Atwood, Margaret. Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth

Margaret Atwood, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth (2008)

Non-fiction. Each of the book's five chapters was delivered as a one-hour lecture in a different Canadian city between October and November 2008. Adapted into a film in 2012:

I found the book entertaining and commendably sprawling but also weirdly elusive. For more on debt see David Graeber and Charles Stross. (Atwood's Debt is one I really must come back to though, perhaps in an actual proper book).

Talking point:

• Why do we have bankruptcy law? In what ways might bankruptcy law ameliorate and/or exacerbate economic injustice? (Also discuss limited liability).

(JLW)

Banks, Iain M. The Algebraist

Iain M. Banks, The Algebraist (2005). Not part of Banks's Culture sequence, although it's a space opera which overlaps in various ways with the Culture universe. In terms of economics, it's notable for its reputation currency kudos (used by the Dwellers). Here's a snippet:

Bribing creatures who found the concept of money merely amusing tended to tax even the most enterprising and talented arbitrageur. The Dwellers clove to a system in which power was distributed, well, more or less randomly, it sometimes seemed, and authority and influence depended almost entirely on one's age; little leverage there.  

Alternatively, every now and again a species would attempt to take by force of arms what those involved in Dweller Studies attempted to wrest from the Dwellers by polite but dogged inquiry. Force, it had been discovered - independently, amazingly often - did not really work with Dwellers. They felt no pain, held their own continued survival (and that of others, given the slightest provocation) to be of relatively little consequence and seemed to embody, apparently at the cellular level, the belief that all that really mattered, ever, was a value unique to themselves which they defined as a particular kind of kudos, one of whose guiding principles appeared to be that if any outside influence attempted to mess with them they had to resist it to the last breath in the bodies of all concerned, regardless.

And another:

The problem was that to the Dwellers all professions were in effect hobbies, all posts and positions sinecures. This tailor that Y'sul and the City Administrator were babbling on about would have had no real need to be a tailor, he was just somebody who'd found he possessed an aptitude for the pastime (or, more likely, for the gossiping and fussing generally associated with it). He would take on clients to increase his kudos, the level of which would increase proportionally the more powerful were the people he tailored for, so that somebody in a position of civil power would constitute a favoured client, even if that position of power had come about through a lottery, some arcanely complicated rota system or plain old coercive voting - jobs like that of City Administrator were subject to all those regimes and more, depending on the band or zone concerned, or just which city was involved. The City Administrator, in return, would be able to drop casually into just the right conversations the fact she had such a well-known, high-kudos tailor. Obviously Y'sul had had sufficient kudos of his own to be able to engage the services of this alpha-outfitter too. People further down the pecking order would have employed less well-connected tailors, or just got their clothes from Common, which was Dweller for, in this particular case, off-the-peg, and in general just meant mass-produced, kudos-free, available-as-a-matter-of-right-just-because you're-a-Dweller . . . well, pretty much anything, up to and including spaceships.

Kudos makes for some interesting comparisons with Cory Doctorow's Whuffie, Karen Lord's social credit, and the trust "currency" of Michael Swanwick's millies.

Also see Abigail Nussbaum's review.

(JLW)

Brunner, John. Total Eclipse

John Brunner, Total Eclipse (1974). Mess with eugenics and capitalism-like structures merged into one institution, y'all might wind up dead.

Here's the relevant bit (big spoiler alert):

“But that’s absurd,” Lucas said after a pause. “Going bankrupt— well, it could bring down a civilisation, but it couldn’t wipe out an entire species.”
“It could!” Ian insisted. “Look, it occurred to us to wonder whether the Draconians traded among themselves, and we decided yes, they must have, but it never occurred to any of us to ask what kind of currency they employed.”
Cathy jumped to her feet. “The printed crystals!” she burst out. “Those can’t have been money!”
Karen shouted. “You’d find money all over everywhere, not concentrated in great big storehouses—”

[like, an hour later] 

“Am I being obtuse?” Karen said. “Or have you not yet explained how going bankrupt killed them off?”
“I was just coming to the details of that. I think I already said— excuse me, but my head is buzzing insanely with all the implications— I think I said I started asking what an individual could accumulate by way of reward, or payment.”
There was a brief hush. Nadine ventured, “Promises that when he became she, there would be outstanding genetic lines reserved to— uh— to her?”
“That’s it. That’s what killed them.” Igor leapt to his feet and started pacing back and forth, thumping fist into palm. “I’ve almost got it,” he said. “You mean that without realising what they were doing, they restricted their genetic pool until it became dangerous, and then it was too late. Like fortunes being concentrated in the hands of a few ultra-powerful families? A sort of genetic capitalism?”

(JLW)

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)

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)

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!

Levine, David D. Tk'tk'tk

David D. Levine, Tk'tk'tk (2005).

David D. Levine’s Hugo-winning short story ‘Tk’tk’tk’ focuses on the tribulations of Walker, an interstellar salesman, as he struggles to understand local market conditions.

