less valuable that expected. Nothing important, at least not in Lei, just jewelry and clothing, and of course recently there was all the metal from the spaceship that people were excited about, which certainly caused some wasted effort but no one even went hungry, much less got enslaved, over it! Why would someone want to borrow money for a short amount of time anyway? They shouldn't be allowed to do that.

"Polyester is the same class of materials as the 3D printer uses. They are called polymers, or plastics in casual use. There are different kinds for different purposes, like aluminum versus iron versus copper. Our uniforms are actually partly made of polyester- One moment-"

He opens a metal case under the table to fetch out a spare shirt.

"Here, if anyone would like to examine it. Plastics are lightweight and easier to make than metal in many cases. We can process exhalation and waste to make them- It's a specialized kind of machine that does it... The idea behind being able to do more things with money is for freedom and to let people choose how much they want things. Back on Earth, not all people could get the things they want- You can spend your money on nicer food, or maybe you don't care about nicer food and instead spend it on board games, or in-vivo genetic treatment, or your own education, or paying artists to make art specifically for you. And it would tend to make more things that people want, because people are willing to pay for things they want, and people want money, so people will make things that other people will pay money for. Nobody has to manage it, it just happens... In an ideal world. Our history is not perfect by any means- But that is why we remember it and know what went wrong and what not to do next time."

They all touch the shirt and smell it curiously.

That's the theory of the town she mentioned, Kef, which they briefly passed through on the way to the diplomatic center. As far as she's noticed, though, there's not been much change to the standard of living - there's more flexibility in gig work than in other towns, which some people like and some don't, but the same material goods and services are available in the same amount and quality as in any dark town. It's an odd town anyway, though, being deep in the drydark, and very new and thus selecting for people who want to be part of an experiment, so it's hard to come to a conclusion.

The idea of the efficiency of a free market is weird but makes theoretical sense, sure... but why does it require letting people promise things they can't do, and then punishing them for it?

The monarch of Sota and the duke of trade of Nitatlel have been informed of this conversation by the tengu and hurry in.

According to the monarch of Sota, it's possible for a magistrate to spend so excessively that the value of their money goes down, causing non-elves who possess their money to worry that the value will keep going down and try to get rid of it, which makes it actually go down even more. So kind of the reverse of a speculation bubble. It happened once, and now magistrates remember the disaster. Also now there's a law that at least 4/5 of a town's money has to be possessed by elves.

The duke of trade of Nitatlel says they have a system kind of like that, except that the 'money' doesn't stay in circulation. Trade money is created on behalf of each person, allocated by their don, transferred to producers, and then disappears. Engineering money and food money and entertainment money and peace money are similar. If you let money circulate indefinitely, it has to stay in existence indefinitely, which would allow some people to hoard it, and there would be the additional constraint of having to keep its 'value' stable.

In the FD anyone of any species can use money for whatever they like. They avoid all those problems by limiting how much money a person can have at one time, by simply using coins a meter across that you physically cannot keep many of.

"We call that an inflation crisis. The amount of money in circulation goes up and down based on what people do with it, and what the magistrate or whoever is controlling the money does. This sounds like a classic inflation scare- You can create new money, but only as long as the confidence remains. The confidence and agreement is what makes it have value. The Nitatlel system sounds interesting- Money allocated in narrow, specific markets... I suppose if one entertainer in Nitatlel got more entertainment money than all the rest, that benefits them somehow? It almost reminds me of some old programs on Earth that said 'if you are poor, you get some free money- But it can only be spent on food or a house'. Whether this is better than just making food and houses available for free... Depends on the people and the place, probably. We think some amount of inflation is good, if it goes up at the same time as more real value - more things people want and like. There are entire textbooks on this as a field of study and I am not an expert. I think some are in the gift of knowledge PDA we distributed, under the title 'economics'. The effects of money can be subtle and hard to measure, and I think it is simpler in some ways on the largest scale. I did not think millions of people could be organized well by magistrates and dons, before seeing Ansaf. Earth had eight thousand million people, and money all tracked by computers like the PDAs almost everywhere."

