"Hm?"

"It's just not how I'm accustomed to thinking about things."

"Yeah, that makes sense. It's really cool that you got, like, as close as you did? You have vision! I just have, you know, a thousand years of cultural development without debt baggage behind me."

"There's something about  -- so there's the basic concept, that everyone should know what agreements they're making and what their alternatives are -- and it gets you really, really far! And I'm suspicious about adding things on top of it."

"The basic concept does get you really far, but like, you've noticed humans have invented money by now and it hasn't solved all their problems? And only part of this is the fact that summoners are scarce."

"I think most humans are slaves. I'm not sure of it because we mostly get everything second or thirdhand but I think they mostly are."

"I think they might technically be serfs which is at least a little less hands-on but my knowledge of this century is pretty lacking. Anyway, slavery isn't incompatible with having a functioning economy, at least depending on how it's practiced."

"How's that?"

"Even assuming you rule out generational slavery and taking prisoners of war and stuff? You just construe people as things they themselves can sell. Then they get into debt - of the ordinary financial kind - and bam."

"That doesn't seem objectionable."

"I thought you might say that."

"I could be persuaded that humans are different in some way that makes it not a good policy for them but - mostly by being very condescending. For example you could persuade me that they are mostly very stupid and should be treated like children."

"So, I don't think it's that humans are stupid, though it seems likely that most of them are stupider than you especially when they're malnourished. I think it's that humans are worse at a lot of things under certain kinds of stress, and having 'falling into debt slavery' as a thing that can feasibly happen to them is one such stressor. Also it'd make precisely the smarter people really nervous about using financial instruments that still work at most of their purposes when you allow people to declare bankruptcy."

"I mean if someone's useful then the smart thing to do if they are your slave is let them do whatever they'd do normally and make them give you half, which is not a very terrible state of affairs to be risking."

"Something terrible happening to people should they ever cease to be useful is also a stressor even on currently useful people. Remember how even in the future humans still die? There's a period of decline before that, if nothing else, and there's usually something else. And that's in roughly the ideal case of the proposed system as opposed to any particularly exploitative corners. You can do lighter versions of this, like training somebody in a job on the condition that they give you ten percent of what they make at the job for a while, without it being bad, but if it gets too steep humans wind up having problems."

"I am worried that in a system where everyone just did sufficiently friendly things no one would...actually want to trade with any humans, once their novelty wore off. Lots of faery courts don't consider humans worth it now, and that's without any restrictions at all on what you can use them for."

"Hm, I suppose that's possible, I'm not aware of any fundamental capabilities humans have that you do not and you could get all their cultural output by reading over their shoulders if you felt like it."

"My father does that sometimes. He has pieced together most of the book about Jesus that is very important to them."

"It's called the Bible."

"I was more confused about it before you explained humans make up stories sometimes."

"Oh, they think it's true, I think in this time period probably they think that it's literally true. It is however mostly not."

"Huh. That makes sense. Someone should probably tell them? I'd want to know."

"They have wars about that. It's ugly."

"Huh."

"It calms down as science improves but I wouldn't characterize the process as smooth."