Atwood, Margaret. Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth

Margaret Atwood, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth (2008)

Non-fiction. Each of the book's five chapters was delivered as a one-hour lecture in a different Canadian city between October and November 2008. Adapted into a film in 2012:

I found the book entertaining and commendably sprawling but also weirdly elusive. For more on debt see David Graeber and Charles Stross. (Atwood's Debt is one I really must come back to though, perhaps in an actual proper book).

Talking point:

• Why do we have bankruptcy law? In what ways might bankruptcy law ameliorate and/or exacerbate economic injustice? (Also discuss limited liability).

(JLW)

Falk, Lee. Time Is Money

Lee Falk, 'Time Is Money' (1975). Fairly short and to the point, and online. A potential inspiration (idk) for Stephen Tolkin's The Price of Life (1987), which could very well have been an inspiration for Andrew Niccol's In Time (2011).

Compare Kurt Vonnegut’s ‘2 B R 0 2 B’ (1962): not a currency exactly, but an exchange relation. Also compare the Days currency in Terry Pratchett's Strata (1975), and the Oubliette's currency in Hannu Rajaniemi's The Quantum Thief (2011). Also compare real-life LETS currencies and the Economy of Hours, which can in principle use demurrage (naturally dwindling value) to encourage circulation. None of them have yet adopted the idea of killing you if you run out.

(JLW)

Graeber, David. Debt: The First 5,000 Years

David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011). Not strictly speculative fiction, but a representative of all that "the truth is stranger (albeit less rigorously extrapolated) than fiction" anthropology out there.

Jo Walton remarks in her review ("The Best Science Fiction Ideas in Any Non-Fiction Ever: David Graeber's Debt: The First Five Thousand Years") that a problem with writing SF and fantasy "is creating truly different societies. We tend to change things but keep other things at societal defaults. It’s really easy to see this in older SF, where we have moved on from those societal defaults and can thus laugh at seeing people in the future behaving like people in the fifties. But it’s very difficult to create genuinely innovative societies, and in genuinely different directions." Cory Doctorow says he found it thought-provoking but frustrating, and names it in the acknowledgements to Walkaway. Charles Stross draws the epigraph of Neptune's Brood from it.

Graeber's book is also a great reminder that many well-known facts (such as the fact that  money was invented as an improvement over barter, solving the double coincidence of wants problem) are liable to reveal themselves as rather wild and far-fetched speculative fiction. You can also check out Graeber's 2009 article for Mute which condenses a few of his book's major arguments. And also see Graeber's On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs, which talks about something that several speculative fiction writers have noticed (Douglas Adams is one of them).

Still the best book about money I've read.

(JLW)

Novik, Naomi. Spinning Silver

Naomi Novik, Spinning Silver (2018).

Many of the entries in this database have a few passages with economic themes, or some interesting worldbuilding with intriguing economic implications. Novik's Spinning Silver is different. The entire novel is a sustained meditation on value, debt, and exchange, also touching on themes of debt peonage, honour and gift-giving, justice and mercy, economic antisemitism and pogroms, sexual division of labour, bridewealth and dowry, affective labour, the objectification and commodification of women and girls, domestic violence, and sisterhood and solidarity. 

The book is filled with instances of expansive and transformative magic, from the everyday metamorphoses of the market, to gowns that are made more splendid by dearly-bought sorcery: all these moments speak of Novik's method of spinning this rich adventure from her slight source material, the story of Rumpelstiltskin. Or perhaps more accurately, from the cluster of Rumpelstiltskinesque fairytales called 'Name of the Helper' stories. Here is one, for instance, that features an elf kingdom:

One time a beautiful peasant girl was gored by a steer. She screamed aloud and called for help. The friendly elf came immediately, comforted her, and promised to help and rescue her, if she would marry him and go with him to the elf kingdom. She had no choice but to say yes, and upon her agreement the elf rescued her.

