The Economy

[Fetterkey]

The most intriguing part of this story for me was "The Economy." What
exactly is it-- surely not simply a reference to the invisible hand!

[Matthew]

I'm glad you noticed that, Fetterkey!

This story is set in a future world scenario in which I plan to set a
few games and stories. For fun I had podtycoon make a passing
reference to The Economy: "The afterlives are run by The Economy (what
you'd call our world government)". To him, it's just part of the order
of things but it exposes something that I'll explore more in other
stories and games.

In brief, the future in which podtycoon lives suffered in the fairly
distant past a massive economic shock, triggered by major ecological
degradation (chiefly brought on by global warming-driven climate
change), and worsened by foolish responses to the same. In the tumult,
a world governing authority was formed to recover the economy, and all
other issues were subsumed to this, national governments being
controlled by business interests and afraid of the populist revolt
triggered by the poor economy. Over the years phrases like "The
economy needs this" and "the economy must do that" made "the economy"
meld with "government" and "society" in an Orwellian fashion: language
changes how we think, and then how we think reinforces the language.
By podtycoon's day, the term "The Economy" has long since been
appropriated as the name of the global government. It was a popular
term-- who could argue that we should NOT do what The Economy
required? So as powerful people and institutions do, they leveraged
that. Control the language, control the thought. That's a very hasty
description, and my future creations will illustrate this more
clearly.

The interesting thing is that I thought of this Economy-as-world-
government idea years before the current economic meltdown. Some would
say this fiction is coming a lot closer now. Hopefully this is not a
case of life imitating art!

Thanks for the question and thanks for reading!
--Matthew