The truth was, Lowell Stackhouse hadn’t been proven wrong, about anything. He remained confident that well into the indefinite future the US could have continued to accumulate a quiet, steadily climbing national debt while keeping a foot on interest rates, which had been so low for so long that ages ago it became standard practice for banks to charge hefty fees for the bother of stashing your cash. For debt is an engine of growth, and fattens the pie for everyone. Why, imagine a world in which you need cash in hand to buy a house: the middle class would purchase a home around the age of eighty. “Neither a borrower nor a lender be” was the motto of a public that swung from trees. Lowell’s avoidance of debt in his own life was a psychological problem; perhaps in childhood he’d felt a discomfort with accruing an implicit debt to his scrimping parents for taking care of him that a little boy could never pay back. Because philosophically, he believed in debt—leveraging, for the sophisticate—which down through the ages had earned an undeservedly tainted reputation. He didn’t even care for the word forgiven in relation to a liability that’s been written off, implying that a loan is a sin. What was wrong in America at the moment? Not indebtedness but an inability to borrow: that is, lack of indebtedness. However temporarily, the United States couldn’t buy a house.
Lowell’s reasoned, seasoned positions were the braver for also being unpopular. Yet in what passed for his own home, he got no respect. While even an economist was reluctant to reduce all of life to dollars and cents, people revere work that pays. Presently, the work of the mind didn’t pay. In the USA of 2031, scientists, academics, and engineers suffered a lower status than the all-hallowed farmer.
Witness: in August, Lowell’s feckless brother-in-law Jarred made a run down to the city, his pickup laden with fruits and vegetables from his kooky dude ranch in Gloversville. Having ridiculed the backwards agrarian project from the start, even Avery treated her younger brother’s arrival in Brooklyn like the Second Coming, while the kids jumped up and down and danced around in a frenzy they were all too old for. You’d think they’d never seen a tomato. Not that their uncle’s trip from upstate had been motivated by familial largesse. Jarred bestowed on his kin a few potatoes, early apples, and bunches of kale, but the majority of the haul had been reserved for the market at Grand Army Plaza, where the price gouging was criminal. So long as farmers were able to flip the money quickly into hard assets like seed and equipment and other people’s foreclosed property, the entire agricultural sector was making profits hand over fist.
Having lost his own house and credit cards, Lowell had to admit that it rankled: depreciation of the dollar had allowed his irresponsible, blowhard brother-in-law to painlessly pay off the fixed-rate mortgage of so-called “Citadel” in full, as well as to dispatch the debt from previous whimsies. Having taught his students at Georgetown that the evaporation of debt was one of the most marvelous powers of inflation, Lowell was comfortable with macroeconomic “injustice” in the service of systemic correction. That he couldn’t quite install his own dogma on a private, emotional level probably constituted an intellectual failing: microeconomic injustice, up close and personal, bugged him as much as the next guy.
By contrast, Lowell was purely relieved that their friends Tom Fortnum and Belle Duval were doing all right, even if Tom’s fleXts to him and Belle’s to Avery emphasized the negative out of discomfiture. Shortly before the Renunciation, Belle’s parents had taken early retirement while still in good health. Investing the profits from an app start-up in the naughts, they’d bought a top-of-the-line e-RV, and had plans for a global tour. Cut to the chase, all that was left was the e-RV, parked permanently in Tom and Belle’s drive. Yet all misery is relative: unlike Lowell’s in-laws in Carroll Gardens, at least Belle’s mother still knew the difference between a hairbrush and an aardvark, and the parents didn’t exactly live in the house. Tom and Belle’s kids were attending second-tier colleges, but they weren’t kicking around their aunt’s mildewed basement, or worse, turning tricks in town for pocket money, as Avery claimed Savannah had. (Lowell didn’t kid himself that his daughter was a virgin, but for Avery to mistake the girl’s footloose experimentation for whoring… Really. The gorgeous but aging mother jealous of her alluring daughter—couldn’t his family come up with something fresh?) Bottom line: Tom worked for Justice, and Belle’s patients were mostly Medicare. When financed by loose monetary policy, government expenditure is most valuable when first spent; high inflation would erode both Tom’s and Belle’s incomes only as the cash infusion rippled through the larger economy. Both government salaries and Medicare reimbursement rates were now linked to an inflation algorithm that didn’t require further action from Congress. Even if a Snickers bar eventually cost five billion dollars, they were safe.
Odiously, Ryan Biersdorfer and his sidekick Lin Yu Houseman were better than safe. While The Corrections couldn’t rake in the royalties of the old hardbacks, Biersdorfer had cannily priced the download so low that for better-heeled foreign buyers it was too much trouble to go looking for a pirated copy, and the pittances added up. More substantially, he was much in demand on the lucrative international lecture circuit. That meant earning bancors (doubtless through an offshore shell company), and the currency confoundingly did nothing but appreciate. So rather than convert his foreign income to dollars, required for repatriation, Biersdorfer was reputedly buying up real estate in Paris, Tuscany, Hanoi, and Jakarta. Any American who championed his own country’s collapse as well-deserved payback and promise of socialist rebirth was a treasured performing bear abroad, since most of the fatuous economist’s serious scholarly competition back home couldn’t bankroll airfares. Europeans were fascinated by the rare Yank who had been allowed out of the country, thus moronically conflating capital controls and controls on freedom of movement. (On second thought, maybe being at liberty to go wherever you want so long as you don’t spend any money there is fairly tantamount to house arrest.) Typically, too, Biersdorfer and his sexy Asian yes-woman spent little to no time in the US these days, which apparently made them ideal interlocutors for explaining to the rest of the world what it was like here.
Lowell wasn’t hung up on masculinity, but it was hard on a fellow, having to appeal to his sister-in-law for the means to acquire a new lip balm and then being abjured to please use a dab of lard instead. So when in October of ’31, Georgetown finally came through with his back pay for the summer before last, he felt literally flush: his blood vessels dilated, his cheeks ruddied, the tips of his fingers tingled. Determined to be an asset for once, Lowell offered munificently to do the week’s shopping.
He shook out some slacks and a stylish shirt, both worn only ten days since their last wash. (The competition for washing loads was fierce, and he tended to cede the two items permitted per resident to poor Savannah.) Grandly, he filled the Jaunt’s gas tank to the brim. Outside Green Acre Farm, he relished the ease of parking, since few Brooklynites could manage the costs of running a car. Sashaying through the entrance with a whistle, Lowell found his posture had improved, his first realization that it had ever deteriorated. His pink suede loafers may have been blemished in places, but they still drew glances from afar. He felt like a man, a real man, for the first time in months, a sensation startlingly reliant on trouser pockets that bulged with banded cash.