The episodes in the cottage at the edge of the Staryk kingdom, with its glitching domestic space and invisibilised labour, offers another subtle link: a rumpelstilt is a sort of poltergeist or goblin. These episodes might equally suggest 'The Elves and the Shoemaker', just as the magic mirror and abduction to a wintry kingdom might suggest 'The Snow Queen.'

So what is the deal with Staryk society? It has strong elements of a heroic, honour-based society, except that these elves also seem ... kind of libertarian? Any gift obliges you to the giver in complex ways (cf. Mauss, Levi-Strauss, Strathern, etc.), but for the Staryk these obligations have a magical, binding quality. They therefore shun gifts (even in the sense of simple instinctive acts of kindness and care) and try to turn everything into explicit exchange.

The story opens with young Miryem, uninvited, taking over her soft-hearted moneylender father's business. As I interpret the story, it is partly about Miryem encountering, in the Staryk, the preposterousness of her own chilly and indignant ideas of fair dealing, writ large. Debts, whether formal or informal, are not necessarily bad, exactly, but ... the equal moral worth of contracting parties should never be confused for equal power or freedom. What actions count as gifts, which obligations need to be repaid, what should count as repaying them? The answers are always matters of power, circumstances, feelings, perceptions, and imagination, much more than they are the kind of thing that can be carefully written down in a ledger. 

But does Miryem actually ever learn this, or anything like it? Miryem has a kind of fairytale comeuppance, and she does grow and change in various ways (making a boast and stepping into the shape she has made), but in all the excitement I'm not sure she ever really does revisit her early mercilessness. Perhaps it is the limitations of a critique of commercial society (nascent capitalism) that is rooted in feudal ideals (hospitality, the abundant table, the honourable household where hard work and loyalty are rewarded). I'm not completely sure, but I think that -- although I kind of love this book -- its politics are pretty abhorrent to me. 

Further reading:

• Carol Jones, Women's Worth: A Western Misconception
• David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years
• Jerry Z. Muller, Capitalism and the Jews
• Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract
• Amanda Mandzik, Once Upon an Economics Course: Using Fairy Tales to Teach Economics
• Workers' Tales: Socialist Fairy Tales, Fables and Allegories from Great Britain
• Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation

Onwualu, Chinelo. 'The Fine Print.'

 Chinelo Onwualu, 'The Fine Print' (2019).

Reprinted online 2021 in Apex.

A story that explores notions of contract, consent, debt, slavery, consumerism, socially reproductive labor, and interactions between powerful corporate bureaucracies and their stakeholders.

The spell frowned and looked through the sheaf of papers again. “The terms of the contract indicate that you are to yield your first-born child in payment for your bride. Normally, I would be able to offer you some compensation, but you have not placed enough wishes to qualify for any of our promotions or rewards. I’m afraid there’s nothing I can do.” 

Onwualu, Chinelo. What the Dead Man Said.

Chinelo Onwualu, 'What the Dead Man Said' (2019).

Extract:

As they grew feeble, the burden of caring for them and maintaining the world they’d built fell to us. My agemates, those I kept in touch with after I moved, tell me I was lucky to get out when I did. Leaving New Biafra when I was only 12 meant that I was too young to be tied down by the weight of its social obligations. They complained of having to work long hours to preserve family businesses passed down by aging parents and grandparents. They spoke wistfully of the massive payouts the government awarded to those who could birth three or more children, but few of them could carve out the time needed to cultivate such large families. Though my own life—a spacious apartment in the hills of Highland Crescent, an easygoing art research consultancy—was very different from theirs, I’m not sure I did escape. One cannot cut the invisible threads of familial indebtedness by simply running off to a distant land.

Full story here.

Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four.

George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) is set in a dystopian totalitarian society: roughly totalitarian, although at one point an Inner Party member draws a distinction: "The command of the totalitarians was 'Thou shalt'. Our command is 'Thou art'".

