Banks, Iain M. The Culture series

Iain M. Banks's Culture series. Notable for its post-scarcity civilisation: anyone can have pretty much any good or service they want. Nobody has to work unless they want to. Work has more to do with self-expression, self-fulfillment and relaxation than with toil, coercion, duty and necessity. Banks outlines the Culture's democratically planned economy in "A Few Notes on the Culture" (1994). See also Gene Roddenberry.

Here's one interesting snippet: in Banks's Look to Windward (2000), a highly desirable ticketed music event leads to a "partial" reinvention of "money."

“Well, for tickets to Ziller’s concert [...] People who can’t stand other people are inviting them to dinner, booking deep-space cruises together — good grief — even agreeing to go camping with them. Camping! [...] People have traded sexual favors, they’ve agreed to pregnancies, they’ve altered their appearance to accommodate a partner’s desires, they’ve begun to change gender to please lovers; all just to get tickets [...] And they have indeed [...] come to agreements that go beyond barter to a form of liquidity regarding future considerations that sounds remarkably like money” (p.276).

I wrote about this a little bit in the reflective part of my PhD. I said:

"This episode suggests a technologically privileged and sexually liberal version of commodity theory, with the same progression from inconvenient, illiquid, spot-trade barters to more conveniently liquid transactions. The tenacity of money in the Culture series, flourishing inside its homines economici like gut microbiomes [...] suggests a failure to fully erase money."

(JLW)

Beckbessinger, Sam. Undercurrency

Sam Beckbessinger, 'Undercurrency' (2021).

Part of a whole collection of financial futures. The story relates to a futuristic biofuel kelp farm pilot, located beyond the shallows with the help of drones that drag the kelp up to soak up the sun in the day, down to the sea bed to soak up nutrients in the night. In this new environment, a new subspecies of giant sea snail is thriving. The story explores the economics of environmental management, and in particular conflicts between decarbonisation and preserving biodiversity.

She believes in the market. How its invisible hand can solve the most complex problems, as long as everything has been priced in. Carbon tax treaties. Pollution fines. The costs your business doesn’t have to bear, the benefits they didn’t have to pay for. Her economics professor back in business school called them “externalities”. Her Ouma used to call it “leaving your mess for the fairies to pick up”.

Wole Talabi comments:

A brilliant story focused on climate change, energy transition and sustainable investment, “Undercurrency” follows a South African woman’s attempt to build her company, growing underwater kelp for biofuel on the coast while falling in love and learning about the complexity of doing the right thing in a world of complex and competing drivers. The voice in the story is strong, the description of the romance, while quick, feels natural and the descriptions of the science and the diving are vivid, accurate and wonderful. Full disclosure: I am an engineer in the energy industry and an avid diver, therefore naturally biased or as we say in Nigeria, I am the story’s target market. Consider me sold. Highly Recommended.

The choice of a giant sea snail offers a faint echo of the landmark snail darter conservation case of the 1970s. The Endangered Species Act is an intriguing mix of anthropocentric and ecocentric motivations. Kaitlin Bakken suggests: "If it were not for the human interest in protecting the land, the snail darter fish would not have been considered. [...] Conversely, where human interests are superior, wildlife species are generally unprotected."

The story is able to wrap up quickly and satisfyingly (in a way) with carbon credits as the deus ex machina. Instead of harvesting the kelp as biofuel, the fields are sold to the fossil fuel industry to offset carbon emissions. It works narratively, but it relies on a catastrophically rosy picture of how carbon credit trading has worked in practice.

“Prop up the oil companies?”

“That’s one way to see it.”

That is pretty much the correct way to see it.

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 [...]"

Bogdanov, Alexander. Red Star

Alexander Bogdanov, Red Star (1908).

As well as co-founding the Bolsheviks with Lenin, Bogdanov wrote this Martian utopia (and its prequel, Engineer Menni). It was published in 1908, shortly before Bogdanov's expulsion; translated into German in 1923, Esperanto in 1929, and English 1982.

This snippet of Red Star explains the division and allocation of productive labour. It anticipates themes of Bogdanov's Tektology: Universal Organization Science (1912-1917) and later the social and organizational cybernetics and systems theory of people like Stafford Beer, Margaret Mead, Niklas Luhmann.

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)

Roddenberry, Gene. Star Trek

Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek. What's really fascinating about the economics of Star Trek is the inconsistency. The official line is that the Federation is post-money, and there are hints (replicators etc.) that it is more-or-less post-scarcity too.

Nevertheless, we also get references to rents, remittances, stakes, compensation and even the compulsory face of future finance, the credit. The equivocation is neatly captured in TOS Episode "The Apple," when Kirk snaps at Spock (and not for the first time I bet), "Do you know how much Starfleet has invested in you?" Spock responds something like, "Twenty-two thousand, two hun--" and is rather tellingly interrupted before he can finish, "--dred and forty three clams and eighty seven point one four pence, Captain. Why, what's up?" It's a discrepancy can be reconciled in various ways, which I hope to look at in some detail elsewhere.

I think the post-scarcity of Star Trek is worth comparing to that of Iain M. Banks's Culture, with which it has similarities.

There has been a fair bit written about Star Trek economics, most notably Manu Saadia's Trekonomics:



Trekonomics from Inkshares on Vimeo.