"People can tell what jobs are necessary without being paid, and do them whether they're fun or not."

"Facetiously, are you sure you aren't a low-budget alien? Seriously, we should get an economist in here. And get you that bank account, because we can't coordinate on the right number of people doing every job nearly that well so we bribe the people doing the underpopulated ones until it balances out," says Alenn.

"Also money is a cool way of keeping score, but I guess if you can tell how much value you're creating without that you wouldn't need it for that either. I'll go get the hospital social worker, he'll know more about how to get you set up with everything and into all the databases," says Kars, and leaves.

"...thank you," says Kyeo as he goes.

"I'm not an economist and won't have as good of questions as they will; do you want to ask me questions about the present for a while?"

"...how does money work."

"Okay, so there are government-issued tokens, usually in the form of computer data (but some people want physical tokens so you can get those too (they're interchangeable except for convenience)), and you get them when you do something useful for someone and spend them to get people to do useful things for you. Usually not for favors between friends, that's usually too inconvenient for people to bother so individuals usually just do each other favors without tracking it, but for big stuff or stuff between strangers. If I want a chocolate bar or a boat ride or a professional roleplaying game session, I give some money to someone who can provide it. And when I do research people who want to read my results pay me for it. With me so far?"

"...what is a professional roleplaying game?"

"Uh, super fun but not really related to how money works? It's a form of entertaining people that one can charge money for if one gets good at it. Generally one can charge money for a thing if people want more of it than other people are willing to provide for free. So for example Kars is a nurse and most people don't want to be nurses so Kars makes a lot of money. I'm a linguist and a lot of people want to be linguists badly enough that they'll do it even for not very much money, so I make less."

"How much will I be required to pay for this hospital stay?"

"I don't work here so I don't know how they handle weird cases but usually people get insurance, which is a thing where one pays in a small amount proportional to one's risk of health problems every month and then if one needs treatment it pays out to cover the treatment, and that helps with the thing where difficulty of a sudden expense grows superlinearly. You didn't have insurance but you also didn't have the opportunity to get any or the opportunity to refuse treatment so they might not be allowed to charge you? And if they do you can set up a plan where you pay a bit at a time or get help from a charity. This is a totally reasonable time to get help from a charity; nearly anyone would have problems if they got sent back in time and landed on their head."

He might have been injured before the time travel but he's not really sure and it doesn't matter. "What is a charity?"

"When people have more money than they need and want to help people they give it to an organization that distributes it to people who don't have enough money, or spends it on things that are useful to everyone, like medical research or nice city parks or a lot of other things."

That sounds weird and inefficient but okay. "Thank you."

"There's also taxes, where the government collects money from everyone who has a lot and spends it on the things the prediction markets and the policymaking experts say are the most efficient priorities. That's where the negatax comes from. But a lot of people want to decide what their spare money goes to instead of letting the government allocate it. It's less efficient but it gives people more freedom and makes sure the government can't miss something people think is important."

"Can people not... tell... the government things?"

"That's what prediction markets are for! You can make money by predicting the outcomes of potential policies and the government does the things predicted to work well. Also elections, presumably you still have those because they don't need money. What do you do instead of prediction markets, though?"

"I don't think I understand prediction markets well enough to say what it is they do."

"Okay. So anyone can go on a market website and post a bet-statement, like 'if the school district makes this change to the math curriculum the average calculus score over the next five years will be higher than the average over the last five years' or 'the price of apples will be below X on the next full moon' or 'Raz Etvan-Neri will win the Zendo tournament'. And people can make deals with each other to buy and sell copies of that bet-statement at whatever price they want. Then if the statement comes true every copy is worth a solis and if it doesn't it's worth nothing. So if Anda sells Bor some statement for seventy-five centis and then it comes true, Anda has to pay Bor a dollar, so Anda loses 25 centis and Bor gains 25 centis. Bor makes a profit because they made a correct prediction. And if you have a lot of people trading a statement you can get a sense of how likely it is to come true or not--statements that people will pay 90 centis for come true nine times out of ten and so on."

"...ah."

"So what do you do instead, just elections? I'd have expected a society that didn't need money would do prediction markets for nonexchangeable glory points, so negapoints for me."

"A lot of what you're saying is still very confusing to me."

"In a [my Ibyabekan and the translation model are very bad] way or in an [I am not adjusting well for cultural drift] way?" 

"Probably the second thing."

"Hmm. It would probably help if I knew more of your last and our next hundred years of history. Do you know why people stopped speaking Convergentlanguage?"

"I've... never heard of Convergentlanguage."