Electricity sounds like a reasonable first pass unless you're missing like... germ theory? Germ theory's probably more important.

We didn't know that one but Elves don't get sick, really, that one I think will progress faster if we pass it along to the humans.

Yeah, more for humans than you guys, but it's a big one. How does one go about passing on germ theory to humans around here?

We've sent a messenger with our notes so far along the road to Círdan, of the Grey Havens, the Elven city on the sea. They trade with Númenor. It should reach them within a month. You could be there not much slower, if you wish to go to Númenor, but I think they'll progress quickly from the notes, and their navy can share what they learn with the other human civilizations faster than we can ourselves. 

Okay. Thanks. I can go into more depth on that sometime if that will help.

What should I do about dinner, is that delivery indefinitely or what?

Does that work for you?

Sure, if it's not inconvenient for you.

We have the means to make food free for everyone, like they do in the West, but the Dwarves think it'd be a mistake and I think they're right. It's certainly no trouble to do it in a specific unusual case like this one.

You can do that and the Dwarves think it would be a mistake?

Yes. Dwarves think it's very important to build societies where desirable actions get better outcomes than undesirable actions, or you destroy all the channels by which people can communicate what they value and you end up trapped in - bad locally-satisfactory places where no one gets any rewards for looking for a better one. 

There are people in my country who just kind of live on welfare forever but they are not obviously the same people who would be radically innovating anything.

I don't think I pay for my food. I'm not sure. I don't track my accounts. I'm certainly not very motivated by paying for my food. I think there's probably a way to feed everyone without running into those problems, and maybe you found it.

I'm not sure I'd recommend the Canadian welfare system as a beacon of perfect institution-building but it, like, beats torturing people into finding jobs flipping burgers. People wind up motivated by other things to get the high leverage jobs. Like for one thing welfare isn't cushy or very respectable.

Is torturing people until they find jobs a common approach to this problem?

Not literally, but if there's no way to get food for free and you don't have any anything, one gets hungry, you know?

The crowd has thinned out enough that May starts picking her way toward a door.

So there's a few different approaches that have been tried here. There's where people who can make food make enough for everyone and no money changes hands; that works in Valinor and works in places under martial law and could maybe be made to work under comparable social pressure elsewhere but that's a lot of social pressure and - I shouldn't, and don't know if I could.

There's the approach where people all get money and can use it to buy food, which raises the question of where you get the money -- you can try to just make enough money personally off the things you invent to fund everything the whole city needs, but if you offer this -- particularly if you offer it to Dwarves and humans -- you get lots of them and a situation that's very dependent on your continuing to have the income to fund the whole enterprise, and destitution if you ever run out.

There's the approach where you pressure or require all the rich people to help you, but the Dwarves won't if they think you're doing something harmful and distortionary and there are few enough rich Elves you run into the problem with the last thing and besides I don't like having laws that aren't the same for Dwarves and Elves. 

And the Dwarf argument here, as best I understand it, is that there's also the option where you do none of those things. And remarkably, if food is plentiful enough and if you keep working on ways to produce it with less effort, everyone still gets fed, just through their own efforts and those of their families and through the thing where other people can make money by providing them with food. And unlike the other approaches, this one isn't an institution, I'm not deciding who qualifies and how much they get and whether they're cheating and who is supposed to help me pay for it and who gets cut off first if it starts to cost too much.

And some people get hungry. And it'd be unconscionable, surely, to let some people get hungry just because you don't want the hassle of one of the first three solutions but what Dwarves would say is that 'hassle' is the wrong measure of the thing wrong with the first three solutions. I realize it's awfully convenient for me to believe them.

I'm not saying I can't see the argument in the abstract... maybe Elves and Dwarves don't have too many people who are too disabled to get a job or who were being supported by somebody who dies suddenly?

I'm not very good at walking. It's been warm here but in winter at home I get around in a chair with wheels because otherwise I'll just fall over and need to use something like that to get around anyway. And some people are way worse than that at moving around, or they've got a brain thing, or whatever. Or some people are, like, stay at home parents, and then their breadwinner gets hit by a truck, and they have four kids they could handle all right before that but not so much after. Welfare's, like, the safety net, in Canada, and there's lots to complain about but having no safety net is a scary idea.

I think that might be more of a problem for humans because they get sick and die so much, and because most kinds of work are harder for them. If it ever came up I also wouldn't expect any problems from feeding widows with young children, that's not a category that grows because you're incentivizing it.

Elves who are very sick mostly go to Valinor.

Well, you might get people trying to have a kid quicker so they would qualify if anything did happen, but probably not a rash of spousal murder so much.

What does going to Valinor do, do they have hospitals there or something?

The Valar do healing and also all the plants are nutritious and good for you and the weather's always temperate so there's really a limit on how far wrong things can go without anyone interfering to make them worse.

Sounds nice. Sounds like kind of a made up amount of nice, actually, I kinda wanna ask "and are the streets paved with gold" -

- no? Gold's a very poor paving material. There's gorgeous cut gems embedded in the stone, though - like this - sparkly road.

...it's a reference, not an infrastructure suggestion, but that's pretty.

What's it a reference to?

I'm not actually sure what the original is, maybe the legend of El Dorado. People like to talk about things being excessively made of gold as metonymy for wealth they could go grab some of. There is a movie about talking mice in which they say the streets are paved with cheese instead.