# Quote — Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars

> ...there’s all kinds of phantom work! Unreal values assigned to most of the jobs on Earth! The entire transnational executive class does nothing a computer couldn’t do, and there are whole categories of parasitical jobs that add nothing to the system by an ecologic accounting. Advertising, stock brokerage, the whole apparatus for making money only from the manipulation of money—that is not only wasteful but corrupting, as all meaningful money values get distorted in such manipulation.” She waved a hand in disgust.

- Author: [Kim Stanley Robinson](https://www.leafyquotes.com/kim-stanley-robinson.md)
- Book: [Red Mars](https://www.leafyquotes.com/kim-stanley-robinson/red-mars.md)
- Page: 299
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Kim_Stanley_Robinson#Red_Mars_(1992)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/kim-stanley-robinson/red-mars/theres-all-kinds

## More from this book

> In games there are rules, but in life the rules keep changing.

p. 431 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/kim-stanley-robinson/red-mars/in-games-there.md)

> The weakness of businessmen was their belief that money was the point of the game; they worked 14-hour days in order to earn enough of it to buy cars with leather interiors, they thought it was a sensible recreation to play around with it in casinos—idiots, in short. But useful idiots.

p. 395 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/kim-stanley-robinson/red-mars/the-weakness-of-businessmen.md)

> “Being on Mars will change us in an evolutionary way.”
>
> Arkady shook his head vehemently, causing him to spin a little in the air over the table. “No, no, no, no! History is not evolution! It is a false analogy! Evolution is a matter of environment and chance, acting over millions of years. But history is a matter of environment and choice, acting within lifetimes, and sometimes within years, or months, or days! History is Lamarckian! So that if we choose to establish certain institutions on Mars, there they will be! And if we choose others, there they will be!”

p. 88 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/kim-stanley-robinson/red-mars/being-on-mars.md)