Alcott, Louisa May. Transcendental Wild Oats

Louisa May Alcott, 'Transcendental Wild Oats: A Chapter from an Unwritten Romance' (1873).

Alcott's satire about a bungling 1840s Transcendental utopian community, and its extremely poor incentive design. It is inspired by the short-lived Fruitlands commune.

Transcendental wild oats were sown broadcast that year, and the fame thereof has not yet ceased in the land; for, futile as this crop seemed to outsiders, it bore an invisible harvest, worth much to those who planted in earnest. As none of the members of this particular community have ever recounted their experiences before, a few of them may not be amiss, since the interest in these attempts has never died out and Fruitlands was the most ideal of all these castles in Spain.

Doctorow, Cory. Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

Cory Doctorow, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (2003).

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)

Ekpeki, Oghenechovwe Donald. O2 Arena

Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, 'O2 Arena' (2021).

Online here. Features what could be a kind of oxygen-based currency, the O2 credit. Payments are denominated in Os. Naming the currency in this way emphasises that drawing breath has become commodified, although roughly the same story could be told using naira or some other unit. We could speculate that perhaps the O currency is redeemable by the central bank for a certain quantity of oxygen.

Le Guin, Ursula. The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (1974). Le Guin's fairly brilliant imagining of a well-established "Odonian" revolutionary anarcho-syndicalist society on the moon Annares. It sets out a utopian vision via a stress test of that vision. The novel is absolutely an anarchist-syndicalist polemic -- to think otherwise is a serious misreading! -- but it dwells on the fragilities and flaws of the society it advocates.

Books like these are really carrying the whole SFF team. Really: The Disposssessed is getting toward half a century old, and is still in many ways the first go-to book for speculative fiction and political economy. That's a testament to the great insight and imagination of the novel itself, of course. But it could also be a wee bit of an indictment of what we've all been up to since then.

A huge amount has been written about it, but I haven't come across any attempt at a brief summary of the key economic institutions and practices of Annares. So I've attempted that below. If you think I've bungled something, please let me know!

Maughan, Tim. 'Zero Hours'

Tim Maughan, "Zero Hours" (2013). A short, sharp shock about the interface of emerging technologies and low skilled labour (or supposedly low skilled labour, perhaps).

Compare John Maynard Keynes's prediction: "for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem – how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well."

Instead, hello gig economy, hello extreme precarity, and hello cognitive capitalism, which "no longer consists, as in the Fordist time, of investment in constant and variable capital (wage), but rather of investment in apparatuses of producing and capturing value produced outside directly productive processes" (Marazzi 2010: p.55). "Zero Hours" is online at Medium.com.

Also see "Four Days of Christmas" at Motherboard.

(JLW)

Mitchison, Naomi. Not By Bread Alone

Naomi Mitchison, Not By Bread Alone (1983). Mitchison's entry in SFE. Review by Kate Macdonald.

Newman, Peter. The Vagrant

Peter Newman's dark science fantasy The Vagrant (2015) takes place in a sort of war-torn, post-apocalyptic dystopia. A development economist might say: there is no banking infrastructure, governance structures are weak, and life is corrupted by demon magic.

So it is the kind of setting where you would not be surprised to find the typical crapsack economics of scavenging and primitive accumulation, and a "reversion to barter" (about this phrase, and about some common misconceptions around barter, see David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years).

That is more-or-less what we get, but there is some intriguing nuance. First, bodies (and selves) are fairly permeable and porous in the world of The Vagrant, so there is a sense that words like "scavenging / looting" and "recycling / reusing / repurposing / upcycling" don't quite capture the micro, macro, and necroeconomics of it all:

Stick-like people and bloated flies gather in the twilight, both drawn to the still warm corpse of the Dogspawn. By morning they have picked the bones clean. By afternoon half of the people have died, their stomachs unable to accept the rich meat. By evening their skeletons are bartered over by Necrotraders. 

In New Horizon nothing is wasted.

Second there is apparently, on a literal level, a coin money economy functioning alongside ad hoc spot trades and what-have-you. The representation of this money is quite intriguing. People always seem at least a little amazed, and maybe even a bit mesmerized, when the Vagrant brandishes his coinage. Psychologically speaking, perhaps that's just because: what's this ragtag hobo doing flashing that kind of cash?

But it's also a little more numinous than that. The coins have the depth of Tolkienian artefacts, fragments from a lost epoch. It is almost as if, instead of the passage of time sapping the coins of their purchasing power as we'd expect -- you try paying for your Wispa in Nisa with a Roman antoninianus coin, it is hard -- the longevity of this medium-of-exchange is testament to the cunning and wisdom of their artificers.

