The Trouble With Peace and shows the decline of Hobbesian Sovereigns

Last year I posted an article about Joe Abercrombie’s epic fantasy novel The Trouble With Peace and how it dramatized the conflicts that made our world. The book is out in paperback tomorrow and I would highly recommend reading it.

The novel is set in a kingdom that is on the cusp of an industrial revolution. The power of Kings and nobles is being challenged by both a rising class of merchants and industrialists and an emerging industrial working class, who are unhappy about the conditions they live in.

You can hear a brief clip from the audiobook read by Steven Pacey below:

Last year I wrote about @LordGrimdark’s novel #TheTroubleWithPeace from @Gollancz & how it dramatises the conflicts that made our modern world. It's a great epic fantasy novel and it's out in paperback tomorrow. Here's a clip of the audiobook read by Steven Pacey pic.twitter.com/zDFwWYDGGB

— Alastair J R Ball (@AlastairJRBall) May 12, 2021

This extract focuses on King Orso, newly crowned king of The Union, who has the unenviable task of leading his country through this time of transition and upheaval. Listening to this clip of the audiobook made me think about this section from my previous article, in which I explored how The Trouble of Peace highlights the arguments made by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson’s in their seminal work on economic development Why Nations Fail.

The Union and English history

In the United Kingdom (where I am writing from) the origins of the inclusive institutions that led to the industrial revolution can be traced to the political changes brought about by the English Civil War and the Glorious Revolution of the 17th century. In Abercrombie’s novel, The Union is at a similar turning point.

Like England at the time of the Glorious Revolution, The Union is a monarchy but power ultimately rests with a group of people and is not solely invested in an absolute monarch. The Union is governed by the Closed Council, a group of senior noblemen around the king who hold offices of state. This transition from absolute monarchy to group rule is the beginning of the process of creating inclusive institutions.

Acemoglu and Robinson identify two aspects of a society that is needed for inclusive institutions. They are “centralised government” and “pluralism”. Both of these began in England at the beginning of the Early Modern period, when King Henry VII disarmed the rebellious nobleman and created a bureaucracy around the king.

This centralised power allowed for a government to be created. It also created pluralism because with the loss of their arms the barons lost their military power and thus they had to attain power and influence through non-military means. This led to them pushing for more powers for parliament.

Hobbesian Sovereigns

Recently I have been reading about Thomas Hobbes and how he thought of The Sovereign. King Orso is not a Hobbesian Sovereign has he doesn’t have the total power to make decision about his subjects as Hobbesian Sovereigns do. He has to balance the demands of the members of his Closed Council and those of the newly rising powers in The Union.

What I hadn’t appreciated about The Trouble With Peace when I first read it was that it’s not only about the economic changes that Acemoglu and Robinson identify in Why Nations Fail, but it’s also about the political changes that occurred that moved us away from a Hobbesian conception of the Sovereign to something more like the small-l liberal democracy we have today.

King Orso has to bear in mind some (but not all of his subject’s wishes) when he makes decisions for the Union. This is a step on the path towards a nation where The Sovereign is a body not an absolute ruler and is responsive (to a degree) to the wishes of all its subjects.

More on Hobbes soon

I will have more thoughts on Hobbes in a new blog post coming shortly. For now, I will say that if you’re interested in economic and political history and enjoy reading fantasy novels then I can recommend The Trouble With Peace. There’s a lot to dig into with this book.

The Trouble with Peace dramatises the economic and political changes that made our modern world

I wonder if I am the only person who, whilst reading Joe Abercrombie’s new epic fantasy novel The Trouble With Peace, was reminded of Why Nations Fail, Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson’s seminal work on economic development.

The novel is about a society poised on the edge of the transformation into the type of modern industrial society that we would recognise. Factories are springing up, whilst canals are being dug. Farm labourers are going to work in mills, whilst cities are growing. All of which reminded me of Acemoglu and Robinson’s study of the history of this process in our world.

A new world of factories and mines

The Trouble With Peace is the second book in Abercrombie’s The Age of Madness Trilogy, which takes place in his First Law world that has been established in a previous trilogy and standalone books. The First Law is not a Medieval-eques fantasy setting like Middle Earth or Westeros. The Trouble With Peace is set in a world where kings don’t have absolute power and economic rivalries between nations are becoming more important than military ones. There are warrior kings, like Stour Nightfall, King of the Northmen, but this is no longer their world. Their power is waning, whilst the prestige of industrialists and inventors is growing.

