The Probability Broach, chapter 13
The North American Confederacy’s scientists explain to Win Bear how their breakthrough came about. Like many great scientific achievements, they stumbled across it by accident, while they were trying to create wormholes for space travel:
In 194 A.L., Paratronics, Ltd., attempting to reach beyond the limited range of ion-drive spaceships, stumbled upon the Probability Broach. Peering through a microscopic hole in the fabric of reality, they expected to view deep space from some vantage point other than their own solar system.
Instead, their first photograph showed:
NO PARKING
Reorienting themselves ninety degrees produced:
THE SILVER GRILL
FINE EATS SINCE 1935This was not Alpha Centauri. Nor could it be the Confederacy, which hadn’t used a Christian calendar for two centuries.
Realizing that they’ve stumbled upon a parallel universe, the Confederacy’s scientists study this strange new world:
Microprobes went into the hole: air, soil, and a few tiny insects came back for analysis. The atmosphere on the other side was filthy with hydrocarbons and other chemicals, the water similarly dirtied. One source was quickly identified as crude internal combustion vehicles. But why didn’t anyone drag their owners into court?
This is one of those passages that raises more questions than it solves.
It’s Smith’s attempt to show that his anarcho-capitalist society can deal with commons problems like pollution. No EPA needed—if someone is pumping toxic chemicals into your water or air, just sue them!
However, he still hasn’t dealt with the fact that in an anarchist society without laws or government, all legal systems have to be voluntary, by definition. What if the polluter just ignores your attempt to sue them? What if they’re a major employer in the region and the judge is in their pocket?
Or what if the source of the pollution is hundreds of miles away—do you have to pay out of your own pocket for a full scientific study to track down the source and identify the guilty party? What if you can’t afford that?
Also, what can’t you sue for? Any fire that burns wood, charcoal or natural gas releases lung-damaging particulates and toxic chemical compounds; that’s not scientifically controversial.
If you can sue your neighbor for driving a polluting car, can you also sue them for lighting a bonfire or a barbecue grill in their backyard—or even for cooking inside their own house? How far could someone with a grudge take this? Could they drag their neighbor into court every time he so much as looks in their direction?
Something Smith doesn’t appreciate is that laws can increase your freedom from harassment, by defining what is and isn’t a valid cause for complaint. Rather than the utopia of freedom he wants us to envision, a no-rules world where everyone has an unlimited right to sue for anything, no matter how trivial, might be more like a neighborhood with an oppressive, overbearing HOA.
Investigations proceeded slowly. Boring holes through reality is expensive: the university’s lights didn’t quite dim whenever they switched on the Broach; the comptrollers just felt that way. Even thermonuclear fusion had theoretical limits, and the Probability Broach approached them.
This chapter raises a vital question which Smith barely glances at: who pays for blue sky research in the North American Confederacy?
Is “scientist” a career in this world? If so, where does the funding come from that makes it possible? Who pays for basic research that’s often expensive, that comes with no guarantee of success, and that doesn’t have an immediate practical benefit in sight at the outset?
In our world, most basic research is funded by governments. There are good reasons for that. Governments, because they channel the productive power of an entire society, can fund science on a scale that a single wealthy individual or even a corporation couldn’t afford.
More importantly, governments aren’t commercial enterprises. They’re not constrained to make money in everything they do (and shouldn’t be!). They can afford to take the long view, funding research that doesn’t turn an immediate profit, but that ultimately benefits all society by expanding the knowledge base that makes further discoveries possible.
Thermonuclear fusion, which Smith mentions in this paragraph, is a classic example. Smith doesn’t explain how the North American Confederacy invented it or who funded the research, but it will never happen because of someone tinkering in a backyard shed. Building a working fusion reactor is a colossal project. If the real world ever manages it, it will be thanks to the efforts of an international alliance of nations that contributed billions of dollars for its construction and was willing to plug away at the problem for decades.
In general, a for-profit entity will only support research that serves a commercial purpose. A corporation might invent new pharmaceuticals or research better materials, but they’d never build something like the Large Hadron Collider, just on the off chance that a useful discovery might come from it.
But the paradox is that we owe many of our most valuable breakthroughs to pure curiosity-driven research that wasn’t undertaken to serve a commercial purpose.
Marie Curie didn’t envision nuclear reactors when she studied rocks that emitted a mysterious glow. Antonie van Leeuwenhoek didn’t anticipate germ theory, antibiotics or vaccines when he looked at pond water through a microscope. The scientists who studied unusual repeating DNA sequences in obscure bacteria didn’t know initially that it would turn out to be the most flexible and powerful gene editor ever found.
In fact, a purely capitalist society wouldn’t just lack the motivation to do fundamental research, they’d be positively disincentivized. Scientific progress depends on openness—on scientists freely sharing their methods and their results with each other, so they know what’s been tried and what doesn’t work, and so they can replicate, build on and refine other people’s discoveries. This would never happen in a world where competition and profit are supreme. For-profit corporations don’t help their competitors design better products. Their incentive is to hoard knowledge, not to share it.