Ancient forces stir, ancient presences awake. It is almost as if each coin emanates a little enchanted bubble of civil society and a liberal social order, sustaining itself against reason within the brutal Hobbesian state of nature:

The Hammer leans over him. ‘More?’
He nods.
The coin dances three times, then stops.
The Hammer’s small eyes narrow. ‘More?’
He beckons her closer. She comes.
He points to her coin. Puzzled, she lifts her hand to him, open, disc shining on her outstretched fingers. He nods and taps his own coin against it.
Reunited, the silver sisters sing. The duet haunts the ears, stirring regrets and things lost.
When it ends the Vagrant puts his coin into her other hand.
Her eyes glisten, water growing at their edges. ‘Mine?’
The Vagrant nods.

Perhaps it's also worth briefly noting the most distinctive thing about The Vagrant: it doesn't really give us a lone badass and his entourage, or a party of badasses, so much as a badass nuclear family. Of course the hard military power and the economic power are concentrated in the Vagrant himself, but the baby and the goat -- and Harm and (mild spoiler!) the Hammer -- exercise significant agency whenever they're present.

And just because I mentioned Tolkien: might it be interesting to think about the relationship of the baby figure and the figure of Bilbo Baggins? Bilbo is in part a surrogate for a young reader of The Hobbit, rosy-cheeked and beardless among the oppressively bearded endeavours of the adult world. Bilbo is also someone who is rather unaccountably allowed to participate in a dangerous and crucial and highly technical project, and discovers to their delight that they're more than able to prove their worth. There is usually a smug elusiveness about what makes hobbits so important, which reminds me more than a little of the smug elusiveness about the value added by the "enterprise" factor of production, a value which is significant enough that a top CEO totally deserves 200 times the salary of a machinist. We could think of Bilbo, perhaps, as the young nephew of Gandalf the CEO -- or, more subtly, as someone who is pliable to the interests of capital, whatever the specifics of their sociological class background -- whom the dwarves have to be nice to ("yes yes, you're uh, the Ringbearer ... no we totally can't see you at all, sir ... I mean Bilbo. Sir") because he'll be their boss one day.

And of course, he'll get to write the history of it. (I can just see There And Back Again on the rack in the airport next to The 10% Adventurer: How to Fulfill the Ancient Legends WITHOUT Quitting Your Day Job! or The Seven Dwarves of Highly Effective People or the latest in NLP from Ed Wormtongue or whatever).

Of course, that's probably putting it a bit strongly. But it is nice for a change to see a kid in a tale of high adventure who is just pretty much in practical terms a hassle and a risk.

One more snippet:

The Vagrant stares at the coins in his hand, each with the power to buy and sell life. Only five remain now. They have been spent on necessities such as food and medicine as well as indulgences, acts of charity that do little to pay off the debt of conscience. 

The last few coins have bought a boy’s freedom, a goat and a modicum of privacy for the journey. Of the three, only the goat can be classed as a necessity.

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

Pohl, Frederik. 'The Midas Plague'

Frederik Pohl, 'The Midas Plague' (1954).

A kind of world-turned-upside-down post-scarcity dystopia: available to read on Archive.org.

In 'Lessons from science fiction: Frederik Pohl and the robot prosumer' (2020), M.J. Ryder writes:

Drawing on his experience as an advertising copywriter, Pohl often introduces elements of marketing theory and psychology to demonstrate that humans don’t necessarily need machines in order to behave in a machine-like way. Three of his most important works in this regard are his co-authored novel The Space Merchants (1952), and his short stories, ‘The Midas Plague’ (1954), and ‘The Man Who Ate the World’ (1956). While each of these works shares Pohl’s central concern with human-machine relations, they also explore elements of Pohl’s environmentalism, and concern with the impacts of mass-consumption on human life – a key concern of the early post-war period with the dawn of the computer age heralding a raft of new technologies and consumer goods. While machines, robots and automated technologies play an important role in each of these three works, they each blur the boundaries between human and machine, and interrogate the role of humans and machines in the cycle of production and consumption. It is not enough that machines produce and humans consume, but rather that humans become more and more like machines, such that consumption itself becomes a mechanical process, stripping consumers of agency and creating a dystopian world in which the only ‘freedom’ is the freedom not to consume, and is a freedom limited to the very rich.

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. Singularity Sky

Charles Stross, Singularity Sky (2003). Entry in ISFDB. Stross's entry in SFE.