"My parents were lamenting that with a bit of foresight we could've had a red moon and no reds anywhere else by now."

"How would reds live on the moon alone, or is the idea that they wouldn't?"

"The arcologies need a pretty different set of skills than anything on Amenta anyway, you'd be retraining whoever you sent, they could pick it up. Who knows if it'd have worked."

"Hrm. It'd be expensive to ship them all there."

"I used to try to convince Aitim you could fund red relocation stuff with the money from all the space freed up in expensive urban areas but apparently after you clean it there's not actually that much left. Which is probably why everyone just ends up shooting them, as economic policy it's very efficient." He makes a face.

"And besides, there's no incentive to use that money in that way, you could use it on anything else and then just shoot them."

"That too, yes. Except the sort of indirect incentives of the form 'since they know we'd do that we can't have robots at all, even if we think 'robots and relocation at our expense' is a better deal than continuing to have them around'. And blues are bad at that kind of incentive."

"Why's that?"

"I think it's a - you need to lie to win elections so all of the people who win elections are pretty good at reneging on their word without the slightest bit of guilt, and everyone knows that about them, so you don't get systems that depend on trustworthiness. People might just not be capable of trustworthiness in one-shot games like that, lots of economists would say it's rational not to be."

"Games?"

" - oh, economists call everything a game, I suppose it's a bit callous in the context of shooting five million people. If there are actors and payouts it's a game."

"Huh. Are you one of those economists -"

"I am not. But I haven't convinced anyone I'm right yet."

"Do the blues actually listen to economists or do economists mostly just listen to each other?"

"The problem is that you can make a compelling economic case for exactly opposite policies a lot of the time so a lot of blues end up going with the economists who agree with them about what they wanted to do anyway. On things where they don't already have a strong opinion or where economists are unusually agreed they'll often listen- helps if the argument is explainable - they wouldn't listen to us on something like whether to shoot all Anitam's reds, too many non-economic variables."

"Huh. I'm not aware of blues listening to purples for expertise reasons, just for 'what will get you to vote for me' reasons..."

"Which is dumb! You know infinitely more about how to do corporate tax policy or worker compensation or internal parts allocation -"

"But we don't know how to talk about it, see, I wouldn't have known the game thing."

"There could be, like, workshops, how to talk like you spent two years at a university getting a ruling-caste vocabulary - though I don't actually expect that'd do much, I think the other part of it is that I ask Aitim 'who do I talk to about the limits on hours-per-week' and Aitim says 'Leva Silan, tell his secretary it's a corporate interest hearing and don't throw more than two charts at him and have the proposal you want to sign ready to go - but send it to Ibadia Nalasi first - she won't get back to you but you can tell Leva you asked her for comment a week ago -"

"...ah-huh."

"Which is a fucking stupid way to run a country. I bet if one of your site managers has a problem or an idea they don't need to know the right vocabulary and the right six people to email -"

"I mean, if they email their favorite dumpling shop, nothing happens, but there's a process and it works."

"And for whatever reason the government's official processes mostly don't work and so everyone just got good at circumventing them which neatly ensures they never really hear from anyone who hasn't been versed specifically in the informal ones." He makes a face. "Aitim should make ten of himself and just answer that kind of query full-time."

"Now that would be an interesting technology. Would he need ten child credits, I wonder."

"Ten blue credits. I want the government to run better but that's a steep price for it."