Of scarcity: I suspect a lot of the cultural environment arises from awareness of Marx's economic theory and relative ignorance of other, later, economists' works (George, Coase, Tulloch ...) Marx was considering an era where the factory system was (1) expanding into all sorts of activities that previously had been managed otherwise and (2) succeeding to produce more product that ever before and (3) was "sharing the wealth" in what Marx portrayed as an unfair, even evil, mal-distribution. Products were plentiful, "wealth" wasn't. Extend that into an SF future and one gets to very few physical needs, but even less agency or autonomy.
What we don't see in SF are new arenas of competition and scarcity. Real world, who predicted competition for radio frequency spectrum bandwidth? For license to protected corridors in low Earth orbit? Competing for "clicks" and "eyeballs" among "influencers" ? What SF author thought up imposing artificial scarcity on carbon dioxide with "cap and trade" schemes? Competition for drugs that cost billion$ to develop, pennies to manufacture, and can be pirated in other nations that don't respect artificial scarcity of patents or do much government quality control testing (rejecting "plenty" of imperfect pills) for some price between the pennies and the billion$. Nobody predicted the problems associated with insufficient WASTE -- we can't economically develop a way to recycle our nuclear fuel because we don't make enough of it; we can't recycle our plastic because there's too little of each separate kind in the one big pile.
I think we're sort of in a Julian Simon world where human ingenuity will continue to provide us new and surprising sorts of expensive and scarce resources -- while the traditional resources continue to become cheaper and more plentiful.
I stopped reading The Draka fairly early into the series too. The problem with the story is that, in its own grimdark way, it's just as unbelievable and idealistic as all those post-scarcity utopia stories. It's not a realistic exploration of the horrors of war and conquest and slavery, it's just an outright paean to evil.
The real world is often quite a bleak place, so we're used to equating realism with bleakness, but that only applies up to a point. When you start to approach maximum bleakness, it stops being realistic and just becomes absurd. In a realistic world, the Draka Empire would've fallen apart within a matter of decades. Probably within just a few years, since their entire culture was based around cartoonishly evil values (which don't exactly tend to promote long-term stability) and their entire society loved to indulge in pointless sadism even at the cost of efficiency. At least the creators of Warhammer 40k had the good sense to avoid taking their setting too seriously.
I tend to think of Socialist societies in SF as being the lazy, convenient way of ignoring the messy parts of how 'things' -- especially manufactured things -- get to be available. That is, the author doesn't have to create in his own mind an economic backstory if he doesn't want to. It's like rogue magic that just happens. You're supposed to ignore it.
E.C Tubb wrote the 33 book series about Dumarest trying to find his way back to earth and almost every book at least implied that the local government was a monarchy or some form of socialism (or some weird mix of both), where everyone got what they needed except the lower classes, who had to 'buy' and travel by spaceship, which was definitely market-based. At least that's how I remembered the books. Like too many series the ending was a disappointment.
I think that science fiction in general tends to be one of the more polarizing forms of fiction - at least politically. While I'm sure they exist, I don't know of too many books in the "literary fiction" genre that would make enough of a political statement for me to dissent with it.
This may be because of the natural tendency of science fiction to lean towards visions of utopia and dystopia. When an author puts aside the mundane and tries to convey what a perfect or pure evil world would look like, they're bound to butt heads with some of their readers. Whereas a normal world may leave room for moral interpretation, an extreme one will often end up taking explicit stances on every moral question.
The pattern you discuss also may hold with older SF. I'm currently reading Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End. The post-Overlord Golden Age is fairly socialist in nature: end of scarcity, end of unpleasant labor, everyone has what they want, etc. Clarke, I believe, was socialist-leaning. But Heinlein was clearly more on the libertarian right-leaning side. Asimov was apparently a traditional liberal. If anyone knows of any other examples, feel free to share.
I've long thought the contrast between Asimov's robot stories and Williamson's humanoid stories significant. The humanoids follow essentially the same rules as Asimovian robots; but whereas robots are essentially helpful, societies that accept humanoids are nightmarish, the nanny state as a horror story. And yet both of them could be viewed as a symbolic image of a socialist state. I don't know that I would call Williamson libertarian, but he seems more conservative than Asimov.