Walker trips up over a variety of linguistic and cultural caltrops. He does not realise that the deepest and darkest room in the hotel is the most desirable and expensive (duh). He falls for the extrastellar equivalent of downing a local liquor he really can’t handle (more literally, his shoulders are sprinkled with strange green rings, but the principle is the same, and even the chanting “Rings, dance! Rings, dance!” (p. 170) faintly echoes a frattish ‘Drink! Drink! Drink!’). He has difficulty distinguishing high and low denomination currency boluses, since figures are written in fragrances (p.162). Numbers have qualitative associations he is frequently forgets: one buyer is mortified at the idea of paying seventy for an item, but will happily pay seventy-three (p.162). Potential customers profess themselves, with elaborate humility, to be unworthy to take ownership of Walker’s exalted merchandise, calling it “beyond price” (p.161). They do hint at the possibility of compensating him for an “indefinite loan” (p.173, cf. p. 161), but seem to prefer endless, aimless, chinwagging (“did you come through Pthshksthpt or by way of Sthktpth” (p.163)) to talking turkey.

Detail by detail, Levine conjures an amusing and convincingly exotic setting, and only a heartless reader would blame Walker for his bewilderment. Nonetheless, at bottom, Walker’s experiences are just exaggerated versions of what a naive and insensitive late C20th North American (or "Westerner," maybe) might encounter, trying to hock their merch in Asia and East Asia, and perhaps particularly, in Japan.

That is: compared to Walker, the aliens belong to what the anthropologist Edward T. Hall influentially described as a “high-context culture” (Beyond Culture, 1976), in which comparatively greater emphasis is placed on implicature, supported by shared context and experience. Walker’s frustration with meandering chit-chat – what he at best justify as “building rapport” (p.163) – recalls the reactions of some North Americans to a more informal style of decision-making common in Japanese organisations. That is, a style which exhibits a more flexible understanding of what might constitute ‘on-topic’ and ‘off-topic’ conversation, and which closely links the legitimacy of decisions to the social intimacy which has led up to them (cf. e.g. Haru Yamada Snr., Different Games, Different Rules, pp.55-59).

We must be wary of stereotyping, of course -- I'm pretty sure that golfing and drinking is part of work for London City bankers, every bit as much as it is for Tokyo salarymen -- but the broad distinctions are there, at least in the Business Studies and Linguistics literature. And in light of these connections, Walker’s eventual spiritual transformation, which sees him reforming his earlier striving attitudes, is not particularly difficult to understand – he is simply one more tourist-turned-Western Buddhist. Which is still good.

Is the story colonialist, orientalist? When I first wrote this post, I pussyfooted around the question a bit, because I like the story -- and also because I also think I need to try to take an author seriously when they tell me that somebody is a giant alien insect, or an orc, or whatever: and not simply unscramble the story in some way which suits me, and then critique the cleartext as if the ciphertext had never existed. But. The use of insect and swarm imagery, in the depiction of an inscrutable, indirect and exotic people? A people whose ways are a little more collectivist than our narrator's, and who offer him a mystical path to self-transcendence? This is definitely horrible territory.

Should no more pussyfooting. Levine should have used squidbears. And/or France.

This was originally part of a blog post that was also about Cory Doctorow's 'Chicken Little.' The two stories are both about making sales, and they both appear in Hartwell and Hayden's 21st Century Science Fiction anthology.

(JLW)

Lord, Karen. Galaxy Game

Karen Lord, Galaxy Game (2015). A sequel to The Best of All Possible Worlds. Features a world, Punartam, where resources are allocated by the interplay of two formal media, called "social credit" and "financial credit." There is a kind of mapping between divisions such as market and gift economy, or between money and social capital, onto the division between basic needs and wants/luxuries -- all suitably science fictionally estranged and disheveled, of course. Here are the relevant snippets:

Haviranthiya told him very soberly that it appeared Academe Maenevastraya had registered a prior claim on his acquaintance and he could no longer provide Rafi with an Academe Surinastraya recommendation as a starting nexus for future Punartam interactions.
[...]
   "And your essentials," Ntenman continued.
   "There's nothing wrong with them. You should approve of that."
   Essentials were harder to understand, but after Lian dumped a message and a quantity of voice-access credit into his channel, things became clearer. The credit was "a loan, not a gift", and the fact that Lian had extended it made Lian one of his primary essentials. "Stay neutral," Lian's message warned. "Do not accept credit from non-Cygnians."
[...]
   "Your keys are your peers," Lian's message explained further. "I've introduced you to a couple of mine and I'll introduce you to more in time. I know your family and I shared food and drink with you in public, so I'm one of your first-tier keys. Keys you meet through me will be your second-tier keys. You will have to acquire more keys by your own efforts."
[...]
   He quickly discovered that for every variant of the credit system, there were several academic interpretations and models on how they should work. "Economic credit is mere financial engineering," sneered his Academe guide. "Social credit is art."
[...]
   "Yes, that's survival. But social credit determines what you will eat, and where, and with whom."
   "And I get my financial credit from my essentials but social credit from my keys."
   "More or less. That depends on where your nexus is located and the allegiance of your keys. Sometimes it's worthwhile to have a broad representation, but sometimes a nexus will refuse to acknowledge certain keys or networks, or will itself be shunned by other networks." Ntenman exhaled sharply, already frustrated. "It's a complex formula. The size, density and degree of overlap of your networks is measured, your net worth is calculated with reference to recommendations from your keys, and only a fully qualified Credit Assessor can work out the result."
   "But good social credit makes my financial credit more valuable, is that right?"
   "More or less. You're in a higher consumer bracket for some things."
   "So this is good! I have a nexus and I'm making a start on my social credit. I'll be able to pay you back."
   "Don't be rude," said Ntenman, only half-joking, and Rafi belatedly remembered that on Punartam, it was bad manners for anyone, be they creditor, debtor or completely uninvolved, to harp on an unpaid debt.    "So, financial credit is what gets me food and shelter?" Rafi asked. He had discovered that teaching him the basics appeared to put Ntenman in a better mood, as if doing so re-established the correct order of things.

