"It was also customary in most developed countries at the time to have one size fits all public education - nominally. There were implementation issues that were substantially ameliorated when I ended material scarcity."

"I don't expect that would benefit Amentans. Better funded schools, absolutely, but there's just not enough time to cover everything at a pace that's also conducive to letting kids be kids. You could do a mediocre job of everything or you could start tracking people for what they're good at."

"I suspect there are a lot of advantages to a tracking system but conflating 'what they're good at' with 'what their hair color is correlated with in a hopelessly confounded manner' is not quite the same."

"There is almost certainly room for improvements, one-size-fits-all just doesn't strike me as an example of such an improvement."

       "There are rural areas where there's only one school, I'm sure someone's looked at data on outcomes from that."

"Hopelessly confounded," repeats Cam.

"There are also rural areas with several schools. We have heard of statistics."

"That's not what I mean."

"Anybody who would like to set up their own society and take immigrants will get lots of eager immigrants."

"I suppose you do have that going for you."

"Our politicians are deeply conservative mostly because - there are six hundred million people relying on us, if we fuck up they have nowhere to go, the downside is much worse than the upside is good. The first lesson they teach you in blue school, if you're on a political track, is small-scale and reversible or don't do it at all. And I think that's the right thing to teach anyone responsible for six hundred million people with 'coup' and 'conquest' the only things resembling a stabilizing mechanism there are. But once people have somewhere to go, maybe we can teach our children that lesson third, put some other things first."

...sigh. "How did it get to be that everyone uses the same caste system?"

"Societies with it were dramatically more successful, and outcompeted anyone who didn't."

"Can I have a version that takes a whole paragraph?"

"This was about seven hundred years ago. The Atapli were a trading civilization living on the coast of what's now Tapa and Voa, and while lots of places had caste systems of some kind they were the most - administratively sophisticated - of the pre-industrial empires and had the most formal caste system. With roughly the modern roles, though green and yellow were much smaller than they are now. They set up cities all along the coast, and the cities grew very wealthy, and they were administered according to the Atapli system, and it was adopted in some cases voluntarily and in some cases at the insistence of the local government. Some trading partners of the Atapli had a green aristocracy, and blues overthrew them with Atapli backing; other places were grey-ruled and found that the royals they wanted to marry their children to were all blue and declared themselves very-pale-blue. All of these societies did unusually well for themselves, compared to societies without a caste system or with a differently organized one, and many of them conquered their neighbors or just expanded and pressed their neighbors back into undesirable lands. It wasn't universal at that point, but it was very widespread, and continued to outcompete alternatives until there weren't any."

"Huh."

"It seems possible that aptitudes are more heritable for us than for most species."

"Possible. It also occurs to me that getting you summoning means introducing it to your whole universe."

"We could certainly be conservative about introducing it to aliens."

"They would probably want pretty badly to get it."

"If aliens showed up with summoning and said to us 'we'll give you planets but not teach you how until we're sure of you' we'd manage."

"So you'll just have your yellows summon extras to address their various scarcities."

"These are getting to be decisions on a scale we're not equipped to be making, but that has the - small-scale and reversible - advantages."

"What about other countries?"

"There are countries that probably shouldn't have summoning. This is again - not decisions I'm in a position to make."

"Well. Is it possible people who are should be here?"