Comments on: Speculative Economics

By: ian

ian — Wed, 21 Jul 2004 17:02:57 +0000

Gladiator at Law was Pohl and Kornbluth, not Mack Reynolds. I had forgotten him however, I remember one of his stories was based around the idea of the Soviet Union outproducing the US on everything from consumer products to big engineering. I think he used the ‘universal basic’ idea in several stories.

By: Dave F

Dave F — Tue, 20 Jul 2004 09:39:46 +0000

I regret having forgotten to mention the socialist SF writer Mack Reynolds, whose work explores utopian worlds based largely on centrally run economies. His most memorable idea for me was a society in which each individual is given an equal birthright of a certain number of credits, to make of what he or she will. This has been described as a meritocracy, but I don’t think that is quite adequate. Best known work: “Looking Backward from the Year 2000” although the best read is the pulpier “Gladiator at Law”. No great prose writer, however. Still, nor were Asimov or Clarke.

By: Nick W.

Nick W. — Tue, 20 Jul 2004 02:01:13 +0000

Sigivald: well, my answer is yes and no. You are right that latinum is a poorly expressed symbol for the reintroduction of scarcity. However, it was accompanied, both in the later years of TNG and roughly the second half of DS9, by a variety of economic factors that generally point to scarcity. For example: the energy costs of replication are more heavily emphasized, meaning of course that energy itself, or the ability to produce it, is a form commodity. (As you suggest with your comments on dilithium.) A clearly explained economic foundation? No. Certainly not. But I think the more interesting point here is the way that the reintroduction of scarcity economics (at least symbolically) correlates with the general emergence of Trek’s later self-avowed “noir-ish” feel. Star Trek’s allegory up to that point had been “Wagon Train to the Stars,” but after this shift it seems closer to “Maltese Falcon.” Why that shift occurs is a topic for fascinating debate.

By: Sigivald

Sigivald — Mon, 19 Jul 2004 23:21:06 +0000

Nick: Ah, but wasn't latinum just a cheap hack by the writers to re-introduce scarcity, once they realised that they needed things for people to have conflict about? (Though why latinum should be valuable at all merely because it cannot be replicated is beyond me. It has no explained use-value, that I recall, and in an economy with no other scarcity of goods to speak of, what good is it? Why exactly anyone would want latinum at all, is not very well explained. (Except perhaps for trade with outside groups who have scarcity, but why would they want it? At least dilithium is useful and scarce. And no, I'm really not quite as geeky as this sounds. And I don't really like Trek.) Here on Earth we have actual scarcity of goods to drive things, and the value of Gold is attributable both to tradition (not to be underestimated in monetary affairs) and some use-value (aesthetic and industrial).

By: novalis

novalis — Mon, 19 Jul 2004 21:13:44 +0000

And who can forget John Holbo’s classic commentary on fantasy economics: Miéville should seriously consider writing a thumping great historical political economy of his world – Marx’s Das Silmaril, if you will. It would be huge fun to read. It should be a multivolume affair that, ideally, he never manages to finish. ( ‘What I have to examine is the magical mode of production, its supernatural laws and tendencies winning their way through and working themselves out with necessity as hard as mithral.’ A long and careful analysis would follow of how power in Middle Earth is a function of – and race relations are inescapably mediated by – silmarills and, in later stages, ring ownership; value and use-value; importance of control of the means of ring production. “A spectre is haunting Middle Earth – no, really, a spectre!”)

By: Bob Smith

Bob Smith — Mon, 19 Jul 2004 20:04:19 +0000

Ugh, the Mars series by Robinson? I couldn’t even finish the first book, it read more like a DIY book on colonizing Mars than a good SF book. Do the later books get any better?

By: Nick W.

Nick W. — Mon, 19 Jul 2004 18:59:00 +0000

As an aforementioned “social scientist with a weakness for SF”, I would add a simple point here: whether star trek does or does not function in a post-scarcity society clearly depends on which incarnation of star trek you’re talking about. I seem to recall lots of plots in Deep Space 9, for example, revolving around ‘gold pressed latinum.’ (However, also to be fair to the original post, the emergence of scarcity economics roughly correlates with Gene R’s death and the consequent darkening of Trek’s moral tone.)

By: kevin

kevin — Mon, 19 Jul 2004 18:38:24 +0000

I would L. E. Modesitt to the list of sf/fantasy authors (he? she? writes both) whose work spends quite a great deal of time on economics. Modessit’s conflicts are very often economic in nature, and economic—and the play of economics on society and ethics—are at the core of almost everything of his/hers that I have ever read.

