Flash! Fiction 3 by Peter McMillan - HTML preview

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Milt, Mo, and the Money Machine

The other day I discovered a curious 1970s artifact stored away in a dark, dusty corner of a virtual bank vault somewhere on the Internet. It wasn’t really a discovery so much as a happening upon something, sort of like "discovering" a well polished rock on a de-serted beach at the end of the tourist season. What I happened upon was the 30-year-old record of a debate between Milt and Mo about the money machine. At the time of their debate, the money machine was breaking down, and the importance attached to fixing the machine was suggested by a new index—the "misery index,"

the sum of inflation and unemployment.

Now Milt and Mo were really important people, and of course the money machine is a really important apparatus that keeps the life-blood of modern commerce circulating. Milt and Mo knew important things, and they knew that it was known that they knew important things and that what they knew was beyond what most of us know or could reasonably hope to know, and so when they debated, they knew there were a lot of people listening.

Because at the time the money machine was functioning erratically and causing panic in the crowd, and because both Milt and Mo were highly credible, people did listen. What people were listening for was how to get out of the mess and how to avoid it. The sought-after solutions were practical in nature, but underlying them were fundamental and fundamentally accessible assumptions, which persist today in the contemporary variants of Milt and Mo's money machine mechanics.

Milt believed in putting the money machine on irreversible autopilot.

Of course, there's no such thing as an irreversible governor, but the intent was to discourage fiddling with the money machine. Milt was a lovely person, but he had a theoretical and heretofore unfalsified 89

lack of confidence in human competence and integrity. So he believed that the money machine, which was a discovery of rare genius and positive value, would be most efficient if set at a con-stant speed relative to the long run trend rate of economic growth.

Any rapid acceleration or deceleration would increase the wear and tear and lead to inevitable machine breakdown.

Mo, on the other hand, believed in keeping the money machine in manual mode with a designated knob twiddler watching and intervening with great care and wisdom. Milt facetiously commented that he would support knob twiddling as long as Mo was the knob twiddler, the implication being that this approach did not lend itself to law-like regularity and so the probability of human " mis intervention"

would be very high. As it turns out, a recent governor of the money machine, Mr. Greenback, may have been the consummate knob twiddler, effectively fine tuning the money machine and smoothing the cycle of upswings and downturns, even winning the praise of a sceptical Milt. For his part, Mo was convinced that while there were times when the money machine needed to be manually guided through particularly difficult phases of the business cycle, fail-safes, beyond discretionary human control, could be built into the machine to prevent it from going out of control.

Today, 30 years later, the world is filled with hybrid knob twiddler-auto pilots who run the money machines the world over. They are highly educated, well intentioned, removed from the distractions of fractious politics, and capable of judiciously balancing multiple conflicting interests. They understand the limits of (others') human knowledge. They understand the weakness of (others') human nature. They promote the superiority of (their) expertise in resolving public policy disputes. They profess scientific objectivity in pursuit of good governance. They proclaim the practical imperative that the good of the many exceeds the sacrifice of the few. Finally, they 90

bring order and predictability, as governors of the money machines, into a world otherwise characterized by conflict and uncertainty.

Now that’s what you’d call progress! Some believe that with the Milt & Mo neo-synthesis we have reached the End of Economics.

Now, wouldn’t that be nice?

First published in Through the Gaps, July 6, 2014.