Empire Games Series, Book 1(25)
You’re going to need the working women, because the United States is coming.
They have aircraft that can cross between time lines. They have corpuscular petards—atomic weapons, they call them. We face a development gap of roughly sixty years. That’s how far ahead of us they are, in terms of science and engineering. It’s not insurmountable, but there’s more to it than just better nutritional supplements and technological toys: a lot of it is psychological. They have different ways of looking at things, better cognitive models for understanding certain types of problems. And they’re vastly more efficient at logistics and training than we are. Unfortunately for us, their government is frightened and angry, and they have already incinerated time line one, the first other inhabited time line they discovered.
We can’t afford to get this wrong. Sooner or later they will discover the Commonwealth: and they are a far deadlier threat to the Revolution than the French Empire or the remnants of the old regime.
If we don’t deploy those extra thirty million workers, then we’ve lost a quarter of our workforce before we even begin. We also need to educate our people. Many of those workers could be teachers instead. We need those teachers to educate in turn the generation of skilled workers and specialists that we’ll need in twenty years’ time. And they will be vital to our tertiary education system, which will equip that next generation for the high-technology jobs that are coming. These in turn will be generated by the series of industrial revolutions we’re going to embark upon.
Yes, I said industrial “revolutions.” Plural. Technologies are not neutral: they come with attached agendas, with associated ways of thinking. Industrial revolutions are inherently political revolutions. Today’s ironworkers and coal miners will find it hard to adapt to tomorrow’s automated factories and thinking machines. It would be very difficult for an entrenched empire to survive such a series of revolutions without experiencing serious unrest, but you—we, gathered here today—are the party of revolution. Our whole raison d’être is to ride the tidal wave of change and use it to build a better future. This should not be beyond us.
If we try and make a sixty-year leap forward in, say, thirty years, we’ll still be behind the Americans when we get there—they’ll have moved another thirty years ahead of us. So what I’m proposing to do is to aim ahead of the target. Merely modernizing the New American Commonwealth on an industrial level should be achievable in thirty years, but we must also build in social structures that enable our successors to maintain the pace of progress, to make it an ongoing process. Modernization can become the engine of continuing revolution.
Radical citizenship and a universal franchise are a good start, but that’s not enough. We need to produce an educated, skilled workforce, and to do that we need to deliver full female emancipation—for which family planning services are essential. Workplace nurseries are also essential. And health care and school support are both essential too. They are also popular with women who vote. And they will vote.
Next slide, please.
Some of you are thinking that if we need more workers, we should simply breed them. That all that’s needed is to focus our efforts on reducing childhood mortality through inoculation campaigns and the new antibiotics. But the change I’m proposing isn’t just about numbers, it’s about quality. I’m proposing that we engineer a demographic transition, from a society with a high birth rate and a high death rate to one with a low birth rate and low death rate. Once we get there it becomes cost-effective to train and educate everyone to a high level, because we’ll recoup the investment over their working life. That’s one of the keys to rapid development: a transition to smaller families, much higher educational attainment, and new technologies. These factors combine to produce a generation that can work far more efficiently than their predecessors.
In time line two, this happened decades ago in the United States and Europe. It’s happening right now in China and India. Their economies are growing at a sustained average of more than ten percent a year. In five decades they have gone from peasant agriculture to placing spaceships in orbit around Mars. But you can’t do that with unskilled labor and a workforce that systematically excludes half the population. Or with ill-educated women who are too busy and too fatigued to give their babies the attention they need to stretch their minds, teaching them to learn how to learn.
Next slide, please.
Communications and information technology is the next key area where the USA is notionally ahead of us; arguably, this is the most significant area of all. Right now we’re barely aware of its existence, but it’s the main engine behind the recent runaway growth in the USA, amounting to a new industrial revolution. It has also led to a number of negative problems there, including increasing structural unemployment, a ridiculously hypertrophied police state, and fiscal instability. But forewarned is forearmed, and therefore I propose that we make an end run around their worst mistakes by setting up the security frameworks for our Commonwealth’s communication networks a decade before we need them …
BROOKLYN, NEW YORK, TIME LINE TWO, MARCH 2020
To get to his exfiltration site, Hulius needed to take his bike on the subway for three stops. It was a calculated risk: his mission planners had decided it was faster and marginally less dangerous than requiring him to ride for fifteen blocks through Brooklyn, and if the weather was inclement it was clearly preferable. But this was where he ran into trouble.