The new world that is being born values skills with finance and commerce, rather than swords. Entrepreneurs like the ambitious Lady Savine dan Glokta are becoming more influential and powerful aristocrats are seeking business partnerships with industrialists and inventors to enhance their prestige, whereas in the past this prestige would have been won on the battlefield. Poor people are pressed into factory and mine work, rather than fieldwork.

The Trouble With Peace is mainly set in The Union, a monarchy that is built on alliances between nobles and regional governors. The Union is beginning to go through the industrial revolution and some of the most powerful writing in The Trouble With Peace is the description of the squalor and danger that the new industrial workers have to live in. Abercrombie vividly renders the callousness of industrialists and how cheap human life is to them.

Economic development as a source of dramatic conflict

Acemoglu and Robinson write about this transformation and the type of political institutions needed for it to be a success. It is the fight over the control of these institutions that is the conflict in Abercrombie’s novel.

The core of Acemoglu and Robinson’s argument is that government is needed to create healthy economic development through making markets inclusive, which is done via education, training, providing infrastructure and helping people start business. Acemoglu and Robinson refer to “inclusive institutions” (rule of law, independent courts, banking and finance systems, property rights, etc.) as the bedrock needed for a prosperous country.

This may sound like a poor source of conflict for an epic fantasy novel, but many times throughout history a revolution has been necessary to create inclusive institutions. The American Revolution is a good example of this. Revolutions are a great source of conflict for a novel and the main plot of The Trouble With Peace is such a revolution.

The Union and English history

In the United Kingdom (where I am writing from) the origins of the inclusive institutions that led to the industrial revolution can be traced to the political changes brought about by the English Civil War and the Glorious Revolution of the 17th century. In Abercrombie’s novel, The Union is at a similar turning point.

Like England at the time of the Glorious Revolution, The Union is a monarchy but power ultimately rests with a group of people and is not solely invested in an absolute monarch. The Union is governed by the Closed Council, a group of senior noblemen around the king who hold offices of state. This transition from absolute monarchy to group rule is the beginning of the process of creating inclusive institutions.

Acemoglu and Robinson identify two aspects of a society that is needed for inclusive institutions. They are “centralised government” and “pluralism”. Both of these began in England at the beginning of the Early Modern period, when King Henry VII disarmed the rebellious nobleman and created a bureaucracy around the king.

This centralised power allowed for a government to be created. It also created pluralism because with the loss of their arms the barons lost their military power and thus they had to attain power and influence through non-military means. This led to them pushing for more powers for parliament.

Liberal bourgeoisie revolution

The Trouble with Peace explores a similar process. King Orso, newly crowned king of The Union has centralised power in his Closed Council and we can see the beginnings of a modern form of government with ministers appointed to key roles such as Arch Lector. At the same time nobles in the larger Open Council, which can be seen as a proto-parliament, are pushing for more authority, which is the beginning of a pluralistic form of government.

The main plot of the novel follows a rebellion against Union King Orso by Leo dan Brock, aka the Young Lion, a regional governor and a popular soldier. He is supported by his entrepreneur wife, Lady Savine dan Glokta and members of the Open Council vying for more influence. Leo’s rebellion can be seen as a liberal bourgeoisie revolution, similar to the wave of revolutions that spread through Europe in 1848.

These liberal uprisings (I mean liberal in the John Locke sense of the word, not the Joe Biden sense) challenged the absolute authority of monarchs and sought to create more inclusive governments based on modern ideas of rights and liberty. Or at least they sought inclusiveness, rights and liberty for middle class industrialists. Although many of these revolutions ultimately failed and led to a conservative authoritarian backlash, they were a step towards creating more inclusive institutions and thus part of the journey towards our modern form of government.

The rise of the middle class

The rise of the middle classes, merchants and industrialists, is crucial to the story of the liberal bourgeoisie revolutions and to The Trouble with Peace. Acemoglu and Robinson in Why Nations Fail argue that the emergence of the merchant class is key to the move towards inclusive political institutions in England in the 17th Century.

