The Probability Broach, chapter 11

Ed and Win are going to see a client in Laporte’s Old Town district. Win narrates that, where he comes from, “old town” conjures up a Norman Rockwell image of quaint little cottages. But here, the oldest part of the city is a megalopolis, with skyscrapers “swooping five hundred stories into the clear bright air”:

That expression, “Old Town,” conjured up mental pictures that couldn’t have been more wrong. Most Confederates do business out of their living rooms, which discourages undue formality and keeps enterprises small. Mention time clocks or commuting, they’ll look at you like they know where you escaped from. But like many inhabitants of Laporte’s older district, Freeman K. Bertram had things turned around: the high-powered executive’s version of sleeping over the delicatessen.

Paratronics, Ltd., an impressive pile of Aztec Modern rock, was planted where the Poudre River canyon empties onto the plains. We slid into an underground parking lot, dismounted, and pulled three gees getting up to the 223rd floor.

Once again, this section has one of those libertarian/anarchocapitalist sleights of hand we need to pause and unpack. Just like a conjurer distracting the eye with flashy moves, L. Neil Smith’s invocation of massive skyscrapers is meant to distract readers from the precarious assertion one paragraph earlier.

Libertarians always claim that they’re the realists, the ones who understand the cold hard truths of math and economics, not like us silly socialists with our heads in the clouds. Yet at the same time, Smith says that most businesses in the North American Confederacy are small businesses—so small, in fact, that they need nothing more than a home office.

So how does he explain economies of scale?

Large businesses have an inherent advantage over small businesses, because they can take advantage of high volumes to get by on a smaller profit margin. If you own a factory where machines churn out a million widgets per year, you only need to make pennies on each one to turn a profit. Meanwhile, the artisan who crafts each widget by hand obviously has to charge much more to make a living.

Even if the small business buys the same machines as the larger business, there are fixed costs that have to be repaid. The more sales they have, the more they can spread out those costs across each sale, increasing the amount of profit they can squeeze out. So, again, there’s a built-in drive toward bigness. It’s inherently more efficient to be big than to be small.

Of course, there may be sentimental reasons why people prefer to shop at small businesses, even if it costs them more. But in raw economic terms, a bigger business can always undercut a smaller one. And Smith has crafted a world where economics outweighs everything else. Why aren’t people in the North American Confederacy obeying the incentives of the free market?

It would appear that, even though he’s depicted an anarchocapitalist society where nothing limits how big or powerful a corporation can get, L. Neil Smith is uncomfortable with the implications of that.

He wants to depict a Jeffersonian country where most people are homesteaders living under their own vine and fig tree, running small cottage industries from their porches, beholden to no one. He doesn’t want readers to picture a cyberpunk dystopia where colossal, amoral megacorps carve up the world, and most people are impoverished peons who live in company-town slums and spend their lives in indentured servitude to their employers.

But he doesn’t have any explanation of why the latter scenario doesn’t crowd out the former. Why don’t larger businesses outcompete smaller businesses and drive them to extinction? Why don’t companies agree to merge rather than compete with each other, so they face no competitive pressure and can gouge their customers for as much as they want to? Why don’t they try to buy up critical resources to become a monopoly, gain a chokehold on the flow of commerce and raise their prices to eye-watering levels? There seems to be nothing in this world that would prevent any of this from happening, and yet somehow it doesn’t.

High up in that skyscraper, Ed and Win meet their client: Freeman K. Bertram, the head of Paratronics, Ltd.

Bertram was a tallish, nervous type who preferred hornrims to getting his eyeballs resculpted like everybody else; he affected a sort of Italian Renaissance beard and a kilt.

The backstory here is convoluted, but to summarize: Bertram had hired Ed Bear to investigate a series of thefts from one of Paratronics’ warehouses. By coincidence (or is it?), a pen with a Paratronics logo somehow turned up in Win’s world, on the other side of the dimensional portal.

Ed and Win relay this story to him, including the fact that Win comes from a parallel universe, something that Bertram doesn’t seem that shocked by. He’s more annoyed by the fact that Ed hasn’t caught the culprits behind the warehouse theft. To this, Ed replies that he’s advised them on how to tighten their security, and that’s all he’s going to do: “I protect property. I don’t collect people!”

Side note: Is there anyone in this universe who does collect people? Does the North American Confederacy have bounty hunters for hire? Or do you just get away scot-free unless you’re caught red-handed at the scene of the crime?

L. Neil Smith never addresses this question. He makes a big deal out of how everyone here carries weapons at all times to protect themselves, because no one can trample on the rights of an armed individual. If that’s true, it’s hard to see how that profession could exist here, unless they swarm suspects with superior force—but a government can do the same thing, and yet Smith is adamant that his armed anarchists are more than capable of repelling any government intrusion.

Bertram grudgingly accepts Ed’s explanation. He says that to help Win out and solve the mystery of the pen, he can refer them to one of the researchers his company works with, a Dr. Thorens at Laporte University.

On the way out, Win muses, “this country could use a few lessons in elementary sneakiness”. Ed asks what he’s talking about, to which he responds that Bertram was wearing a bronze ring with the eye-in-the-pyramid logo. For some reason, they don’t double back to interrogate him about it, even though this implies that Bertram has ties to the same gang that tried to murder Ed and Win at home.

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Other posts in this series:

• The Probability Broach