As a grim satire, it is aimed at Stalinism (and perhaps also British Labour, whom Orwell detected authoritarian-totalitarian pre-crime). The novel's attack is partly manifest in the material conditions in which its characters live: grimy, squalid, hairy (there's a shortage of razorblades), munching paltry chocolate rations that don't taste right. It is implicitly a planned economy, and one thing it produces in abundance is lies about how much it is producing.

Mark Harrison, examining the Soviet economy in the 40s and 50s, writes:

Soviet managers worked from day to day within a target-driven culture. The Politburo set overarching priorities. From these, planners set ministerial and regional production quotas or “plans.” Ministries and local authorities distributed the plans to factories, farms, and offices. In industry, construction, and transport, quotas were usually in rubles at “fixed” plan prices. Procurement quotas for foodstuffs and timber were in units of weight or volume. The ratio of performance to plan formed the rewards and reputations of most officials and managers. [...] Did managers hide plan failure? That this was commonplace is suggested by the emergence of a specialized Soviet-era jargon. Everyone understood the verb pripisyvat’, literally “to add on” fictional goods to the report of plan fulfillment. The noun pripiska (plural pripiski) was the value of “add-ons,” the fictional goods included in the plan report [...]

Orwell reviewed F.A. Hayek's Road to Serfdom in 1944, and found much to like in it. He seems to approve of Hayek's thesis that by bringing "the whole of life under the control of the State, Socialism necessarily gives power to an inner ring of bureaucrats, who in almost every case will be men who want power for its own sake." But, Orwell adds, Hayek refuses to admit "that a return to ‘free’ competition means for the great mass of people a tyranny probably worse, because more irresponsible, than that of the State. The trouble with competitions is that somebody wins them."

The traditional nursery rhyme 'Oranges and Lemons' is scattered throughout the novel in scraps and strains. The lyrics almost seem to soak up the novels themes and yet fail to articulate them; obfuscating and mystifying, instead of clarifying.

The malleability of human life in Nineteen Eighty-Four sets it within a tradition of posthumanist literature. The posthumanist connotations of 'last man' in the last line -- at one point Orwell's protagonist Winston is mockingly addressed as the 'last man' -- is perhaps one reason for its strange weightiness. Either way, the nursery rhyme threads the themes of money, debt, and religion right through the novel like a seam of gold:

Oranges and lemons,
Say the bells of St. Clement's. 

You owe me five farthings,
Say the bells of St. Martin's. 

When will you pay me?
Say the bells of Old Bailey. 

When I grow rich,
Say the bells of Shoreditch. 

When will that be?
Say the bells of Stepney. 

I do not know,
Says the great bell of Bow. 

Here comes a candle to light you to bed,
And here comes a chopper to chop off your head!
Chip chop chip chop, the last man is dead.

And there's one other bit of another ditty that is perhaps worth mentioning:

Under the spreading chestnut tree
I sold you and you sold me

Qiufan, Chen. Debtless

Chen Qiufan, Debtless (2020).

Available here. Snippet:

“Don’t worry about Anan’s part. Her operation is already taken care of.”

“Oh, thank you.”

“All costs will be added to your debt, encrypted in the blockchain embedded in your genes. No one can tamper with it.”

“A life of debt.”

“Look around you. Everyone’s eager to borrow. Borrowing represents confidence in one’s future and in one’s self. And why not? Debt defines a person’s value. Such a debt quota is available to few people on Earth. Which is the only reason I’m standing here now.”

“Of course, Ms. Mei Li’ai, although your time is not as expensive as your father Mr. Mei Feng’s. But let’s talk it through. It’s a debt worth several lifetimes of an ordinary person’s toil.”

Shriver, Lionel. The Mandibles

Lionel Shriver, The Mandibles (2016).

To its credit, The Mandibles does actually try to imagine in some detail what it would mean for US sovereign debt to reach a crisis level. The plausibility of the account is, of course, food for debate.

