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.

Roberts, Adam. By the Pricking of Her Thumb

 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. 

Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter

See Katherine DM Clover's article on inflation in the world of Harry Potter.
See also Eliezer Yudkowsky's Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, Chapter 4: The Efficient Markets Hypothesis.

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