Free Forty Signs of Rain by Kim Stanley Robinson Page B

triggering global repercussions; this meant, in practice, almost everything that happened. This week for instance it was tornadoes, previously confined almost entirely to NorthAmerica, as a kind of freak of that continent’s topography and latitude, but now appearing in East Africa and in Central Asia. Last week it had been the weakening of the Great World Ocean Current in the Indian Ocean rather than the Atlantic.
    “Unbelievable,” Frank would say.
    “I know. Isn’t it great?”
    Before leaving for home at the end of the day, Frank often passed by another source of news, the little room filled with file cabinets and copy machines, informally called “The Department of Unfortunate Statistics.” Someone had started to tape on the beige walls of this room extra copies of pages that held interesting statistics or other bits of recent quantitative information. No one knew who had started the tradition, but now it was clearly a communal thing.
    The oldest ones were headlines, things like:
    W ORLD B ANK P RESIDENT S AYS F OUR B ILLION L IVE ON L ESS T HAN T WO D OLLARS A D AY
    or
    A MERICA: F IVE P ERCENT OF W ORLD P OPULATION , F IFTY P ERCENT OF C ORPORATE O WNERSHIP
    Later pages were charts or tables of figures out of journal articles, or short articles of a quantitative nature out of the scientific literature.
    When Frank went by on this day, Edgardo was in there at the coffee machine, as he so often was, looking at the latest. It was another headline:
    352 R ICHEST P EOPLE O WN AS M UCH AS THE P OOREST T WO B ILLION , S AYS C ANADIAN F OOD P ROJECT
    “I don’t think this can be right,” Edgardo declared.
    “How so?” Frank said.
    “Because the poorest two billion have nothing, whereas the richest three hundred and fifty-two have a big percentage of the world’s total capital. I suspect it would take the poorest four billion at least to match the top three hundred and fifty.”
    Anna came in as he was saying this, and wrinkled her nose as she went to the copying machine. She didn’t like this kind of conversation, Frank knew. It seemed to be a matter of distaste for belaboring the obvious. Or distrust in the data. Maybe she was the one who had taped up the brief quote:
72.8% of all statistics are made up on the spot
.
    Frank, wanting to bug her, said, “What do you think, Anna?”
    “About what?”
    Edgardo pointed to the headline and explained his objection.
    Anna said, “I don’t know. Maybe if you add two billion small households up, it matches the richest three hundred.”
    “Not this top three hundred. Have you seen the latest
Forbes 500
reports?”
    Anna shook her head impatiently, as if to say, Of course not, why would I waste my time? But Edgardo was an inveterate student of the stock market and the financial world in general. He tapped another taped-up page. “The average surplus value created by American workers is thirty-three dollars an hour.”
    Anna said, “I wonder how they define surplus value.”
    “Profit,” Frank said.
    Edgardo shook his head. “You can cook the books and get rid of profit, but the surplus value, the value created beyond the pay for the labor, is still there.”
    Anna said, “There was a page in here that said the average American worker puts in 1,950 hours a year. I thought that was questionable too, that’s forty hours a week for about forty-nine weeks.”
    “Three weeks of vacation a year,” Frank pointed out. “Pretty normal.”
    “Yeah, but that’s the average? What about all the part-time workers?”
    “There must be an equivalent number of people who work overtime.”
    “Can that be true? I thought overtime was a thing of the past.”
    “You work overtime.”
    “Yeah but I don’t get
paid
for it.”
    The men laughed at her.
    “They should have used the median,” she said. “The average is a skewed measure of central tendency. Anyway, that’s …” Anna could do calculations in her head. “Sixty-four thousand three hundred and fifty dollars a