The merchant class supported parliament in the English Civil War and Glorious Revolution as it was in their interest to get a more pluralistic society that would represent their views. Again, this is shown in the Trouble With Peace through rising middle class industrialists such as Lady Savine supporting The Young Lion’s rebellion. We would expect that if Leo becomes king, then he would be beholden to the Open Council who made him king and will have to share more of his power with them, creating a more pluralistic society.

Proletariat uprising

Pluralistic reforms in the 17th century and 18th century England created greater freedom for the middle-classes and allowed the industrial revolution to happen, but this economic freedom came at the expense of the working classes who were moved from fields into factories and had to endure terrible working conditions. The “Dark Satanic Mills” that John Milton mentioned in his hymn Jerusalem.

This led to strikes, calls for better conditions, more rights for working people and working class led movements such as the Chartists and events such as the Peterloo Massacre. Working class rebellion is a constant presence in Abercrombie’s novel. Groups such as the Breakers and Burners disrupt production and agitate for better conditions for the proletariat or a revolution against the bourgeoisie mill owners. They are a clear parallel of the Luddites from English political history.

As a Marxist, and a lefty, I feel sympathy for the Breakers and Burners who are forced to endure horrendous working conditions and driven to drastic action to improve their lives. The Marxist theorist in me says that the Breakers and Burners need Leo dan Brock’s bourgeoisie rebellion to first overthrow the upper classes and spread power to the bourgeoisie before a proletariat uprising can seize the means of production. The historian in me says that working class agitation, from the Chartists to Peterloo, were important steps towards further reforms such as the Great Reform act of 1832 that led to more inclusive institutions and paved the way for the eventual enfranchisement of all people in the 20th century.

Grimdark fantasy

As you can tell, a fantasy novel with a lot of political and economic history analogies is something that I can really get into. There are a lot of other positive things about The Trouble With Peace. The story of the rebellion is tense and I couldn’t stop turning the pages to find out how it ended. There are a lot of complex, well developed characters that bring the story to life.

Often as a reader, you think that you fully understand a character and then they will do something that surprises you, like Arch Lector Glokta, the head torturer for King Orso being surprisingly nice to his subordinate Vic when he is forced to leave his office. There are also the surprise switches of allegiance, twists and turns in the course of the rebellion that keep the reader engaged throughout the novel.

Abercrombie is known as the master of “grimdark”, a subgenre of fantasy, and this novel doesn't disappoint on that front. It is violent and bloody, although never with a sadomasochistic glee at the suffering of the characters. In Abercrombie’s writing, the suffering is a reflection of how violent society was in the Early Modern period. This novel also dismisses any romantic notion of what a war fought with pike and cannon was like.

No clearly defined right or wrong

There are also no clearly defined right or wrong in The Trouble With Peace or good guys and bad guys. I felt sympathy for Orso, who has unexpectedly found himself king and is trying to deal with a country that is changing rapidly, but before he can get his feet under the table he has to deal with his nobles rebelling. However, I also felt sympathy for The Young Lion, a brave soldier who might usher in the next phase of social reform to make society fairer and more equal (eventually).

This lack of good guys and bad guys also increased the tension. No one is fated to win from the start, so the rebellion could succeed or fail. In our status of omniscient reader, we are not given any more clues to the direction of future events than the unlikely protagonist themselves.

More than a rebellion

What I found most interesting about The Trouble with Peace is how it dramatises economic and political conflict through human conflict. A rebellion is about more than kings and nobles, it is a conflict between different ways of organising the world. What I liked most about this novel is how Abercrombie effectively uses an epic fantasy story to dramatise the economic and political changes that made our modern world. The same changes that Acemoglu and Robinson describe in Why Nations Fail.

What can Will Save the Galaxy For Food teach us about a future without jobs?

It is a well-known fact that science fiction novels say more about the time in which they are written than about what is likely to happen in the future. Science fiction is full of predictions that didn’t come true (Space 1999, anyone?) but, more importantly, how we view the future gives us insight into the present.

With that in mind, I recently read Will Save the Galaxy For Food by Yahtzee Croshaw, a post-modern take on the sci-fi trope of the hero starpilot. In the future, space travel led to a Golden Age of starpiloting, where daredevil adventurers found fame and glory in perilous deep space. Then Quantum Tunneling is invented and overnight no one needs starpilots anyone. The pilots themselves are thrown on the scrapheap and have to grovel for a meagre income selling guided tours of the sites of their past glory.