The duke of trade of Nitatlel muses that inflation prevents people from hoarding money, and will be delighted to study the economics information on the PDA.

If you get lots of entertainment money your don will brag about you and you'll have students and children. If you can't get entertainment money, the local lord of entertainment will get someone else and then you have to do a different job.

"Suppose I have a great idea, it needs money now and will be finished in a deci-year, I talk to my housechief, they maybe talk to the magistrate, and then they do the idea. Suppose my idea is for me only, then they give me the money and I do the idea and give them more money, okay. Suppose it doesn't work, what happens? Suppose my housechief made a mistake, then my housechief has a problem, we don't need to talk about that. Suppose I made a mistake, then, in the future I have ideas, they don't give me money. Suppose I use money to buy metal and go away by myself. This is a bad idea, why? I come into new town, I don't tell the magistrate because this isn't my town, I give people bits of metal for food and for they don't tell the magistrate...but soon, maybe days, maybe deci-years, everyone will know I did this bad thing, magistrate will know. And all this time I am not still even happy! My friends are in the old town, no friends in new town. I need to go back to my old town, stay in old town, work. Pay five more money? No, I don't have money. Work for Exodus, get money, pay? But I'm a bad person, I steal metal, Exodus doesn't want me...

In summary, I don't understand situation, I pay five more money each deci-year."

"...I was following you up until going to the new town? Cycles of debt, and moving debt from town to town, and people not understanding what is going on are indeed problems. I might not understand you."

He certainly doesn't think there should be a freaking futures market or any of the other financial chicanery, even if it will probably inevitably creep in over time there's no need to rush it.

"People of Exodus are used to using money. Before we left our planet, everyone used money. They grew up doing it, and that is different than changing to it later. Right now in Nivis, everyone works without money and everyone gets food and houses and doctor visits and their children get teaching and they get time in the entertainment place, all without money. But that's special, because building a new town on a new planet is hard, and the rules of Exodus say we will do it this way at first, and then we will form a new government once we are settled. Maybe they end up liking not using money. Maybe they want to go back to having money and get money for working and spend money on things they want. Maybe they just use taxes- Instead of the magistrate making more money when they need to spend it, there are rules saying you have to give some of your money back to the magistrate... I think there are bad things that can happen in any way of doing things, edge cases and strange situations that the rules do not deal with well."

"I'm trying to understand the extra five; I'm thinking about situations with borrowing money. Maybe my brother borrows money and steals it, now I want to borrow money and they say, you're like your brother, maybe you steal money, this is dangerous for us. We think that in a thousand situations like this, when do you steal the money, in five situations. We want five more money from you, now we are safe and you can borrow the money. They say this, I borrow a thousand, I give extra five.

This is what I think, one situation with extra five. But this situation doesn't make sense. Stealing money is hard. I ask: why extra five? On Earth, is stealing money easy? What is situation where they want extra five and I'm willing to pay extra five?"

"There are taxes in Kef. Not for every person, only for every house, and for steel and water."

"If I have a lot of money, and let a lot of people borrow money, sometimes they will make a mistake or decide to do things like run away, and I don't get my money back. If that happens I might lose all of it. Also it's a little bit of work to - have the money to give out in the first place, and to keep track of the money and when it gets paid back. So let's say one in one hundred people borrow money and then can't return it all, or can return only half. If I lend a hundred money to a hundred people, one of them doesn't pay me back, and I lose a hundred money. But if every person has to pay me back one hundred and two money, I gain two money ninety-nine times and lose one hundred money one time- So I gained ninety-eight money. So, without the extra money I don't want to let people borrow money, I'll just lose it sometimes and not get anything. But with the extra, I'm willing to do that because I expect to get a little bit more money over time."