Science fiction in recent decades has included an extensive exploration of an economic idea, or at least an economic term: The concept of scarcity. In a peculiarly science-fictional dialectical move, this exploration takes place by assuming the absence of scarcity and asking what follows from it.
The late Iain M. Banks is well known for making “post-scarcity” a premise of his Culture series, for example. In effect, this idea makes advanced technology a kind of djinn that can grant human wishes.
Similar ideas actually have a long history in science fiction.
Indeed, the man who gave it its name, Hugo Gernsback, for whom the Hugo Awards are named, was an adherent of an earlier version, technocracy, which he advocated in the first science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories. (Charles Stross – the 2007 Prometheus Best Novel winner for Glasshouse – once joked that the persistence of science fiction after technocracy was forgotten was as if the Soviet Union had fallen in the 1930s, but left behind a lasting tradition of socialist realism in the visual arts!)
THE ALLURE OF ‘TECHNOCRACY’
Technocracy, proposed by Howard Scott and endorsed by the well-known economist Thorstein Veblen, particularly appealed to engineers and technicians working for the large corporations of the early twentieth century. Such technical workers found themselves coming up with ideas for technologically ideal solutions to productive problems, only to be told that these ideas were financially unworkable and they would need to come up with different solutions that worked within budgetary constraints.
Technocracy advocated government by the technical experts themselves, and promised that if they were set free of the institutional constraints of capitalistic finance, the liberated forces of technology would vastly increase human wealth, which could then be shared equally by everyone.
Since then, various new technologies have inspired similar hopes. In 1954, the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission predicted that nuclear energy would make electricity “too cheap to meter.” A decade later, the Triple Revolution movement said that one of its revolutions, the “cybernation revolution,” would enable machines to take over production, leaving human beings the beneficiaries of mechanical largesse — an idea that Philip José Farmer explored in “Riders of the Purple Wage,” his contribution to Harlan Ellison’s anthology Dangerous Visions.
VINGE’S SINGULARITY AND ALADDIN’S LAMP
After Vernor Vinge popularized the idea of a technological singularity, Ray Kurzweil predicted that it would come about within a few decades, producing super-intelligent machines that could vastly increase overall technological capabilities. One new technology after another has turned out not to be Aladdin’s “djinn of the lamp.”
The underlying idea of technocracy seemed to be that physical limits on human capabilities were real, but economic ones were social conventions.
A capitalist society had the conventions of market pricing and cost accounting, which imposed restrictions over and above those of engineering. But a society with a different culture might transcend those limits. In effect, technocracy denied that economics was actually a science, and by implication, that there could be such a thing as “economic science fiction.”
A POST-SCARCITY SOCIETY?
The idea of a “post-scarcity” society implies a similar denial. Economics is commonly defined as the science that studies the allocation of scarce resources and its effects on human life. In a world without scarcity, there would be no need to economize anything and nothing for economists to study.
But the way this idea is used in the science fiction community is odd. It’s widely remarked that a post-scarcity society would not be one where all resources were superabundant, but where some were and others were not. But that definition doesn’t apply only to imagined futures!
Ludwig von Mises, the magisterial figure of Austrian economics, distinguished between “free goods,” which were superabundant relative to human needs and did not need to be economized, and “economic goods,” which did need to be economized; air, for example, was a free good. (Though science fiction writers have imagined worlds where air must be paid for.)
Some goods — air, for example — were already superabundant in the Paleolithic (some people might say that they were farther from being scarce then than now). So every human society that has ever existed has had a mix of free goods and economic goods. If that’s what it means to be “post-scarcity,” then we have always been there.
Of course, we’re free to say that “post-scarcity” means that we have a great abundance of goods that are scarce in our society and our era. But that seems a very present-centered way of looking at things—one that’s hard to reconcile with the literary mission of science fiction, which is to put us in the point of view of people from future or alien worlds, as Kipling did in “As Easy as A.B.C.” or Cherryh in The Pride of Chanur.
Could “post-scarcity” mean something different?
Could it mean, for example, a world where everything is superabundant, nothing is scarce, and nothing needs to be economized? This is what it seems to mean if you’ve internalized the terminology and concepts of economics. This seems like an assumption that might be made as the premise for a science fiction story, on the basis either of different cultural attitudes toward production and distribution, or of technological discoveries that transcend our current limits, just as superluminal travel does, or superhuman intelligence.
ARE ECONOMIC LAWS MERELY SOCIAL CONVENTIONS?
But the assumption that cultural change could achieve this depends on the idea that economic laws are social conventions, which we could change by collective agreement. Such laws would apply only to human cultures, and only to specific human societies.
However, scarcity seems to be more than that. One of the central ideas of ecology, Liebig’s law of the minimum, states that the growth of a biological population is always limited by the scarcest resource or limiting factor required by that population—for plants, for example, by the scarcest mineral nutrient. If there were no scarce resources, a biological population could increase its numbers without limit. A post-scarcity human society would be capable of such increase.
This isn’t what we see in novels about “post-scarcity.” The sapient inhabitants of Banks’s Minds, for example, aren’t growing explosively in numbers, nor do the Minds seem to be doubling repeatedly to house them. The sapient beings seem to be effectively cherished pets, taken care of, but trained not to want too much; their “post-scarcity” reflects the limitation of their desires. They may be adapted to their scarcity, and comfortable with it, but scarcity is what it is.
Scarcity seems not to be simply a cultural norm, or convention, but a natural law, one that applies to living beings as such. The need to economize is a feature of life and of the natural world.
URSULA LE GUIN’S THE DISPOSSESSED
Consider, for example, Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, a classic portrayal of an anarchistic society. Her Anarresti do have economic customs different from those of market economies; their culture considers “propertarian” an insult, denies ownership, and has all goods allocated by a “Production and Distribution Committee.” But repeatedly, in the scenes set on Anarres, we see the presence of scarcity, and characters struggling with its effects.
In a different mode, the novelette “Business as Usual, During Alterations,” by Ralph Williams, published in Astounding Science Fictionin 1958, makes the science fictional assumption of a device that does eliminate many forms of scarcity — a matter duplicator.
Put anything on its tray, from a loaf of bread to the British crown jewels—or another duplicator! — and it can make an exact copy of it. But in the course of the story, the viewpoint character finds another dimension of scarcity that the duplicator fails to address, and comes up with a way of keeping a department store in business by providing things that are still scarce.
Williams makes the point that technological advances may make some things abundant, or even superabundant, but other things will still be scarce, and people will compete for those new scarce goods.
In one of her essays, Ayn Rand asked what wants are fundamental, beyond a cave, a bearskin, and a hunk of raw meat. One of the prehistoric men she envisioned, if they could have imagined the present-day United States, might very well have said that it was “post-scarcity.”
But all of us face scarcities he couldn’t have imagined, from hospital care to Internet bandwidth; and there are other things so scarce that only the very rich can even aspire to them, such as visits to Earth orbit. If we are to envision future societies with advanced technology, a more compelling story will not generalize about being “post-scarcity,” but ask, as Williams did, what new scarcities will constrain them, and how they will economize on the things that remain scarce.
For a related essay on economics in science fiction, see William Stoddard’s blog post analyzing another economic fallacy common in science fiction: the “specter of overproduction” from Pohl and Huxley to Heinlein.
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