Constance Grady reviews The Mandibles on Vox.com:

In the near future of The Mandibles, Keynesian economics is revealed to be nothing more than “dodgy hocus-pocus” that has massively devalued the dollar. America’s national character has been diluted by the enormous political power of Latino immigrants who have, tellingly, changed the automated phone systems so that you have to dial one for Spanish and two for English.

You can’t trust anyone in power. University economics departments are filled with socialists who will tell you that “morally, your money does belong to everybody.” The president who defaults on the national debt was born in Oaxaca, and he only speaks Spanish at press conferences — so really, you can hardly be surprised when he confiscates the personal property of good, hardworking middle-class (and, it’s implied, white) Americans. The government has become a police state, and you can tell this not through its monopoly on sanctioned violence, but through its monopoly on gold.

Full review here.

See also my review at Goodreads, Ken Kalfus review at The Washington Post, and a blog post by Foz Meadows.

JLW

Stross, Charles. Neptune's Brood

Charles Stross, Neptune's Brood (2013). In part inspired by Graeber's Debt. On his blog, Stross discusses fast, medium and slow money in Neptune's Brood.

But Stross is definitely not translating Graeber into fiction -- in fact, he thinks his ending kind of sucks, because he couldn't figure out an ending which "repudiated the entire framework of inherited debt without simultaneously getting all preachy on a soapbox."

On the other hand, Neptune's Brood does contain the rudiments of a very interesting critique of the notion of liquidity. Liquidity is the ease with which something can be converted into purchasing power. Cash is generally accepted so it is highly liquid, buyers for treasury bonds are usually plentiful so treasury bonds are pretty damn liquid, a pile of gold in a geopolitically unstable jungle might be somewhat less liquid (compare Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon), a stolen artwork might be even less liquid, etc.

But really, the "ease" with which something can be converted into something else isn't just a function of what the thing is: it's a function of who owns it, and in what ways, and what they want to convert it into, and what they want to convert that into, and many other factors. The problem with the notion of liquidity is that it collapses all these innumerable factors into a single scale.

In Neptune's Brood there are three kinds of money: fast, medium, and slow. There is a sense in which fast money is highly liquid, medium money is somewhat liquid, and slow money is scarcely liquid at all. Slow, in fact, sort of means illiquid. But what is striking about thinking through these currencies is the qualitative shifts involved. Slow money is essentially implicated with a different kind of activity. An economic anthropologist might say that it constitutes its own sphere of exchange or its own transactional order. That is, slow money is "the currency of world-builders," used for financing star ships and colonies.

It takes power and expert labor to run an interstellar communications laser beacon – lots of both. Nobody will point a laser at a new colony and beam libraries of design templates and cohorts of expert soul dumps at them without an expectation of getting something in return. All colonies must of necessity go deep into debt in the decades after their foundation: It costs a lot of slow money to acquire the vital new technologies and skills it needs to plug unforeseen gaps. Only once its population has increased enough to support a local education, research, and development infrastructure – which can take centuries – can it aspire to a trade surplus. 

Stross plays on the relative causal isolation which exists on the vast interstellar scale to pose interesting questions about the nature and limits of liquidity. Is a currency zone encompassing worlds so far apart even an intelligible notion? Is slow money really money? Does it circulate? Does it have purchasing power? Is it really slow: that is, can its illiquidity really be meaningfully related to the system of light-speed-constrained, third-party-notarization banking which Stross imagines, which is what makes slow money transactions take so long? And does the "slowness" of slow money intuitively connote "stability" because we now strongly associate instability and speculation, including lightning fast automated High Frequency Trading? I suspect that, like many of science fiction's most useful extrapolative thought experiments, the value of Stross's model is in how interestingly it disintegrates when closely considered.

Here's a friendly critique of Neptune's Brood from Robin Hanson. I also grapple with slow money here and especially here. See also entry for David Graeber.