This is why it’s important to organize a society where not everything needs to serve the profit motive. Antibiotics, space travel, nuclear power, GPS, the internet and CRISPR, among others, all came about because some people had the time and the freedom to imagine, to think, and to engineer without expectations of an immediate return.
Smith wants us to believe that the whole infrastructure of discovery can be easily replicated in a world where every university is for-profit and every scientific lab has to turn a quarterly profit. This is debatable, to say the least. If every scientist had to justify their research activities to shareholders, it’s extremely likely that most experiments would never be run, and the few that were would be forced down narrow, predictable channels. Imagine how many crucial discoveries would never be made if all science answered to the money men.
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This is why lots of inventions are based on government-funded basic research, which people as Smith can’t acknowledge. Of course, the result is afterward privatized. How fair to the taxpayer, who gets to pay twice (higher the second time, no doubt).
I was thinking about this “what’s in it for me?” society the other day, when I came across a Bluesky of a train in NYC being fitted out as a Polar Express by the WuTangClan (? I think it was them) and children were encouraged to pick out a gift for themselves as the train went about its everyday business up and down the lines. Why did this private group of people do it? Because they had all grown up not knowing whether they would get a gift at Christmas and deciding to make sure today”s kids got at least one gift. I can provide the link if anybody’s interested.
One thing that’s been bugging me about The Probability Broach since the beginning is why Ed cares about Win at all, and why he’s provided a home and medical care for him. The way the society is structured, Win has nothing to give Ed in return, so logically Ed wouldn’t care what happened to him.
Also, it’s blowing my mind that the Confederation (which reminds me of the south and the ultra-super-duper Kris-chun culture) wouldn’t use the common Christian dating convention. They seem to use the standard days of the week, so why might they have stopped using the conventional calendar that allows them to do business with the rest of the world, and what did they replace it with?!?
This occurred to me too.
Later in the book (as I recall), we learn that our side of the Broach does have technology never built in the NAC – atomic bombs, which apparently exist on our side, not on their side, not because governments are better at huge projects like that, because only a government would built such an evil thing.
There’s a line of dialogue which says that the NAC does have nuclear bombs, but the only thing they use them for is asteroid mining. Apparently it just never occurred to anyone in this world to use them as weapons.
Thanks. I had forgotten that people who lived through a major (like Lucy) never thought of using a large explosive device as a weapon.
Not even the Hamiltonians? You know, the super-evil statists who fought a war against the confederacy mere decades ago? It’s not just Smith’s heroes who are naive, but so are his villains.
Another big problem with pollution and the sort of simple strict liability that libertarians sometimes push is that it’s often impossible to draw a direct connection. If a company starts dumping some toxic chemicals in the water and the cancer rate doubles in the town that uses that water it’s fairly obvious why but that doesn’t mean that any specific cancer patient can show that the toxic chemicals are too blame.
There is also the problem of intentionally dodging liability that I can’t imagine Smith addresses at any point. Say company A has toxic waste they want to get rid of but just dumping it leaves them open to lawsuits. So they pay company B to dispose of the waste. Company B takes it and dumps it, then after a year company B dissolves and company C is formed from B’s assets. Company C then offers to dispose of the toxic waste, then company D after a while and so on. This sort of scam is a problem in the real world but their are laws that make company A liable for making sure that their toxic waste is disposed of properly, they can’t just pass off the liability. In Smith’s type of libertarian utopia any large company would be surrounded by a bunch of little grifters willing to take on toxic materials (waste, debt, contracts, etc) and gamble that they won’t blow up before they are disposed of.
I may have said this before but there’s no way for corporations to exist in Smith’s world. They aren’t natural like a sole proprietor or a partnership, they’re a legal entity created by government to allow people to invest sums of money with no liability. If that’s not so, owners are on the hook for damages if the company’s sued. That might be a disincentive to bad behavior — though Smith doesn’t strike me for the minute as someone who’d be arguing that corporations are a bad thing.
It’s an interesting point. I expect some form of corporation would exist because the basic idea evolved naturally in our world. Small companies had single owners, this lead to various forms of partnerships, which lead to systems where rich backers partnered with somebody who had the business expertise. These rich backers would then trade and sell their partial ownership of the companies. Governments only stepped in to regulate an existing unregulated market, and even then more so they could trace the money for tax purposes.
In a libertarian world the idea of a limited liability investment might be rejected. Anybody with an investment in the company would have some degree of liability for what the company did. Without government regulation every ownership deal would have it’s own terms. The broad outlines would be standardized but the details would vary, making trading complex and limiting the size of corporate structures.
I think this runs into the same problem these posts have made consistently — how does this work in a world with no government? Even in a small partnership with nobody crooked, things can run aground because the partners had completely different head-canon ideas of what they agreed to. The same is true of contract law in general, where if there’s no “meeting of the minds” there’s no contract. Without courts or trustworthy arbitration, how does that work out?
