Adults and Children in IJ, and a little Economics/Finance

For the first time, I think I found an instance in which I could hypothesize why two passages were located where they were in the book. The passage from 317-321 and then the passage from 321-342 make a direct contrast in whether the people in the USA are like children or like adults. The passage from 317-321 is a discussion between Marathe and Steeply about freedom. Steeply and Marathe talk about how US citizens are like children in the sense that they only have 'freedom-from'. Freedom-from meaning that they have freedom from oppression, censorship, duress, and other forces. However, US citizens do not have 'freedom-to'. They do not have the freedom to choose what they wish to do because they were never taught how to chose. Marathe says that US citizens will end up just choosing to satiate their most immanent desires, and he says this by saying how US citizens are like children. Children who want candy. He says that US citizens will not stop in pursuit of the candy that one might dangle in front of their face. They want instant gratification. This idea is continued in the discussion between Marathe and Steeply between pages 418-430 in which they talk about how each individual wants instant gratification. On page 428, they talk about how the delayed gratification of giving a can of soup to someone else is a smaller magnitude of gratification than eating the can of soup yourself. In Economics, this is referred to as a "discount value", meaning that things of a certain value in the future must be discounted when compared to values of things in the present. Reading this section reminded me what my Economics professor from this past summer said about discount values. He said that the people with the highest discount values are 6-year olds. A 6-year old will whine and nag for an ice cream cone right now, and the prospect of getting two or three ice cream cones in a week or so instead of the cone right now is worthless, because the future prospects are worth nothing to the 6-year old. They are highly discounted. So my point is that Marathe and Steeply's conversations about freedom and choice lead to the indication that the freedoms of US citizens have effectively rendered them to be children.


Now my point of contrast and about the relative location of passages. From page 321-342, the kids, the younger kids in fact, play the game of Eschaton. This game is far more complicated than any game I have ever played. There are specific rules, complicated strategies, game theory, computer statistics, negotiations, politics, and history and current events that all play major roles in Eschaton. What I thought was particularly strange was that Eschaton was played by the younger of the children at ETA, and that the older kids were only spectators. For the first part of the game, and from what I gather took place in all previous games, these young kids conducted themselves very professionally during this game and abided by all rules. They conducted complicated and well thought out strategies and played for a very long time that I would not expect 12-15 year olds would be able to focus for. This section gave me the feeling that these kids were very mature for their age and were more like adults than kids. This contrasts with the previous section that made the adults in society out to be more like children. Now of course the game did break down in a very childlike (and humorously depicted) fashion in the end, but for the first part of the game and in all previous years of the game, these children acted with maturity and the coolheadedness of actual world leaders (or terrorist cell leaders, I wasn't quite sure).

On another note, does B.S. stand for something like Before Subsidized time? That was my guess, but I couldn't tell for sure.

-LT