The Greatest Asset

"The Greatest Asset" is a science fiction short story by Isaac Asimov. It was written as a 'sequel' to his story "2430 A.D." with the intention of refuting, rather than illustrating, the same quotation by J. B. Priestley. It was published in the January 1972 issue of "Analog" and reprinted in the 1975 collection "Buy Jupiter and Other Stories".

On a future Earth that has established a totally controlled and balanced ecology, the Secretary-General of Ecology, Ino Adrastus, controls all the ecology with the aid of massive computers. He is visited by Jan Marley, a science writer. Adrastus says that he is essentially a clerk whose sole task is to sign the directives produced by the computers. In the middle of their conversation, they are interrupted by Lou Tansonia, a medical researcher from the moon colony, whose proposal involving setting up experimental ecologies has been rejected by the computers. After Tansonia explains his proposal, Adrastus signs it against the recommendation of the computers. This leads Marley to think that he was there specifically to see this act.

After Tansonia leaves, Adrastus explains to him that a common saying attributed to Adrastus is slightly misquoted as being, "Man's Greatest Asset is a balanced ecology." Whereas it should say that "Man's greatest *need* is a balanced ecology. Man's greatest *asset* is the unsettled mind." This is because unsettled minds are a necessary prerequisite for "man to be man - which is more important than merely to live." Adrastus is then revealed to have engineered this encounter to fix this misattribution.

The quotation by Priestley runs:

Between midnight and dawn, when sleep will not come and all the old wounds begin to ache, I often have a nightmare vision of a future world in which there are billions of people, all numbered and registered, with not a gleam of genius anywhere, not an original mind, a rich personality, on the whole packed globe.