Comments on: The economics of abundance

By: Matt

Matt — Thu, 11 Sep 2003 00:45:31 +0000

Couple of points: 1)I suspect Iain Banks did not have libertarian ideas in mind for the Culture, he would tend towards anarchist ideas, he is very much on the left. The Culture seems like an “anarchist/libertarian” set up but I think in fact that its a benign dictatorship. The Minds/ships do the heavy lifting – formulating long term policies, thinking about stuff, generally organising while humans are just along for the ride, they dont have a scarcity problem, life is just one long holiday. 2)Downloadable MP3s are available for free/very low cost yet if one checks ebay one will find thousands of 2nd hand CDs for sale and people are willing to pay good money for them. They still have a regard for the artifact itself, not just the tracks on the CD.

By: Maureen

Maureen — Mon, 08 Sep 2003 20:36:08 +0000

Rich—Regarding the “machine-generated attention that so effectively mirrors human attention that it can’t be differentiated”, I don’t think most people will go for that—in a philosophy class I took last year we discussed going into a virtual reality where everyone loved you and your knowledge of the unreality of the situation was erased. If given a choice, most of us would reject this virtual reality in favor of the real world; we wanted our human contact to be real and we wanted to truly matter to other (philosophical) actors. If a machine is programmed to pay attention to you, the attention is meaningless because the machine has none of what we call free will (whatever that is) and thus cannot be spoken of as a philosophical actor. (Perhaps this is why demagogue dictators crave more and more public support—as they sap the free will of individuals, they subconciously realize that they’re decreasing the value of the attention/adoration they receive.) On a more materialistic basis, people still buy real, natural diamonds even though few can tell them apart from cubic zirconia and they’re physically identical to synthetic diamonds. We—or at least American society—place a specific worth to authenticity.

By: Michael Sinclair

Michael Sinclair — Mon, 08 Sep 2003 01:19:32 +0000

Your original report brought to mind a novel from the early seventies which it has taken me until today to dig up: John Brunner, “Total Eclipse” (Doubleday, NY, 1974). It was an archaelogical puzzle; why had this race which had a super abundance of material goods so quickly become extinct? Economic competition was for genetic breeding rights; with success came hereditary concentration of wealth, and by the time they realized it, it was too late, the society was genetically bankrupt. At the time I remember thinking it simply an analogue of money. Another curious example might be the punishments meted out in the movie “Zardoz”: where people lived forever, offenders were “aged” a number of years according to the crime. Perhaps in such a society competition could be for years.

By: Ray

Ray — Sun, 07 Sep 2003 00:06:02 +0000

Gotta put in a plug for Delany’s “Trouble on Triton”, which posited a satellite economy based on 1960s ideals of abundance, set a deliberately engineered third-world Earth against it, and centered an unhappy libertarian protagonist in it.

By: Jonathan Wilde

Jonathan Wilde — Sat, 06 Sep 2003 22:27:38 +0000

Can you go into more detail about what makes these works more economically ‘literate’ and ‘sophisticated’?

By: ajay

ajay — Fri, 05 Sep 2003 14:52:14 +0000

Rich: Of course, in the recent Culture novels he is starting to deal with the issues raised: in “Look to Windward” an enormous one-off concert is described as “worth inventing money for” in the sense that tickets are valued and scarce; but of course, there are very few things that ticket holders will accept in exchange…romantic favours being about the only one. And in “Excession” we start to see that the Minds are not exactly free from the lust for power that afflicts humans. I love the argument against time travel, based on the existence of interest rates (see Hanson’s page). Can anyone remind me who came up with the economic rationale for FTL travel (basically people deposit money in long-term high-interest accounts and then take a relativistic holiday)? Despite its sound, it wasn’t Douglas Adams…

By: Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 05 Sep 2003 13:57:44 +0000

Hey, Henry! I’m a Canadian!

By: Chirag Kasbekar

Chirag Kasbekar — Thu, 04 Sep 2003 19:58:44 +0000

Henry, I’m not the most avid sf reader in the world—far from it—even though I’ve sort of inherited a small library of sf books from my father. But I like the genre for the potential it offers social science. In any case, I don’t know if you’ve come across Robin Hanson’s “The Economics of Science Fiction” page. So here it is: http://hanson.gmu.edu/econofsf.html

By: Simon Jester

Simon Jester — Thu, 04 Sep 2003 18:28:16 +0000

I think just about all British science fiction has a leftish bias; the closest thing to a piece of right-wing SF produced by a British author (that I can think of) is the last chapter of Bob Shaw’s “The Peace Machine”. And only the last chapter.