By: ian

ian — Mon, 19 Jul 2004 16:45:19 +0000

In terms of SF which deals with economic issues, (I leave it to others to comment on how well) look at The Dispossessed, Ursula Le Guin; The Great Explosion, Eric Frank Russell; Coventry, Robert Heinlein; The Syndic, C M Kornbluth.

By: bellatrys

bellatrys — Mon, 19 Jul 2004 16:32:46 +0000

Martha Wells’ excellent City of Bones also deals very specifically with economics, on many levels, – including the value of art and rare artifacts – in a post apocalyptic setting. (The heroes are all struggling lower-middle class types, contending with the facts of immigrant prejudice and race prejudice (one of them’s a gengineered mutant) and how hard it is to get a job in that situation, and how having to buy things like drinking water can really wreck your life…) But all of this is both peripheral and integral to the problems of political intrigue and organized crime and the question of whether or not there’s going to be an Apocalypse II, and where these all intersect in the daily lives of ordinary humans (or mutants) scrabbling to make a living above and below the table…

By: bellatrys

bellatrys — Mon, 19 Jul 2004 16:19:46 +0000

Actually, cac, a friend of mine in fandom and RL, fellow blogger Anglachel, has done a lot of work investigating the base economics implicit in LOTR via the main text and the Appendices, with lots of map references. And factoring in things like the effects of the Great Plague (yes, there have been plagues, but since there isn’t urbanized crowding, there wouldn’t be the same levels of proximity-caused disease) on society and politics and economics (which aren’t really separate things.) What kinds of smuggling and trade routes are implicit in the getting of rare goods like coffee, how wars isolated areas and disrupted trade, the capitalistic impulse that leads some of the elite families of the Shire to sell out to Saruman to guarantee better pipeweed sales, or to take over property to increase milling monopolies – all of which reflect real issues in the middle-ages and early industrial eras (incl. the Renaissance) such as the eviction of farmers by early capitalists to replace them with more profitable sheep, until the sheep economy collapsed due to overproduction and other problems like diseases, in England. I recommend the Gieses’ books, Life in a Medieval Village and Life in a Medieval City, for some eye-opening first-hand looks at how socio-economical-political stuff played out in RL back then. But yes, it is boring if you have too much of it in a novel. (Just like can you imagine a modern novel where the author stopped to explain how, in pages of detail, microwaves and the power grid worked? It’s called doing an ‘infodump’ in SF, and it’s not a compliment.)

By: asg

asg — Mon, 19 Jul 2004 15:53:23 +0000

See, I would view Robinson’s Mars trilogy as Exhibit 1 in Drezner’s argument… a series whose author has clearly thought through the physical-science elements, but whose economics is horrific. All those speeches by the jolly Russian character… ech.

By: Richard

Richard — Mon, 19 Jul 2004 15:01:37 +0000

Of course, two seconds on Google… “Shortly before the Patrician came to power there was a terrible plague of rats. The city council countered it by offering twenty pence for every rat tail. This did, for a week or two, reduce the number of rats—and then people were suddenly queueing up with tails, the city treasury was being drained, and no one seemed to be doing much work. And there still seemed to be a lot of rats around. Lord Vetinari had listened carefully while the problem was explained, and had solved the thing with one memorable phrase which said a lot about him, about the folly of bounty offers, and about the natural instince of Ankh-Morporkians in any situation involving money: “Tax the rat farms.” ” From Soul Music, apparently.

By: Richard

Richard — Mon, 19 Jul 2004 14:58:34 +0000

It was rat farms, IIRC, and related to a penny bounty on rats’ tails during a period of rat infestation. The exact quote is something like “The Patrician’s first words on taking office and having the situation explained to him became infamous; ‘tax the rat farms.’” I think it can be found in the Discworld Companion, but can’t remember if it was unique to it, or merely repeated the joke from another book.

By: Henry

Henry — Mon, 19 Jul 2004 14:48:07 +0000

Ah, “The Midas Plague” – I still have vague plans to write a paper on that story and budget-maximization theory in public choice. I greatly preferred the original short to the fix-up in “The Years of the City.” Pohl was and is a bit of a genius. >A notable addition to the list here would be Britain’s Stephen Baxter Dave Langford invented some imaginary Baxter novel somewhere or another in which the Vikings succeeded in getting into space, unimpeded as they were by NASA bureaucracy. bq. Terry Pratchett. For example there is his aside (I forget which book) on government attempts to minimise the fly problem by offering a bounty. IIRC it was very successful for a short while; then came the fly farms Does anyone have the exact reference for this. Rather a topical issue according to Tyler Cowen