DeLong Smackdown Watch: Paul Krugman Is "Startled at My Ignorance"

Paul writes:

Economic science fiction: I’m startled at Brad DeLong’s ignorance: he thinks there’s something new about science fiction novels where the science in question is economics.

This theme actually goes back a long way. I once stumbled across Robert Heinlein’s Beyond This Horizon, a very early novel that’s actually inspired by the then-popular doctrine of secular stagnation, which argued that rising savings and declining investment opportunities would lead to persistent problems in getting people to spend enough.

Oh, by the way — it’s a terrible novel, though not as bad a novel as The Internecine Project is a movie. Charles Stross’s Merchant Princes novels, on the other hand, are economic science fiction worth reading.

Admittedly my memory of Beyond This Horizon is hazy. But I recall it as being much more about scientific research into life after death, ennui, dueling customs, eugenics--I don't recall secular stagnation and the consequent danger that too much savings would produce chronic high unemployment as playing much of a role, although I do recall a powerful government able and eager to finance all kinds of expensive blue-sky research. I also recall a "social credit" government that finances itself and pays citizens a basic income, all out of seigniorage...

I agree that Charles Stross's Miriam Beckstein "Merchant Princes" novels are much better than Beyond This Horizon.

And I still maintain that Daniel Abraham's "Lord Iron and the Cambist" is worth a Hugo...

Comments

[Nietz]

Whuffie is an interesting idea with significant economic implications. What about a digital currency that tracks its history? I wonder if people would start to value *your* currency less if it came from less reputable sources...

[sm]

Wasn't the theory of economics in that book the source of the social credit philosophy? There were still social credit parties in Canada in the 1980s.
But for heavens sake, don't re-read Beyond This Horizon to find out. Among other flaws it is the source of the aphorism" an armed society is a polite society," which has become a gun owners talking point for decades now. I wonder how this squares with the experience of Iraq.

[derek]

sm, you grant Heinlein too much influence. Social credit was in the air when he wrote. He's not the originator of it.

I too raised my eyebrows at Brad's remark, but not too high. Economics has always been treated as well as physics in science fiction, which is to say bits of it get used as inspiration here and there. In _The Time Machine_ (1895), H. G. Wells used Marx's theory of history to predict the Eloi and Morlocks.

In _The Space Merchants_ (1953), Frederik Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth took consumerism, the mad idea that buying stuff is good for "the economy" because it improves "productivity", to the max, and everyone was socially pressured to buy stuff all the time, and then work themselves hard to earn the money to pay for the stuff they had to buy. Thanks heavens that future never happened!

[Lukeness]

I had no idea that science fiction geeks became Economists... not just aerospace engineers and assembly language programmers!

[Blissex]

«In _The Space Merchants_ (1953), Frederik Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth took consumerism, the mad idea that buying stuff is good for "the economy" because it improves "productivity", to the max, and everyone was socially pressured to buy stuff all the time, and then work themselves hard to earn the money to pay for the stuff they had to buy. Thanks heavens that future never happened!» There are others -- in "Gladiator at law" the suburbs become hells of foreclosed paupers, and the central point of the novel is a fight about the ownership of the majority control of a the only good housebuilder :-). Then there was that other novel (title escapes me) where the author imagines a future so fully dominated by advertising and corporations that people start wearing clothes with the manufacturer labels outside so that they be visible to all. Imagine that! ;-).

[Blissex]

«I had no idea that science fiction geeks became Economists... not just aerospace egineers and assembly language programmers!» BDL has confessed previously to having been a programmer and spending too much time on RPGs/adventure games before turning to economics. «everyone was socially pressured to buy stuff all the time» Well, not just pressured -- he also imagines that people become addicted to some beverages because the manufacturer puts in some kind of alcaloid. Well, it is not alcaloids, but surely nicotine, salt and sugar have provoked nearly as good at creating cravings, if not outright addiction as in nicotine; of course this has resulted in immense profits.

[Daniel Abraham]

And I can't tell you how pleased I am that you liked it. My background is actually in biology. I came to economics late in life, and independent of any formal training. Having actual economists enjoy the story makes me think I've actually understood some of the concepts.

To point up the literature of economics more generally, I'd also put in a good word for David Liss' A Conspiracy of Paper and The Coffee Trader.

[Ken Houghton]

I'll take Gregory Feeley's _Arabian Wine_ over _The Coffee Trader_ any day.

Mack Reynolds was always supposed to be an Economics SF Writer.

[Alex Tolley]

As others have mentioned, Robert Heinlein wrote quote a lot about "economic systems". His early novel, "For Us the Living" has pages of details on the economic structure of the 21st century, including a nice toy model to explain why the system of capitalism circa 1928 was a problem.

[Verbal]

See also Kim Stanley Robinson's book Red Mars and its sequels - there's a lot of economics (mars trying to throw off the yoke of the multinational corporations which sponsored its colonization; colonialism and postcolonialism, etc. etc. etc. are brought in) thrown in with the ecology, sociology, politics.....