Joshua Gans revisits life among the econ, 50 years after the classic investigation by Axel Leijonhufvud.
In Leijonhufvud’s time there were two super-castes with different totems.
Today, however, the super-castes are hardly to be seen and the old totems have been replaced by a singular new totem:
The technology powering the Econ runs on one precious resource, d’ta, and the work of obtaining that d’ta rests with the grads. Upon arrival in the dept, they are immediately sent into the D’ta Mines and tasked with collecting seemingly impossible quantities of the resource. They toil in dirty and unsanitary conditions. Ironically, their next task is to painstakingly clean and polish the d’ta they have extracted one at a time — sometimes millions of individual items — so they can then be sorted and made available for processing. With luck, the grads may be assigned processing tasks that take place in windowless rooms twenty-four hours a day operating a single machine. The hope is that they can then produce the new high achievement of the Econ, a tabl. It is hard to describe what a tabl is to outsiders, but it represents the outcome of finely processed d’ta. The more the tabl contains bright, bejewelling in the form of star-like symbols (*), the more valuable it is. Failure to create a sufficiently dazzled tabl means being sent back to the mines.
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