Sigh.

"What are the primary gains you think we'll miss out on?"

"There's professional summoners back home and they're fine for one-offs but for long term arrangements you tend to want somebody who the daeva you're bringing in over and over likes and if you're limited to pros you have less flexibility on that. It also increases overhead to do things like start fairy transit systems or demonic food distribution or angelic healing if you have to hire a summoner."

"Once we know more we'll definitely want to figure out how to enable that."

Nod.

"What'd you think of your reading?"

"Last planet I did this for was not without its problems but it had an - ascendant value set that made the end of material scarcity something very nearly a quick fix for a lot of them. Your issues seem more baked in."

"Hmm. Can you be more specific?"

"There were problems of limited class mobility, say, but those were 'means-tested welfare programs' and 'poor education' and 'inadequate transportation logistics' and stuff like that. There were some bad governments, a few people did get assassinated, but there were other places to go. Meanwhile you have it literally illegal to make too much money off a thing that is incorrectly color-coded."

"The out-of-caste income cap doesn't affect very many people."

"It doesn't make sense to invest much effort into a career you can't make serious money off of which will never let you quit your day job."

"True. I expect people could get behind a colony planet with no laws on out-of-caste income."

"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?"