For other exotic trust currencies, see entries for Cory Doctorow, Iain M. Banks, Michael Swanwick, and Jack Vance.

(JLW)

Novik, Naomi. Spinning Silver

Naomi Novik, Spinning Silver (2018).

Many of the entries in this database have a few passages with economic themes, or some interesting worldbuilding with intriguing economic implications. Novik's Spinning Silver is different. The entire novel is a sustained meditation on value, debt, and exchange, also touching on themes of debt peonage, honour and gift-giving, justice and mercy, economic antisemitism and pogroms, sexual division of labour, bridewealth and dowry, affective labour, the objectification and commodification of women and girls, domestic violence, and sisterhood and solidarity. 

The book is filled with instances of expansive and transformative magic, from the everyday metamorphoses of the market, to gowns that are made more splendid by dearly-bought sorcery: all these moments speak of Novik's method of spinning this rich adventure from her slight source material, the story of Rumpelstiltskin. Or perhaps more accurately, from the cluster of Rumpelstiltskinesque fairytales called 'Name of the Helper' stories. Here is one, for instance, that features an elf kingdom:

One time a beautiful peasant girl was gored by a steer. She screamed aloud and called for help. The friendly elf came immediately, comforted her, and promised to help and rescue her, if she would marry him and go with him to the elf kingdom. She had no choice but to say yes, and upon her agreement the elf rescued her.

The episodes in the cottage at the edge of the Staryk kingdom, with its glitching domestic space and invisibilised labour, offers another subtle link: a rumpelstilt is a sort of poltergeist or goblin. These episodes might equally suggest 'The Elves and the Shoemaker', just as the magic mirror and abduction to a wintry kingdom might suggest 'The Snow Queen.'

So what is the deal with Staryk society? It has strong elements of a heroic, honour-based society, except that these elves also seem ... kind of libertarian? Any gift obliges you to the giver in complex ways (cf. Mauss, Levi-Strauss, Strathern, etc.), but for the Staryk these obligations have a magical, binding quality. They therefore shun gifts (even in the sense of simple instinctive acts of kindness and care) and try to turn everything into explicit exchange.

The story opens with young Miryem, uninvited, taking over her soft-hearted moneylender father's business. As I interpret the story, it is partly about Miryem encountering, in the Staryk, the preposterousness of her own chilly and indignant ideas of fair dealing, writ large. Debts, whether formal or informal, are not necessarily bad, exactly, but ... the equal moral worth of contracting parties should never be confused for equal power or freedom. What actions count as gifts, which obligations need to be repaid, what should count as repaying them? The answers are always matters of power, circumstances, feelings, perceptions, and imagination, much more than they are the kind of thing that can be carefully written down in a ledger. 

But does Miryem actually ever learn this, or anything like it? Miryem has a kind of fairytale comeuppance, and she does grow and change in various ways (making a boast and stepping into the shape she has made), but in all the excitement I'm not sure she ever really does revisit her early mercilessness. Perhaps it is the limitations of a critique of commercial society (nascent capitalism) that is rooted in feudal ideals (hospitality, the abundant table, the honourable household where hard work and loyalty are rewarded). I'm not completely sure, but I think that -- although I kind of love this book -- its politics are pretty abhorrent to me. 

Further reading:

• Carol Jones, Women's Worth: A Western Misconception
• David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years
• Jerry Z. Muller, Capitalism and the Jews
• Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract
• Amanda Mandzik, Once Upon an Economics Course: Using Fairy Tales to Teach Economics
• Workers' Tales: Socialist Fairy Tales, Fables and Allegories from Great Britain
• Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation

Vance, Jack. The Moon Moth

Jack Vance, "The Moon Moth" (1961). Online. I'm not as convinced that strakh is as currency-like as people sometimes say. That sentence about medium-of-exchange is taken a bit too literally, perhaps. (Strakh also appears, by the way, to be Niven's Kzin's word for an honor, which also ambiguously takes the place of currency).

(JLW)