De Abaitua, Matthew. If Then
An algorithm called The Process makes all economic decisions (although this also means that there is no well-defined "economic" realm). It does so supposedly in pursuit of "fairness." Here is a short snippet from early in the book.
He walked the orderly line of repairmen with individual placards detailing skills offered and services required. This was residual behaviour, rendered unnecessary by the Process. Their skills and availability would be sorted algorithmically and bartered accordingly with other townspeople and their labour; that was how the Process generated the core work schedule for the town, and gave meaning to labour that had become meaningless. But the market had a role to play that was more than trade. It was a social occasion, a chance to get out, to see and be seen. The metrics of happiness required old rituals, old ways of doing things, and so time was set aside within the work schedule for the townspeople to make their own trades.
Delany, Samuel R. Trouble on Triton.
Delany, Samuel R. Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia (1976).
Many utopias, particularly the 'classic' utopias that flourished in the late nineteenth century, use the device of a visitor to expedite exposition. The fish-out-of-water character can mention things that to the inhabitants of utopia are too obvious ever to mention. Then the visitor can listen, bewildered and amazed, to lengthy explanations. Bron in Delany's Trouble on Triton is a bit of an outsider: from Mars, and not entirely comfortable in Triton society.
Trouble on Triton is somewhat unusual in imagining a relatively strong and pervasive state along with greater social, economic, and political freedoms, both formal and substantive. Triton is an unusual democracy: everyone is governed by the candidate they vote for. Living arrangements are various and often communal. Society appears fairly heavily surveilled, although it may be that the majority of the data is never used. Delany also imagines an intellectual discipline, ‘metalogic,’ which expands the realm of the calculable; a metalogician is likely to work in something called a ‘computer hegemony.’
There are some indications that money may have been abolished (outside of a pretentious restaurant or two, where it is used as an archaic affectation), but whether this is really the case depends on how you interpret the credit system, and its relationship with the welfare state:
Second, because credit on basic food, basic shelter, and limited transport is automatic—if you don’t have labor credit, your tokens automatically and immediately put it on the state bill—we don’t support the huge, social service organizations of investigators, interviewers, office organizers, and administrators that are the main expense of your various welfare services here. [...] Our very efficient system costs one-tenth per person to support as your cheapest, national, inefficient and totally inadequate system here. Our only costs for housing and feeding a person on welfare is the cost of the food and rent itself, which is kept track of against the state’s credit by the same computer system that keeps track of everyone else’s purchases against his or her own labor credit. In the Satellites, it actually costs minimally less to feed and house a person on welfare than it does to feed and house someone living at the same credit standard who’s working, because the bookkeeping is minimally less complicated. Here, with all the hidden charges, it costs from three to ten times more. Also, we have a far higher rotation of people on welfare than Luna has, or either of the sovereign worlds. Our welfare isn’t a social class who are born on it, live on it, and die on it, reproducing half the next welfare generation along the way. Practically everyone spends some time on it. And hardly anyone more than a few years. Our people on welfare live in the same co-ops as everyone else, not separate, economic ghettos. Practically nobody’s going to have children while they’re on it. The whole thing has such a different social value, weaves into the fabric of our society in such a different way, is essentially such a different process, you can’t really call it the same thing as you have here.
The gist of it seems to be: basic universal services (food, shelter, transport) on a UBI-like system, plus the opportunity to earn more credits by working for non-essential purchases. But the details are ambiguous and intriguing. It sounds like if you were to buy some groceries, with labour credit in your account, that's what would be depleted; if you haven't got enough, then instead the state pays for the groceries. There would be a curious incentive structure: don't buy essentials when your labour credit balance is low. Then there are these "tokens" denominated in franqs:
He was putting his card back into his purse when something clinked: his two-franq token had fallen into the return cup, reiterating what the booth itself had been placed there to proclaim: The government cared.
He forefingered up the token (with the machine broken, he would not know if the two franqs had or had not been charged against his labor credit till he got to his co-op computer) and fisted aside the curtain.
And:
Mumblers with flickering lips and tight-closed lids swung grubby plastic begging-bowls—too fast, really, to drop anything in. As they passed, he noted a set of ancient keys in one, in another a Protyyn bar (wrapper torn), and a five-franq token. (“Use this till I report it stolen, or the bill gets too big,” had been someone’s mocking exhortation.)