And the larger a joint ownership gets, the more problems everyone will have with trusting the other members. But of course it’s Earth-Happy Happy where everyone can be trusted except Hamiltonians.
JM: “It’s an interesting point. I expect some form of corporation would exist because the basic idea evolved naturally in our world. Small companies had single owners, this lead to various forms of partnerships, which lead to systems where rich backers partnered with somebody who had the business expertise. These rich backers would then trade and sell their partial ownership of the companies. Governments only stepped in to regulate an existing unregulated market, and even then more so they could trace the money for tax purposes.”
I don’t think this is true; I think that governments were involved in corporations from the very beginning, making it possible for this kind of artificial entity to make contracts, buy property, and the like – and to limit the liability of the investors. Imagine that corporation A has assets of one million dollars and is owned by B, C, and D (each of whom has wealth of ten million dollars). The corporation’s activities have caused someone (E) thirty million dollars of damages, and E would like that thirty million dollars now, thank you. In our universe, with governments, the corporation goes out of business, and E gets one million of the thirty he is owed, in compensation – but B, C, and D are otherwise in the clear (which is why they wanted a corporation in the first place), because the government has stated that the owners of the corporation have liability only to the extent of their investments.
In the NAC, whose going to tell E that B, C, and D are in the clear? And without limited liability, who is going to invest in risky activities?
A real-world case in point is Lloyd’s of London, one of the first insurance companies. Their investors (the “Names”) originally had unlimited personal liability for any losses incurred by the business:
https://www.argentagroup.com/news/Investing-at-Lloyds/2025/the-end-of-unlimited-liability–how-lloyd-s-of-london-rebuilt-tr
It’s not stated if there’s such a thing as a limited-liability corporation in the NAC, or if so, how it can exist. Would people just have to voluntarily agree to not sue investors for more than they put in?
This supports what Kevin Carson and the market anarchists have been saying all this time, that capitalism depends on the state for its existence, and so anarcho-capitalism is a contradiction in terms.
Who pays for basic research … ?
Hey, if Aristotle, Isaac Newton, Benjamin Franklin, Robert Boyle, Antoine Lavoisier, Charles Darwin, Ada Lovelace, Baron Rutherford, the young Albert Einstein, and Stephen Wolfram could do it…
Yes, my thought was that if everyone is so rich and well off, we could have lots of amateur scientists and engineers tackling projects or collaborating. Still a strain but in a better book I’d accept the handwave.
Though who the heck decided atomic bombs were a good thing to build? If they’re not using them as weapons, there’s got to be a better alternative these geniuses could have come up with. Or did they invent the cool kind of nukes that don’t have any fallout.
“If you can sue your neighbor for driving a polluting car, can you also sue them for lighting a bonfire or a barbecue grill in their backyard—or even for cooking inside their own house?”
Case in point, London smog wasn’t cleared up until the city cracked down on homeowners with coal fires because those little fireplaces added up to a lot of coal smoke.
Good point about corporations not existing in a world without the legal framework creating them. Although, when it comes to enforcing good behavior through suing people, how do they make people respect the authority of the private courts or arbitrators that handle the suits, in the absence of government, binding laws. police. etc.? In a world where everyone is armed, wouldn’t it come down to who could assemble the largest and/or best trained armed force?
It strikes me as very improbable that nobody would have seriously considered using nuclear devices as weapons.
Independent scientists are a possibility, but as science advances the equipment needed to do new research tends to get more complex and expensive, so most independent scientists would need to either be independently wealthy or be able to find wealthy patrons to fund their research. This would, I think, mean that there would be far fewer scientists doing basic research in an anarcho-capitalist world than in one where governments fund scientific research. In a hyper-capitalist world, most people would want to invest in research that has a good chance of being financially lucrative in the near future.
That’s why we need mutual aid.
I didn’t realize this till hours after reading this summary, not till I was at work, but the Confederates asking themselves why nobody in the other world has sued the polluters is worse than you realize. He is either claiming that all pollution is caused by government and that corporations do not pollute at all, a claim right up there with Holocaust denial and Stalin-apologetics, or else he is saying that pollution could be stopped in our world just by suing the polluters and that environmentalists are too “stupid” to realize this (or even going the “Rainbow Six” route of claiming they make up the whole environmental crisis out of scrupulosity and latent fascist tendencies.) In other words, he is placing all the blame on ordinary people so as to get giant corporations off the hook.
If you’ve ever thought about your own “carbon footprint”, or worse still made changes in your life specifically to reduce it by cutting back on things that made your life more convenient or comfortable (e.g. not taking that foreign holiday because of the “carbon footprint” of air travel), you’ve fallen for this lie.
Bugger, forgot the link: https://nonprofitnewsfeed.com/resource/the-carbon-footprint-how-big-oil-reframed-and-blamed-climate-change-on-the-consumer/