Adams, Douglas. The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980). How easy is it to distinguish socially useful labour from activities which are pointless, parasitic, counterproductive, or downright violent? 

Perhaps not that easy. In Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (2018), David Graeber offers an elegant approach to distinguishing "bullshit jobs." Does the person doing the job believe it has any social value? Graeber acknowledges this  approach isn't perfect -- for instance, sometimes tasks are broken up and distributed in ways which disguise what they are really about. But it's probably good enough. The person doing the job probably is in the best position of anyone to know. Nobody has really worked out a convincing way to measure the social value of work (as opposed to the mere market value), so what else do we have to go on?

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe contains a sort of cautionary tale about bullshit jobs. Long ago, on a distant planet, a plan was devised to get rid of all the pointless jobs ... as well as the people who performed them. Oddly enough, this plan involved a poet, who told a tale of the coming apocalypse. The people with the pointless jobs -- mostly management types, although also some telephone-sanitizers etc. -- were packed off to colonize a backwater planet. "We'll be right behind you," everybody else shouted into space, and of course they weren't. Ha ha ha! There was no apocalypse coming after all! ... or was there?

Perhaps you can guess which planet was colonized? That's right, prehistoric Earth. And yes, we humans are the descendants of the pointless jobs people. This is demonstrated not so much by shared genetics, so much as by shared attitudes and agendas.

Bellamy, Edward. Looking Backward: 2000-1887

Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward: 2000-1887 (1888). Bellamy's utopian novel-- it's the old-fashioned kind you might charitably call "heavy on worldbuilding" -- deals extensively with economics. Bellamy advocates an egalitarian command economy, with everyone taking an equal share of non-transferable credit. The individual spends their credit to claim their share of the national product. The rations are so generous, however, that individuals often find they have credits left over at the end of the year; these are then spent on public goods (such as making everywhere look beautiful).

Although everybody's "wages" are fixed at the same level by a ferocious egalitarian principle, there is something which sounds rather a lot like market mechanisms -- or at least, like a command economy simulating market mechanisms -- mediatized not by money, but by leisure time. You could look at it like this: workers are (in a way) paid different hourly rates, but hours that they work are carefully regulated to ensure that all total incomes are equal:

"The supply of volunteers is always expected to fully equal the demand," replied Dr. Leete. "It is the business of the administration to see that this is the case. The rate of volunteering for each trade is closely watched. If there be a noticeably greater excess of volunteers over men needed in any trade, it is inferred that the trade offers greater attractions than others. On the other hand, if the number of volunteers for a trade tends to drop below the demand, it is inferred that it is thought more arduous. It is the business of the administration to seek constantly to equalize the attractions of the trades, so far as the conditions of labor in them are concerned, so that all trades shall be equally attractive to persons having natural tastes for them. This is done by making the hours of labor in different trades to differ according to their arduousness. The lighter trades, prosecuted under the most agreeable circumstances, have in this way the longest hours, while an arduous trade, such as mining, has very short hours. There is no theory, no a priori rule, by which the respective attractiveness of industries is determined. The administration, in taking burdens off one class of workers and adding them to other classes, simply follows the fluctuations of opinion among the workers themselves as indicated by the rate of volunteering [...]"

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)

Newitz, Annalee. Autonomous

A smart, rich, immersive cyberpunk thriller, which manages to make some quite fantastical and potentially space operatic worldbuilding feel plausible, grounded, and perhaps not even that far off. The novel is faintly pervaded by economic themes, in particular:

• Intellectual Property law, especially pharmaceutical patents, and especially as it pertains to corporate power;
• the blurred and ductile line between state power and the power of large multinationals (a perennial cyberpunk theme);
• the work ethic, the experience of work, and the ways in which work can shape and degrade the worker's body and soul; and
• slavery -- a key premise in the novel is that the rise of artificial sapient nonhumans (bots) has, along with other factors, led to a degradation of the legal status of the human, so that both bots and humans are vulnerable to legalised indenture.

Abigail Nussbaum writes:

As Newitz repeatedly makes clear, the effect of creating a sentient underclass who can perform labor is to erase the distinction between people and machines. Not only are sentient beings enslaved under the justification of being machines, but humans are expected to behave in ways that are more machine-like if they want to compete.

Nussbaum, 'A Political History of the Future: Autonomous by Analee Newitz'

Pohl, Frederik. The Midas Plague

Frederik Pohl, "The Midas Plague" (1954). Online. A topsy-turvy world satire with a lot of very intriguing material in it. A great story for thinking about the fact that scarce, as a technical term of economics, is not the same as limited. Rather, scarce means limited in relation to demand (or desire), and "The Midas Plague" plays with the idea of of manipulating not only the production of resources, but the demand for them (via those eleven psychologists, and of course the bit at the end). Pohl doesn't r-e-a-l-l-y rationalize the initial conceit very rigorously, but perhaps in 2016, with the benefit of CAP surplus foodscapes, with the New Public Management of the 1980s onward and the attendant financialization (and therefore consumer-ification) of public and civic life, the case might be easier to make. Also see "The Waging of the Peace" (1959).

Mild spoiler: in the future, the rich have the luxury of living modest lifestyles, while the "poor" have to constantly consume.

(JLW)