As I read the book, I realised that it spoke to a key anxiety of our world, namely that technology will make us all obsolete. Last year the Bank of England said that as many as 15 million British jobs could be lost to machine and online shopping has already caused 62,000 job losses in the retail sector. Due to rising automation in the workplace, we could all end up like the pilots in Croshaw’s novel.

If we are facing a jobless world, then there are policies we can adopt to prevent billions of people having to beg to survive, as the pilots do in WSTGFF. One such example is Universal Basic Income, and it is good that these policies are being explored in places such as Finland. What is striking about WSTGFF is not the poverty of the starpilots without an income, but the complete lack of dignity of their post-Quantum Tunneling existence.

The nameless starpilot protagonist is desperate to hold on to his pride, even as it becomes harder to make a living. He is against all attempts to commodify and sanitise the Golden Age of starpiloting, even if this might make him money. Some of the starpilots start businesses and try to move on, but many cling to the identity that their job gave them. Being a starpilot is more than a source of income - it is who you are.

This really rang true for me. We all base our identity on our source of employment. When someone asks me “what do you do?”, I don’t say: “I scour science fiction novels for political insights to post on the internet to make myself feel clever”, I say “I work in marketing”. Both are equally true.

If we lose our employment, we lose a crucial part of our identity. If we all lose our employment then a national crisis of identity will occur. Increasing advancement in robotics and companies eager to cut as many jobs as possible in order to drive up their profits don’t care about this. We need UBI to save us all from starving, but we need a change in the way we define ourselves slipping into depression.

If all our jobs disappear, we might find ourselves like the starpilots in WSTGFF, clinging to nostalgia for a time when our lives meant something, instead of seizing the opportunities of all our new free time. We might think that we were better off in a time when everyone had to toil away for an enormous chunk of their lives to provide an income that (for many people today) doesn’t cover the basic costs of living.

If there was no work, would we be consumed by nostalgia for a time where there was work? Increasing numbers of women are equal breadwinners to men, but now many men are wondering how a man can define himself when he’s not the sole provider for a family. This has led to nostalgia for a time when a man’s identity was simpler. This nostalgia completely fails to engage with the patriarchal oppression that women faced in the past and threatens to recreate it.

Without work, are we risking a similar crisis in identity? A similar nostalgia for a time when one could define oneself through work? A nostalgia that - similar to what is happening with many men - could be taken advantage of by those who have a dangerous agenda?

In WSTGFF, the pilot eventually learns to move on with his life and lets go of his nostalgia for a Golden Age that never really existed. It’s a good lesson, and it shows we can move on and recreate our lives. Our world is not as neat as a book and rarely provides a satisfactory ending that wraps everything up. There is no beneficent author figure resolving things in our world for the best. That’s why we need to heed the warnings of fiction.

To tackle the problems of growing automation and job losses, we need to think not only about how we will eat when there are jobs, but also how we will define ourselves. Our identities need to become more varied, more complex and less tied to what we do for a living. When people are more than what they do, it won’t matter what they do or if they do nothing.

Time is money in The Quantum Thief

One of the reasons why I love science fiction so much is the imagination that its authors show in creating the worlds in which their stories are set. I am frequently blown away by how creative sci-fi authors can be when inventing strange new worlds, bizarre aliens and ways of living. Of all the books that I have read in the last few years, none have been more interesting or unusual than The Quantum Thief, the debut novel by Finnish author Hannu Rajaniemi. The Quantum Thief surprised me with how outlandish an author’s imagination can be when creating characters, plot and sci-fi concepts to inhabit a fictional world. What I found most fascinating about the novel is that part of it is set in a moving city on Mars, called the Oubliette, where time is their currency. This made me think, how would this work and what economic issues would it bring up?

The first thing to note is that the Oubliette is not a post-scarcity society as are some in science fiction. There is resource scarcity - such as physical space, power, food and luxury items - which means a system of allocating resources amongst the Oubliette's citizens is necessary. Time is the medium through which the Oubliette allocates its scarce resources, as each citizen is given a certain amount of time which ticks away second by second but can be exchanged for goods and services. When a citizen's time expires their personality is download into a machine body known as a Quiet. The Quiet do the majority of the labour in the Oubliette, certainly all the essential jobs including keeping the city moving. A citizen serves time as a Quiet, only maintaining a fraction of their humanity, before being reborn as human and the process begins again.

