Беседы с дочерью об экономике

When the prisoners got word—often by listening to makeshift radios they had built behind their guards’ backs—that the German army was making gains in Russia, they assumed that they would remain captive for a very long time. As a result, prices tended to stabilize. But when they started to realize that the war was nearing its end, foreshadowing their liberation and the elimination of their little economy, the interest rates that bankers offered to savers (rather than the ones they charged for loans) skyrocketed, since nobody wanted to save.

One night Allied bombers hammered the area where the camp was located. The bombs landed closer and closer, some falling in the camp itself. All night long the prisoners wondered whether they would live to see daybreak. The next day the exchange value of cigarettes had gone through the roof! Why? Because over the course of that endless night, surrounded by exploding bombs and consumed by anxiety, the prisoners had smoked cigarette after cigarette. In the morning the total number of cigarettes had shrunk dramatically in relation to the other goods. If previously five cigarettes had been needed to buy one chocolate bar, now only one cigarette was needed to buy that same bar.
In short, the bombardment had caused what is known as price deflation—a decrease in all prices as a result of a reduction of the quantity of money in relation to all other goods. The opposite, a general increase in prices as a result of a larger quantity of money in the overall system, is known as price inflation.

Are you still human now? Of course you are. What if now we move on to the brain? What if, for example, we place a microchip in a strategically located part of your brain—as is done to alleviate the symptoms of patients suffering from Parkinson’s disease—in order to improve your reflexes? Again, I suppose, behind all this technology you will be the same old Xenia.
But what if we then replace another bit of your brain? And another? And another? To cut to the chase, if we keep going, at some point something will be replaced in you that means you are no longer you, and ultimately there will come a point when you will indeed have become an android.