Speculative Economics

Another example of a very popular piece of science fiction with extensive speculation on economics is Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy. There’s a “gift economy” that develops in the Martian underworld in a period of political instability, then a system that features co-ops as the fundamental organizing unit of economic activity in the new Martian republic.

Who knows whether it’s really feasible or not, but he certainly put a lot of thought and effort into devising a plausible future economic system.

Terry Goodkind’s “Sword of Truth” series is strongly Randian. “Faith of the Fallen” may be the best fictional presentation of Randian economics since Rand’s own.

Re: Matt Brown’s first post.

My friend and I were discussing the economic ramifications of nanotechnology a while back, particularly the question of, magical nanobots could build us anything we wanted in the world from waste matter, there would be anything for people to fight over.

My response: “Art and ex-girlfriends.”

Artistic ability and exclusive emotional relationships are two commodities that can remain scarce in the face of unprecedented plenty, because they can’t be mass produced. Sure I can copy a CD, and maybe soon a nice-looking robot will sleep with me, but they won’t write songs, and if I’m truly smitten with someone, a robot can’t replace her.

How the scarcity of these goods would affect human behavior, I don’t know, but they would, and often not for the better.

“The Space Merchants” is a work of genius (though it does peter out towards the end).

Let me point out the obvious reason why Star Trek or Lord of the Rings don’t replicate the capitalist economy: it would make for boring reading. Capitalism is an utterly pervasive aspect of our lives. People don’t want to read about it for the same reason they don’t want to read novels about traffic jams on the way to work. While it would make Dan happy if every work of fiction was a didactic exercise in Capitalist Realism, in an actual capitalist marketplace noone’s buying.

I have never understood the Star Trek universe as that economically complicated or different. Simple technology.

Restaurants and bars are often seen on the Enterprise. You walk thru the door, a camera recognizes your face, you make your order and your account is charged. You order a beer thru the replicator, your account is charged. I don’t see it as a Marxist paradise, for the Captain has better quarters than the crew, just a fully digitized one.

You have to remember that Frederick Pohl was an Marxist back in the 1930s … his stuff is reasonably economically literate.

Lord of the Rings seems to have a reasonably well described functioning economic system, at least for hobbits and men. It is essentially an idealised pastoralism, the middle ages minus disease and famine. We know there are inns and trade in high value, low bulk goods such as pipeweed. There are a lot of references to farming and associated activities. The dwarves make a pretty good living out of mining gems and metals to sell to their neighbours. I’ll concede though that the economic life of the elves is a mystery. They seem to spend most of their time poncing around in forests without any visible means of support. Perhaps as the immortal elder children they were all given substantial annuities before going to Middle Earth. Which raises an interesting issue, how do you value an annuity for an immortal being with an average existence of at least 10,000 years? An alternative theory is that, like artists today, they are subsidised by grants extracted from the long suffering taxpayers of Middle Earth. In this case, their departure to the Undying Lands may not have been quite the tragedy the books make it out to be.

How can anyone say that there is no economics in SF, when the whole Star Wars series starts off with a trade dispute? (see Episode 1, the scrolling letters at the start)

Didn’t the fly farms come from the Great Leap Forward under Chairman Mao?

On the wider question [pedant mode ON]why should we expect fantasy to be realistic about anything – that’s why we call it fantasy. [pedant mode OFF]

Science Fiction on the other hand is about ‘what if’ – it takes an idea or ideas and examines what would happen if they were true. Sometimes those ideas are social, sometimes scientific. The exploration is – more or less – realistic but we shouldn’t expect every SF story to cover every potential issue in equal depth – any more than we expect Dickens, Chandler or Zadie Smith to do.

If a particular aspect of life comes over badly that is more to do with the quality of writing than the genre – above all else, good fiction should allow the willing suspension of disbelief while you are reading it.

“The Midas Plague”, “Buy Jupiter”, the Dorsai series, “Citizen Of The Galaxy”, “If All Men Were Brothers Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?”

Well, maybe not that last one..

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”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2004/07/markets_in_ever_1.html

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.

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.)

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.

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.)

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!”)

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.

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.