Results for “graeber debt” 4 found
Hard Social Science Fiction: Neptune’s Brood
Hard science-fiction is science fiction that respects the findings and constraints of contemporary science. By analogy, I deem hard social science fiction* to be science fiction that respects the findings and constraints of contemporary social science especially economics but also politics, sociology and other fields. Absent specific technology device such as a worm-hole, hard science fiction rejects faster than light travel as little more than fantasy. I consider Eden-like future communist societies similarly fantastical. Nothing wrong with fantasy as entertainment, of course, just so long as you don’t try to implement it here on earth.
Charles Stross is one of my favorite hard social science fiction authors. Stross writes both hard science-fiction and hard social-science fiction, sometimes in the same book and sometimes not. The Merchant Prince series, for example is hard social-science fiction drawing on development economics with a fantasy walk-between-the-worlds element while Halting State is hard-hard science-fiction set in the near future (n.b. HS memorably begins with a bank robbery from Hayek associates).
Stross’s latest, Neptune’s Brood, is hard-hard science-fiction set far in the future and perhaps best illustrated with this telling quote:
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that every interstellar colony in search of good fortune must be in need of a banker.
Although set far in the future, Neptune’s Brood contains plenty of commentary on recent events if one reads it carefully for hidden meaning, i.e. a Strossian reading. It is no accident, for example, that it opens with a quote from David Graeber’s Debt and finishes with altruist squids.
Neptune’s Brood is Stross’s attempt to understand money by thinking about what money and banking would look like given interstellar travel and relativity. Not surprisingly, Stross draws upon Paul Krugman’s Theory of Interstellar Trade and also (perhaps less explicitly) on the new monetary economics of Fama, Black, Hall, Cowen and Krozner. One plot point turns on what might happen should the velocity of money increase dramatically! I was also pleased that privateers make an appearance.
Hard social-science fiction is not just about economics. NB also contains interesting commentary on technology, religion, social organization, reproduction and their mutual influences. I wouldn’t put NB at the top of my list of Stross favorites but I enjoyed Neptune’s Brood and you need not let the commentary interfere with the story itself which in Stross fashion moves along at a rapid clip with plenty of enjoyable action and mystery. Recommended.
* yes, it should probably be hard social-science science-fiction but that is too much of a mouthful.
Assorted links
1. New Carl Zimmer project on science eBook reviews.
2. Empirical tests of how much “cold start” is a problem in labor economics. From this general blog on on-line labor markets and their implications.
3. Markets in everything: dog TV.
4. NYT symposium on the farm bill, including yours truly.
6. CrookedTimber is running a symposium on Graeber’s debt book.
7. Early John Nash on cryptography, written to the NSA.
The wit of the Irish?
What’s unusual about the Irish [medieval] material is that it’s all spelled out so clearly. This is partly because Irish law codes were the work of a class of legal specialists who seem to have turned the whole thing almost into a form of entertainment, devoting endless hours to coming up with every possible abstract possibility. Some of the provisos are so whimsical (“if stung by another man’s bee, one must calculate the extent of the injury, but also, if one swatted it in the process, subtract the replacement value of the bee”) that one has to assume they were simply jokes.
That is from David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years.
What I’ve been reading
1. Andes, by Michael Jacobs. Most travel books disappoint me, but I found this one interesting throughout, most of all the section on Venezuela. It is conceptually strong and overall enthralling.
2. Sergio Chejfec, My Two Worlds. Are you deeply interested in how an Argentinean observer might phenomenologically regard a southern Brazilian city, combined with his philosophy of walking, in fictional form? I am. This may or may not be of general interest.
3. David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Do you seek an overly verbose, sometimes fascinating synthesis of economic anthropology, early 20th century credit theories of money, and the history of debt? The book overinterprets early historical evidence and falls apart as it approaches contemporary times, still it has a vitality which many other tracts lack. Here is a chat with the author.
4. Wells Tower, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned. This Jonathan Miles quotation is better than anything I will come up with: “Tower’s stories [have] the kind of torque that’s so damnably rare these days in American short fiction, where the payoff tends to be the faint, jewel-box click of epiphany, the small tilting of a life. Tower’s ambition is greater and brawnier than that.”
5. Charles Seife, Sun in a Bottle: The Strange History of Fusion and the Science of Wishful Thinking. An excellent and compulsively readable history of the attempts to make fusion power work; I thank Gordon for the original pointer.
6. Aurel Schubert, The Credit-Anstalt Crisis of 1931, no further comment required.