And:
“That’s right.” And the redhead began to talk animatedly about something else, till they reached the transport. “Oh, and may I ask you a mildly embarrassing favor: Could you pay my fare with one of your to— kens. It’s only half a franq on your credit; I know it seems silly but—”
“Oh, sure,” Bron said, opening his purse and fingering around for his half-franq token. He pushed the coin-shape into one of the change slots beside the entrance. (There was still some leftover money; but Sam seemed to have forgotten about it.) The green light flashed, and the token rolled out again into Bron’s palm.
“Thank you,” the redhead said, and walked through the gate. Bron put the token in again; the light flashed again; again the token was returned (and somewhere two fares were billed against his labor credits on some highly surveyed government tape); returning the token to his purse, he followed the redhead onto the transport platform, constructing schemes of paranoid complexity about why the redhead might not want his presence in the city known. After all, basic transportation was a nonrefusable (what the dumb earthies would call “welfare”) credit service.
Are tokens always 'returned,' so that they're really something like lots of little contactless debit cards? If something costs ten franqs, can you use the same one-franq token over and over again to buy it? One of the main features of cash is its relative anyonymity, so cash linked to government databases is a curious hybrid. Yet this wouldn't necessarily be silly: we could speculate around the advantages of preserving some of the materiality of cash. For example, losing a two-franq token would have different implications to losing a fifty-franq token (or a debit card).
Or does the returning have something to do with the nonrefusability of basic services? Do tokens sometimes circulate (I think not, but I'm not 100% sure).
Dick, Philip K. Ubik
A snippet:
The door refused to open. It said, "Five cents, please."
He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing.
"I'll pay you tomorrow," he told the door. Again it remained locked tight. "What I pay you," he informed it, "is in the nature of a gratuity; I don't have to pay you."
"I think otherwise," the door said. "Look in the purchase contract you signed when you bought this conapt."
...he found the contract. Sure enough; payment to his door for opening and shutting constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip.
"You discover I'm right," the door said. It sounded smug.
Doctorow, Cory. Chicken Little
Leon works for Ate, a corporation whose opulent fortunes are entirely based on one previous sale, and are now looking to make their second. Nobody at Ate knows what they sold last time. It's a well-kept secret. Better than well-kept: deliberately lost, forever. They do have a general idea of the type of customer they sold it to:
The normal megarich got offered experiences [...] The people in the vat had done plenty of those things before they’d ended up in the vats. Now they were metastatic, these hyperrich, lumps of curdling meat in the pickling solution of a hundred vast machines that laboriously kept them alive amid their cancer blooms and myriad failures. Somewhere in that tangle of hoses and wires was something that was technically a person, and also technically a corporation, and, in many cases, technically a sovereign state. (p.535)
Doctorow, Cory. Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
If you're doing an economics and science fiction reading list, this should be pretty near the top.
I talked a bit about this book and its quasi-magical reputation currency, Whuffie, in my review of Doctorow's Pirate Cinema.
The TL;DR version is: maybe it's interesting to compare Whuffie and DRM (or at least, the things DRM would imagine itself doing in the best of all possible worlds). Why quasi-magical? Nowadays it's difficult not to see Whuffie through the lens of algorithmic governmentality, Uber, platform capitalism, Peeple, etc. But it may also be worth drilling down to the conceit that underlies Whuffie: a system that can evaluate feelings and work out exactly what they're about and the ways in which they're good or bad (hence 'reality'-based currency).
Also see this interview at the Adjacent Possible, toward the end. Also see under Paul Graham Raven below. For other exotic currencies that are perhaps made out of trust or reputation, see entries for Iain M. Banks, Karen Lord, and Michael Swanwick.
