Adam Roberts, By the Pricking of Her Thumb (2018).
“For thousands of years money has been a way of parsing scarcity—a way of allocating scarce resources. What happens to money when scarcity is no longer a thing?” By the Pricking of Her Thumb is about capital striving to reinvent itself in the early days of a post-scarcity utopia. Most people spend their days in relative delight in a simulated reality called the Shine. But four ultra-rich rivals are seeking to introduce scarcity to the Shine. Some new form of money is bound to arise soon, they all reason, and whoever defines it first may well find themselves ruling the world.
Each of the Four has their own ingenious idea about some “resource” that they think is fundamentally, existentially scarce. Each of the Four hopes to use this “resource” as the basis for a radically new kind of money. In this way, they are trying to piece together the Shine-dwellers’ innumerable little heavens into a sensible, hard-nosed cosmology with a heaven on top and a hell below, and no such thing as a free launch. (I won't say what their ideas are, since it would be fairly spoilerish).
Some reviews: by Ian Mond; by Antony Jones; by Blue Book Balloon.
This novel helped me to reflect a little more on the relationship between money and scarcity. One thing we should remember is that, in economic terms, scarce very seldom means “finite.” The opposite of scarce should not be “infinite.” The opposite of scarce should be “enough.” Post-scarcity is not about having infinite resources, but about having enough resources.
The relationship between money and scarcity is not always intuitive. For instance, you might think that printing more money is always going to be inflationary sooner or later. More and more monetary value gets spread over the same amount of goods and services, so of course the price will rise. Many economists have defended some version of this idea (the quantity theory of money), but any honest sensible economist will at least admit that it's a bit more complicated. When the money supply expands, it can create goods and services that otherwise would not have existed. It can affect the dynamics of circulation as well: it's not as if all the money that exists can magically spread itself evenly over all the goods and services. So printing money is not always inflationary: it depends on the circumstances, and on who prints the money for whom and on what terms.
A bit more philosophically, we might ask: "Enough for what?" Consider the monster's words in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: “I shall no longer feel the agonies which now consume me or be the prey of feelings unsatisfied, yet unquenched.” That is, there are at least two ways of dealing with the feeling of consuming yourself because you can't have what you desire: satisfy the desire, or quench the desire. Likewise, there are at least two ways to make something less scarce. Get more of the thing, or reduce the need for the thing. If need is reduced, then we may suddenly have enough of something, when previously we did not. Since many needs are in constant flux, conditions of scarcity are in constant flux as well.
Put slightly differently. If we have scarce means, fine: this entails there is some set of ends that we cannot completely achieve with those means. But which ends count? There are many, many different ways of defining what should be included within this set of ends. Is it everything that is possible? If so, possible logically, metaphysically, physically? Or is it everything that is imaginable? Or our wants? Our needs? Our expectations? Our hopes? Our revealed preferences? Is it our whims? Does the unconscious figure? Is it whatever will actually satisfy an inner urge, rather than the image that that urge represents itself as? If scarcity is a function of desires, must those desires be express? Must they be informed? Must they be cancellable? Must they be human? Must they be living? Must they be compossible with other desires? Must they be discriminable from other desires? Must we desire to desire them? Must we desire to desire to desire them? We sometimes have affordances for wellbeing or flourishing which are not foreshadowed by any desire; must these be fulfillable as well? We sometimes don’t desire things that we in theory could desire; is that a problem of scarcity too, a problem of scarce desires? What do we truly desire?
Let’s say we settle all those questions. Yet there are plenty more. What does it mean for a desire to be ‘satisfied’? Are wants more effectively ‘satisfied’ if we don’t have to wait, or if we have to wait just the right amount? In Jamie Wahls’s short story, “Utopia, LOL” (2017), the narrator is forced to endure the following hardship: “Four seconds ago, I demanded that we have ice cream. There is an ice cream cone forming in my hand. It is taking FOREVER.” Does ‘satisfaction’ mean putting us back the way we were, before we experienced the desire? Or does it mean becoming the satisfied person we have just pictured? Or must satisfaction transform us in some way we don’t necessarily expect? Are there other ways of answering desire other than ‘satisfying’ it, which can still place us into a state of plenty?
This might all sound a bit scholastic. Most folk just kind of feel the answers, at least as far as these questions concern themselves. “Damn it, I know how many angels I like on the head of my pin.” Relationality and commensurability presumably strongly shape these feelings. Here is an analogy: let’s say you like games, and you love winning them, and that we have all spent a weekend playing dozens of games. I don’t know what came over us, it got messy. And in the end, Sophie won Dixit the most, and Alex won Scythe the most, and you won Calvinball the most, and I won the Glass Bead Game the most, and Madhu’s was the only character who survived D&D, and Carl Menger won Shithead. Each of us triumphed in some areas and each was defeated in others. Given the distribution of victories, might each of us feel powerful and successful and satisfied in our own way? Especially if we were all the sort of people who enjoy winning but don’t really mind losing? But what if then our host—I don’t know, say it’s Carl—reveals that, actually, all our games have been secretly integrated into a single game all along? And that all our wins will now be converted into a single currency, a single pie sliced up between us, to identify the one single winner of the weekend? Might we then feel that our fragile riches were at risk? If so, how else to explain it, except that Carl has managed to change our desires, and had turn plenty into scarcity?
Picture scarcity. What does scarcity look like? My first instinct is that scarcity resembles the Real in Roberts’s novel: it is stagnant, a few meagre things arranged in a great emptiness, with very little happening except that perhaps, occasionally, one more thing vanishes. But on second thoughts, might scarcity look more like the Shine? Maybe scarcity is violently malleable and mercurial, a flickering flux different from one moment to the next, falling into relatively stable patterns, but always intensely sensitive to shifts in wishes, norms, dreams, laws, shifts to anything that can spread with viral rapidity across a population.
Can scarcity really come and go so easily? Okay, I should be careful here: this is also the kind of rhetoric used to tell folks to shut up and accept their unjust and intolerable lot. It does seem important that when we think about spiritual wealth, affluence in one place does not imply penury in another. You know: that cheesy thing, that thing about having everything you truly desire, about being rich in friends, or family, or passions, or esteem, or memories, or books, or nature, or dreams, or stories, or places or things to explore, or love, or confidence, or good fortune, or just plain happiness itself. And this conception of wealth doesn’t preclude it having a relational or even hierarchical quality.
Reading By the Pricking of Her Thumb almost persuaded me of the principle—both commonsensical and fruitfully subtle—that money is fundamentally “a way of parsing scarcity,” a kind of general index of plenitude in relation to desire. I think that’s because the novel really plays with the concept of scarcity hard, till it starts to sprout all these new attributes and dimensions I never realized it had. Scarcity almost starts to do that dance I just described, the squirm of the Shine. But in the end, my hunch is still that scarcity should not be the central term for theorising money; it will conceal more than it will reveal. I think we need to disentangle the story of money from the story of scarcity.
