# The Manual Economy

_\[An attempt at fiction in the style of Scott Alexander. With bits of Lewis Carroll and Douglas Adams thrown in for good measure. Cross-posted from [Grand, Unified, Empty](https://grandunifiedempty.com/2020/08/07/the-manual-economy/).\]_

The hallucination started out so normally, I completely forgot that I was tripping.

I was at the dentist, and I had just had my teeth cleaned. You know the drill, the hygienist goes through your teeth with this little spray nozzle that gets into all the cracks and cavities you pretend don’t exist when you’ve got a brush in there. Then they make you hold some disgusting not-quite-mint not-quite-water in your mouth, and swish, and spit. And spit. And spit. And after about the third blessed mouthful of _real_ water, you can vaguely taste something other than not-quite-mint, until your salivary glands give up the ghost entirely and your mouth turns into the Sahara desert.

As I said, it was _weirdly_ normal for a trip. I’d been expecting unicorns, or aliens, or a sky made up of funky colours and mystical cactus people who could factor large numbers. But I was at the dentist. If I’d wanted a trip to the dentist, I would have just gone to the dentist. It would have been cheaper, and probably better for my teeth.

The entire dental experience was so totally normal I completely forgot I was tripping until I went to pay, and I couldn’t find my credit card. Or any cash. My wallet had a driver’s license and various other identification cards, but no payment at all. The receptionist smiled at me politely.

“Is everything alright? Can I help you”?

I winced. “I’m sorry, I seem to have misplaced all my money, I’m not going to be able to pay my bill today”.

There was a confused pause. A giant hand walked past waving an umbrella and whistling show tunes. The receptionist winked at me with both eyes at once. I suddenly knew, somehow, that I didn’t need to pay, so I turned and walked out the door. Across the street was a bank, so I floated forward until I was inside.

The bank, like the dentist, seemed totally normal. There were no lines, but that was expected for mid-afternoon on a Tuesday. I rolled over to one of the tellers.

“Excuse me”, I said, “I seem to have lost my credit card, can you help me”?

There was another confused pause. The bank teller turned into a giant hand and flew away. The entire bank building sort of dissolved as the buildings on either side squeezed together to fill up the space. I ended up on the sidewalk outside a Starbucks.

I didn’t even like Starbucks.

Sitting outside the Starbucks was a homeless person whose baseball cap kept flickering as if it couldn’t make up its mind. First it was on their head, but then \*pop\*, it was on the sidewalk in front of them with a few coins in it, and then \*pop\*, it was gone entirely. And then it was suddenly on their head again. After a few seconds of this my own head started to hurt, so I stared at the sidewalk extra hard until the homeless person turned into a giant hand, and the baseball cap was arrested for multiplying entities beyond necessity.

The hand spoke to me. “Now look what you’ve done! It’s hard enough to coordinate this economy without some yokel trying to physically instantiate all of the mechanisms”!

There was a third confused pause, but this time the hand just sat there looking disgruntled until I finally echoed its statement back as a question. “You… coordinate the entire economy”?

“Yes of course I do”, the hand replied, “somebody has to do it or this whole place would fall apart. How else does food get to everyone who needs it, let alone all the other goods and services”!

I blinked. “So, you’re, literally, the invisible hand of the market”?

“Well I _was_“, the hand said waspishly. “But do I look invisible to you”?

“Oh, sorry about that”, I apologized. “So my money and credit card, and the bank and everything? They all disappeared because they’re… _you_? Or manifestations of you, or something”?

The hand glared at me. “I’m a hand”, it said, waving at itself sarcastically. “It seems awfully rude of you to talk to _me_ about _manifestations_. Until you came along, I had no need of them at all”! It huffed. “Now here I am, trying to coordinate an economy the size of a planet, and instead of being a magical omniscient force I’m trapped in a giant disembodied appendage. What am even I supposed to do with all of these fingers”?

I giggled. “I dunno, you could say that the economy just went… _digital_“.

The hand rolled its eyes, but I had a lot more ready.

“Oh come on, you’ve got to hand me that one. No? You’re not going to clap back? Well come on then, let me give you a hand coming up with a response. I’m pretty handy with this sort of thing, in fact…”

Ten minutes later, I finally ran out of steam with a complicated pun about greased palms and coconut oil, that even I admitted was a stretch. At this point, the hand had finally had enough.

“Look”, it said, “maybe in your universe the economy is coordinated by these magical distributed pieces of paper and electronic numbers, and nobody has ultimate responsibility for the economy. But in this universe, none of that exists; the buck stops with me. I’ve been listening to you make hand puns for ten minutes, and in that time the entire economy has ground to a halt because I haven’t been there to ensure the right transactions occur at the right time. In some sense I don’t just coordinate the economy – I _am_ the economy”.

I shook my head. “That can’t be right”, I said, “the economy isn’t made up of pieces of paper and numbers, the economy is all of the _real_ things that get moved around because of that coordination. Just because you took a few minutes off to…”, I giggled again, “_manifest_, as a giant hand, farms are still growing food, factories are still producing goods, the economy is still going! Transport truck drivers didn’t all go on strike because you took a small break”!

“That’s exactly my point!” said the hand. “Truck drivers _were_ on strike when you started your little game, but that strike required coordinated action which _I_ provided. When I started slacking off all those truck drivers got bored and left the picket line to follow their individual inclinations, and now it’s chaos”!

At this point I could feel the drugs starting to wear off, but the hand was still going.

“They’re not striking, or trucking, or anything useful at all! The entire economy is crumbling like the twin towers after that so-called plane crash!”

The bank reappeared beside the Starbucks, and the entire row of buildings shifted down to accommodate.

“It’s all the governments fault, them and their secret mind control beams out to steal your thoughts!”

The not-invisible giant hand shrank in size until it was a normal hand, attached to a normal homeless person, still talking about the implications of omniscient economic coordination and various other conspiracy theories. My teeth started to hurt.

I’ve written this trip report in an attempt to jog my own memory. Something that the hand said during our conversation really resonated with me, and I just know the next Nobel prize in economics is mine if I can only remember what it was…

I just _can’t_ put my finger on it.