Reading old SF without a nostalgia factor is weird. There are all sorts of things just off with the unspoken assumptions of the author, and the extrapolations b

Reading old SF without a nostalgia factor is weird. There are all sorts of things just off with the unspoken assumptions of the author, and the extrapolations built on those make the whole story seem skewed. This one looks like it was meant to work as a literal story as well as an allegorical one. Now that it's too dated for that, the allegorical part gets bogged down in the detailed explanations of arithmetic by hand and is a bit vague on exactly what the people who don't bother are missing.