We are introduced to the Oubliette through the eyes of a visitor, Jean le Flambeur, a famous thief who is looking for memories he hid in the moving city. This is an effective way of showing this strange society to the reader without the need for heavy-handed exposition. We see how time can be exchanged for goods and services, but we do not see how someone amasses additional time to spend. This would presumably be from selling goods or services to other citizens, however no one in the Oubliette appears to work. The majority of the labour is done by the Quiet. The Oubliette's economy is a strange mix of slavery and jury duty.

How would such an economy function in reality? There would probably be a problem with inflation as a citizen's money is constantly losing value. Any banks that exist would have to make the interest they offer on any savings very attractive to counter the effects of inflation. Although the natural rate of inflation built into their economy, i.e. the passage of time, would make investment more attractive than saving. However, investing your time in a new businesses to create economic growth and technological development would be risky. There is no welfare state in the Oubliette and a bad investment would be a quick ticket to the Quiet, thus most investors are likely to be risk-averse, which would hold back rapid economic growth and technological development.

Most normal economic process (such as investment, taxation, government spending, public services, importing and exporting) could not exist in the Oubliette. However, there is clearly a need for some public services as there is crime, namely the Gogol pirates, and thus a police force which must require some resources and its employees some remuneration. The citizens who provide services such as policing, and attempt to apprehend Jean le Flambeur, are presented as hobbyists who do this work out of interest rather than a means of securing an income. Most likely these people are already wealthy and thus do not need payment and therefore taxation and government spending is not necessary either. However, if most public services are provided on a voluntary basis then the Oubliette is one large economic shock away from the complete collapse of its essential services.

The lack of saving, investment, government spending, imports and exports means that the Oubliette is a static economy with a low level of economic growth. This plays into the politics of the society. The Oubliette is a secretly totalitarian society ruled over by a shadowy group known as the cryptarchs. Jean le Flambeur claims that it is a secret prison based on the idea of a panopticon, where every action is visible to those watching over it.

The main social value of the Oubliette is based around the importance of privacy, which discourages the sharing of personal experience of society and thus prevents the collective examination of social structures. In short, a ‘keep yourself to yourself’ mentality does not encourage the challenging of power structures. All of this points towards the Oubliette being a static but wealthy society, which appears to give its citizens a lot of personal freedom but below the surface it is very limiting and controlling.

Despite its static nature, there is inequality in the Oubliette. One character, the millionaire Christian Unruh, is clearly richer than the average citizen. There are also beggars, who are only a few minutes away from being sent to the Quiet, thus the Oubliette has unemployment. There must be a trade economy reassigning time from the bottom of society to the top for inequality to occur. The reader is introduced to shopkeepers, including a chocolate shop owner, which links into the point above about investment in the Oubliette being more attractive than saving due to inflation. All this points to a degree of economic dynamism thriving beneath the surface of the oppressive cryptarch regime.

There are no comparable real world examples of economies that are similar to the Oubliette. The closest example I can think of is Cuba. Cuba is a society which balances personal freedom with an authoritarian government. Cuba's currency, the National Peso, can only be used by its citizens, which prevents imports and exports, much in the same way that time cannot be exported or imported from the Oubliette. This leads to the country remaining static for political reasons. Beneath the surface of this static and controlling economy is a thriving and dynamic unofficial economy where citizens work around the government's restrictions.

The economy of the Oubliette is interesting and raises a lot of questions. Aside from analysing the implications of using time as a currency, The Quantum Thief is a really imaginative book. Its fantastic story is weaved around the setting of the Oubliette and it has interesting characters and a lot of tension. The Oubliette merely provides the backdrop for the drama of the story. The Quantum Thief is an original science fiction novel which shows a lot of creativity and I would recommend it to any fan of the genre.

Future Economies

Science fiction writers can be overly optimistic about the future. It is tempting to paint a picture of the future where science and capitalism have solved all of our economic and social problems as well as bringing advances such as interplanetary transportation and AI. Today, science is gradually solving some of the world’s problems; for example, AIDS medicine has progressed enormously and a newly HIV positive person living in the west can expect to live as long as someone who is HIV negative. However, technological progress has made some problems worse, mainly the eradication of the planet’s natural environment.