(JLW)
Doctorow, Cory. Makers
Alberto Cottica writes in a blog post on the economics of Makers:
Perry and Lester’s ability to combine technological building blocks is greatly enhanced by the fact that anything important to them can be performed by open source technologies. This enables them to develop working prototypes from off-the-shelf equipment and software and put them into a manufacturing pipeline without worrying about licensing issues. This has two consequences: first, in the world of Makers ecosystems develop preferably around open source technology, because people like Perry and Lester have every incentive to route around proprietary technology; second, that the speed of the creative destruction cycle is greatly increased.I think this may be the most important intuition Makers has to offer. Just think: we increasingly buy in ecosystem (Mac-iPhone-iPad-MobileMe, or Google-Android-Google Apps, or Linux-Apache-IBM’s proprietary web solutions); ecosystems grow faster if they can build on open source building blocks, so that the open source ones tend to outcompete the proprietary ones in the long run; but innovations in open source ecosystems are almost impossible to protect, and that lowers their average margin as the highly profitable grace period gets shorter. The solution, as Tjan suggests (see above) and most policy makers worldwides agree, is to increase the pace of innovation. This, however, raises the question of just how fast consumers can wrap their head around innovation: every heavy web user is familiar with the sensation that companies are putting out new services faster than we can absorb them, and sometimes we just have no time for them, no matter how cool they are. Google Wave, anyone? So, it could be that the destruction side of creative destruction prevails, landing the economy of Makers into a state of low margins and low growth, as more inventions fail to turn into more successful products on the market.
[...] His fragments on how litigation venture funding works, on how the iced-coffee cans Sammy likes to chug contain embedded CO2 canisters, on the structure of "New Work," on what the ride is about, on how roomware will change how people live together, on whether great groups are hard to put together because flaws are multiplicative while virtues are additive, etc. etc. constitute the book's brilliant mind. These fragments are not infodumps because their purpose is not to reveal essential, tedious information. They are futuristic riffs in the best tradition of speculative thinking. I think the fragments are the real reason why Doctorow wrote the book. His ability to think up these fragments is the reason people love his blog articles, the reason why Boing Boing is such a major watering hole and the reason why this book will be read, despite its literary shortcomings.
It is unfair to criticize a book for what it does not try to be. In this case however, I will, because it points to the possibility of a new kind of writing. I think Makers would have worked better as speculative non-fiction. Ideally, speculation in a SF novel should be a means to an end, but when it becomes the end itself, then it is time to jettison the novel format. We've begun to see some early signs of such ejections. Emerging disciplines like "speculative economics" and "speculative biology" encourage speculative ideas to be worked out carefully, even elegantly, without having to invoke the clumsy paraphernalia of fiction. Is Schrödinger's "What Is Life" any less literary because it doesn't have family drama and existential angst? If an economist wants to discuss how interstellar trade would work, does she really need a space opera? If a finance theorist wishes to explore whether the theory of interest rates rules out time travel does he need to bring in a Romantic Love Interest to spoon feed us the speculation? No. Modern readers have no need of such semantic sugar. Aldous Huxley called for a fictional form that would be "a perfect fusion of the novel and the essay, a novel in which one can put all one's ideas, a novel like a hold-all." Perhaps it's possible. Speculation is independent of fiction though, and this work illustrates both positively and negatively why it's an independence worth encouraging. Sometimes the best representation of a pipe is the pipe itself.
Doctorow, Cory. Walkaway.
Doctorow's Walkaway is a book centrally concerned with political economy. It deserves places on pretty much any reading list of economic SF, and many a list of utopian/dystopian SF, alongside classics such as Le Guin's The Dispossessed. Juliet E. McKenna offers an excellent summary in Interzone #270:
In this near-future, the rich have got much, much richer while those further down the social order desperately cling to exploitative jobs, fearful of becoming a surplus labour unit. Elites ensure this default state of affairs for the blinkered majority by controlling the only meaningful careers left: financial engineering, and politics.
[...]
When computer access is ubiquitous, survival knowledge is free for the taking. Ultimately, people can simply walk away from a society they’re no longer invested in. So Hubert, Seth and Natalie head north into the Canadian wilderness where Limpopo and like-minded folk have set up a community where everyone can have what they want or need without even having to contribute from their own means. Limpopo isn’t the leader because there’s no such role. There is no obligation to even work for the common good unless one chooses to.
[...]
Some are always determined to keep score. Some demand a pecking order. What happens when they turn up and try to remake this community to suit themselves? Walking away from conventional society means walking away from its protections, in a world where anyone can arm themselves with an AK-3DP gun. Conflict is the essence of drama, right? Not so much, as it turns out, when Limpopo and the others simply walk away again.
[...]
Walkaway philosophy says the only way to win is not to play. But what if the other side insists? Well, then it’s time to change the rules of the game, more than once if you need to, and always trying to stay one move ahead.