Wealth & Money Quote by Arthur C. Clarke

Clarke lands the joke with engineer-grade precision: honesty, he suggests, is least reliable when it can be outsourced to paperwork and most revealing when it’s measured in private, by a device that doesn’t care about your narrative. An income tax return is social-facing truth, negotiated through loopholes, accountants, and a whole culture of plausible deniability. The bathroom scale is intimate truth, a daily referendum you administer to yourself. “Zero adjust” is the killer phrase: not the reading, but the temptation to rig the baseline, to make self-deception feel objective.

The intent isn’t really about dieting or taxes; it’s about the small, voluntary corruptions that lubricate ordinary life. Clarke, the sci-fi rationalist, smuggles a moral point through a calibration metaphor. In a world he often wrote about - one defined by systems, instruments, and the limits of human perception - the scale becomes a miniature technology of accountability. It’s also a subtle jab at modernity’s fetish for quantification: if we worship numbers, we’ll also learn to game them.

Context matters: Clarke wrote across an era when bureaucratic identity thickened (forms, audits, credentials) and consumer tech colonized the home. He’s poking at the gap between public virtue and private habits, arguing that integrity isn’t proven by what you disclose when required, but by what you resist falsifying when no one’s watching. The scale’s “zero” is conscience as a setting you can tamper with - and that’s why the line stings.