Capitalism is the driving force behind economic impulses and scientific research is governed by the need to be profitable as much as any other industry. This means the problems it is cost-effective to solve are solved and ones it is profitable to make worse are made worse. Capitalism will not solve all our problems by itself, as some sci-fi authors believe it will. For example, in Michael Cobley’s Humanity's Fire novels, humans has progressed to be a space faring civilization, which implies we have overcome our current environmental and population problems. However we are still ruled over by the same type of governments and private business is still the focus of the economy. It strikes me as unlikely that we would have changed so much technologically but remained the same politically and economically.

Capitalism will also not last forever. Too many sci-fi writers accept capitalism as a fundamental truth that will still be present in a future that has left behind the chemical rocket and the internal combustion engine. In the future, there will be different economic systems, just as there will be different political systems. At a talk given by Iain M. Banks, he complained about lazy sci-fi authors who depict a future where the technology, government and social structures have changed but capitalism remains. It is up to sci-fi authors to imagine interesting future economies and not assume that the economic systems of the present, i.e. capitalism, will still be there in the future. The best sci-fi books imagine interesting alternative economics, for example Hannu Rajaniemi's The Quantum Thief imagines a future society where time itself is a commodity and the currency.

There are plenty of sci-fi novels, with space based societies, which do not think about how the economy would have changed or evolved in the time since humanity got into space, even if it is very far in the future. Vernor Vinge's A Deepness In the Sky is set in a future where humanity has migrated so far from Earth that it is almost forgotten but the impulses of capitalism (personified by the Qeng Ho trader civilization) are still what drives human expansion. Humanity has changed enormously in the A Deepness In The Sky, technologically, politically, socially, but economically has remained the same. This seems unlikely to me.

I believe that the great economic issue of our age, which sci-fi authors should be tackling, is the massively rising level of economic inequality. The fact that future economies might bring about greater levels of inequality is overlooked in most science fiction stories. I find the film Alien and the TV show Red Dwarf very interesting presentations of the future as, unlike the gleaming world of Star Trek, they show us that in the future, there will still be people with bad jobs who strive for more money and status.

In our world, economic inequality has gotten substantially worse over the last 30 years. There were times when we were a more economically equal society, such as the period from the end of the Second World War to the end of the 1970s. In the future inequality could get better or worse. Although a lot of science fiction stories overlook the possibility that society could become more unequal, some approach this possibility in imaginative ways.

The film Gattaca is set in a very unequal future where a social elite perpetuates their power through genetic predisposition. Gattaca is world where birth, or more accurately the social class you are born into, determines the pattern of your life. In the film, we see how this rigid social structure limits the individual. This is what those of us who are concerned about economic inequality fear, a future where the economic divisions are so wide that birth determines the trajectory of your life. Gattaca explores how society’s resources might be allocated in this future and shows that, as society changes to accommodate this new technology, so too does our economic structure. This is an imaginative way of looking at what the future might be like.

Iain M. Banks’ Culture novels have a different but equally imaginative approach to the economy of the future. Culture novels are post-scarcity, where technological progress has made the resource allocation system of capitalism obsolete. The Culture is a society where technology has completely changed every aspect of humanity, its social values, resource allocation and political structures are completely different to the ones of today. The Culture is a future where everything is different.

Technological progress and capitalism will not in themselves make the future more equal. However technological changes will alter our social structures, our political institutions and our economic system. The structures which facilitate our Earth based society will have to change if we become a space-based society. Will these changes be for better or worse? Will they solve our current problems or escalate them? These are interesting topics for sci-fi writers to explore, and many interesting writers are doing so. However it is lazy to assume that capitalism or any other current social or economic structure will remain indefinitely, regardless of how much humanity changes.

What can economists learn from science fiction?

Economics and science fiction are two things that you would not typically associate with each other. One is an academic discipline, and the other is a creative discipline. At a glance, there few sci-fi books that deal directly with economics – there are sci-fi books that tackle politics, sociology, religion and war, but books which look at economics are less prevalent. Is this because economics is too dry? It is too serious? Too heavily based in the real world? Is economics too reliant on data, which does not lend itself to being expressed via prose?