By: WIll Wilkinson

WIll Wilkinson — Thu, 04 Sep 2003 18:24:05 +0000

It’s really pretty absurd to suggest we can ever get over scarcity. Many goods are goods because they are essentially scarce. Take the property of BEING THE MOST POPULAR ROCKSTAR or HAVING THE BIGGEST APARTMENT OVERLOOKING CENTRAL PARK. These are highly desirable properties, but cannot be multiply instantiated. Economists can very well discuss competition over the scarcity of this sort of thing. As Natalie points out attention is scarce, which is what entertainment providers compete over. It will not become significantly less scarce. Also, time is scarce. How to budget time, and how to understand the costs of foregone alternatives, is perhaps the most fundamental economic issue. Even immortality does not solve this problem. How does the ability to create whole spaceships out of ambient matter affect this AT ALL?

By: Rich Puchalsky

Rich Puchalsky — Thu, 04 Sep 2003 17:16:06 +0000

Funny—there was a discussion (well, more like a monologue) on the Usenet group alt.books.iain-banks just a little while ago, under the thread called “Social limits to growth”, in which people tried to work out whether there were ways of getting around even limits on positional goods. I suggested that if you had intelligent machines that a) didn’t require much attention themselves and b) could pay attention to millions of people at once in a way that felt similar to human attention, that even some positional goods could become plentiful and post-economic. Banks avoids the issue of positional goods by having intelligent machines called Minds do all the leadership jobs, and by assuming that the Minds themselves don’t have all the problems that humans do with competition for and use of power.

By: ajay

ajay — Thu, 04 Sep 2003 14:43:35 +0000

Hmm. Wrote a piece on this once: there are some goods that even in a Banks/Stephenson utopia will be scarce. Even if the Source will build you essentially any material object you want, you will still need power – electricity or whatever – to run all your new material goods. Which will need to be generated somehow from some scarce resource (sunlight/geothermal/uranium/deuterium). Also living space: a Source can’t build unlimited numbers of Park Lane apartments, for obvious reasons; nor can it magically expand the number of Mount Everests, so the Nepalese government will still be able to charge $60 000 to climb it. Also rare elements (although extraction from seawater through nanotech may make these easier). Creativity has also been mentioned, but what about all the other “human services”? Doctors, actors, servants, managers, lawyers… most of these can’t be replaced without significant changes in society and/or AI advances, and some not even then. Governments. Politicians. Policemen. University (as someone mentions). So even in a post-scarcity society, we will still be having arguments about zoning laws, universal healthcare provision, frivolous lawsuits, tax cuts and the growth of the state. [Banks and other real post-scarcity utopians get round this by introducing a) lots of strong AI and b) anarchy.]

By: Natalie Solent

Natalie Solent — Thu, 04 Sep 2003 10:59:10 +0000

Someone once said that there will always be one limited resource – attention. You don’t have time to do everything or even think about everything. Even now, some economic decisions revolve about competition for time. The only SF way round that would be artificially enhanced brains, so that we could process information much faster. But I suspect that a story about creatures so far from our present state would be very hard to write. BTW, as a libertarian I don’t see why I should ‘not like’ the idea of abundance. It sounds great to me. The underlying point of libertarianism is – surprise! – liberty, not the transient details of this millenium’s economy.

By: John James

John James — Thu, 04 Sep 2003 10:46:44 +0000

A negative take on what happens in an economy of abundance is E.M. Forster’s ‘The Machine Stops’ – where a machine provides for all material needs and earthlings have moved underground. Basic message: this is a life in which human potential cannot be realised. Anyway, I question whether absolute abundance, in every sense, is a theoretical possibility. I agree that it is possible to imagine that all our material and bodily needs will some day be met. However, can the same be said of informational/cultural/spiritual (whatever you call them) ‘needs’. If we assume that human imagination knows no limits and that there are an infinite possible ‘information/knowledge’ outputs, Say’s law would suggest that we can go on producing and consuming information/knowledge for all eternity. I accept that the magic of non-rivalry implies that consumption of these outputs will be on a non-market basis (i.e. for free). Nevertheless, the organisation of production may still require some assistance from economists.

By: Nabakov

Nabakov — Thu, 04 Sep 2003 09:29:31 +0000

Bruce Sterling’s novels’ ‘Schismatrix’, ‘Islands In The Net’ and his Mechanist/Shaper short stories, all published in the early eighties, placed economic and political issues arising from new technologies squarely at the centre of their narratives.