Recently I attended a lecture entitled ‘What can economics learn from science fiction?’, in which Cambridge economists Ha-Joon Chang argued that economics and science fiction are related. This lecture was to mark the opening of the Political Economy Research Centre (PERC) at Goldsmiths’ College in London, and featured a lively debate on issues relevant to both economics and science fiction. A podcast of the talk can be found here.

Chang argued that economics, especially neo-classical economics, is very similar to science fiction. This is because neo-classical economics - the current dominant form of economics, sometimes called free market economics - is not a science based on imperially proven laws like physics, but is instead based on the unempirical behavior of human beings. Both economics and science fiction are related to natural sciences but are not scientific themselves. Chang also argues that economists can learn a lot from science fiction, as economists lack imagination, something sci-fi writers have in abundance.

Science fiction is about imagining possible futures based on changes in institutions, technology, politics and society, and about how these changes lead to changes in individuals. He also said that individuals are shaped by the society they inhabit and that society’s technology, which sci-fi writers also explore. Changes in technology change how people live their lives; the example which Chang gave was that people in agrarian economies have a lax approach to time keeping, whereas people in industrial economies are very precise time keepers. Science fiction writers explore economic changes by looking at the type of individuals that would be produced by these changes; for example, in Iain M. Banks's Culture novels, technology has liberated humanity from scarcity, and the effect of this is the removal of hierarchy and institutions, and greater personal freedom. Banks's novels explore how social liberalism is linked to resource scarcity.

The ways in which changes in the economy will affect how people behave in the future is important ground for economists to explore. Economists and sci-fi writers can change the emphasis of the structure of the economy in the present to see how the future will be different, and then make a comment about whether this type of change should be encouraged or discouraged. An example of this from sci-fi was Aldous Huxley‘s Brave New World, an imagined society where our economic needs are met and there is no social, political or class conflict. However, by exploring this world and the people who are produced by it, we see that despite appearing utopian, we would not want to live in it.

Another example is Mad Max, which like many post-apocalyptic sci-fi stories, looks at the idea of the neo-classical rational individual set free by the collapse of society. In the world of Mad Max, the people have total economic and personal freedom with no state involvement; neo-classical economists suggest that this should bring about a perfect society, but the world of Mad Max is far from perfect. Post-apocalyptic sci-fi says when individual selfishness is set free the overall structure of society suffers, a comment on neo-classic economics. Mad Max also makes the point that total freedom of individuals from governments and institutions can only be brought about by the collapse of society.

Sci-fi writers can also learn from economists, Chang argued that better understanding of economics would lead to better world building. In David Brin's novel Glory Season, the inhabitants of the planet Stratos have adopted an isolationist and self-sufficient political ideology (similar to Juche in North Korea), which has had the effect of holding their economic development at an early industrial level; they have some railways, but still rely heavily on sailing ships. However, there also seems to be modern broadcasting technology, which is inconsistent. Another example is the Galactic Empire in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation novels: the expire exists to provide the capital world of Trantor with food and raw materials for its 40 billion inhabitants, but it is not clear what the capital exports in return, except for political tyranny. The same can be said of Suzanne Collins's ‘Hunger Games’ novels.

Chang also argued that there was a lot which science fiction writers and economists could learn from each other, as much of the work in both disciplines operates with the same underlying assumptions. Both could learn that the inevitable progress of science and capitalism is unlikely to solve all of our social and economic problems. A Star Trek-like future where scientific progress has eliminated social strife and the need for work is very unlikely; what is far more likely is a future like Alien, where there are still poorly-paid jobs in bad conditions, or Gattaca, where the benefits of technology progress are hoarded by a minority who are preselected by technology based on their genes and background. Faith in progress as a social leveler is naive – the economies of the future are likely to be as oppressive as the economies of today, and perhaps more so.

The main thrust of Chang's argument is one that I very much agree with: that science fiction and economics are closely related and they can learn a lot from each other. I certainly agree that a better understand of economics will help sci-fi writers to create more believable worlds. I also agree that science fiction is a useful tool that economists can use to see how changes in the economy might affect individuals in the future. The two disciplines are related and hopefully both will benefit from a mutually cooperative relationship in the future.