Heinlein's history is complex. His early Beyond This Horizon projects a future quasi-utopian society that has solved many of the problems of the time when he wrote it. Its economy is centrally planned (clearly he had never encountered "Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth"), and while it has a market economy, it also has currency provided by the state in accordance with the Social Credit scheme, with the new currency going for such uses as providing everyone with free food in governmental refectories. By the 1960s his economic views appear to have been more libertarian.
Poul Anderson started his career in the Golden Age, I believe, and became the Libertarian Futurist Society's second most frequent recipient for Hall of Fame Awards, after Heinlein. His stories portray widely varied societies, but often show libertarian sympathies; see for example the interstellar not-government of "Starfog."
I loved, and have all I believe, his Nicholas van Rijn. van Rijn was a citizen (originally) a citizen of Djakarta, apparently of mixed Dutch and Indonesian ancestry. A true Swashbuckler. Given the Dutch's role in early laissez faire capitalism and trading that was perfect.
Interstellar trade in the stories is "ruled" by various groups of traders, who join loosely together as the Polesoltechnic League whose main goal is always profit. And they compete fiercely, sometimes illegally, and sometimes militarily. Van Rijn's battle cries include "God send the Right!", "Kristmenn, Krossmenn, Kongsmenn!", and "Heineken Bier!" He's a wonderful character.
And the fact that Algis Budrys didn't care much for the character just makes it all the better. He says, van Rijn (is) "the boorish slob who makes unblushing use of his naked power, wallows in the sensual luxuries attendant on his commercial success and thus makes a splendid pulp hero". Gotta love it.
The short story titled (I think) "The Man Who Mattered) compares van Rijn's intelligent practical approach to solving a serious problem to the "pointy-headed intellectual" who tries to use a philosophical/ideological approach and fails.
My favorite Van Rijn story is "Margin of Profit" because it makes an important true point, that preventing someone from doing something you don't want him to do doesn't require you to make it impossible, just unprofitable. You can leverage your opponent's rationality.
That assumes that your opponent’s goals require a profit. Some opponents don’t care if their country turns into a dung heap, so long as they come out on top. See Iran and Hamas. Putin may fit in that category, too.
You are using "profit" more narrowly than I am. In the story, a small and nasty empire is sitting on an important interstellar trade route, seizing passing ships and brainwashing their crew to add to its navy. Arming all of the trade ships is too expensive to be worth doing, so although the wealthy trade firms, of which Van Rijn's is one, could afford to, they won't (first example of the point).
Van Rijn calculates that arming one ship out of four will reduce the profit on the trade route but not eliminate it. War ships have much larger crews than trading ships. Three times out of four the trading ship is seized by a warship, giving the bad guys four crew. One time out of four, the attacking warship is defeated and seized by the armed trading ship, costing the bad guys twenty crew. On average they are losing men not gaining, so they stop. (Second illustration of the point)
Is that the same as "The Man Who Counts" (also published as "War of the Wing-Men" by a publisher with a tin ear), which contrasts van Rijn with a hard-working engineer (title taken from a poem by Kipling)? Or is there a different van Rijn story that I'm not remembering?
That's the one. I think it was originally published in Analog as a novelette, but I could be wrong. I don't have the War of the Wingmen in front of me (my 'library' is in the basement and I have difficulty now with stairs), but I seem to remember something to that effect on the frontispiece.
It was published in book form as a novel. And the Internet Science Fiction Database classifies it as one, though it does list its serial publication in Astounding in 1958.
That's what I was remembering. Astounding was in my nearest public library. A nice Carnegie library in a town of 2500. I loved the place.
Astounding became Analog. I probably started reading it in 1956 or 1957. My librarian was quite solicitous of me. I lived on a gravel road about 15 miles away, so once she trusted me, when my mom brought is to town once every two weeks or so she would let me check out pretty much as many books as I wanted. I took them out 15 and 20 at a time.
Looking back, I wonder if she subscribed to Astounding because I had read all the SF she had and asked for more.
Anyway, I think the serialized version was somewhat shorter than the paperback I have from the 19060s. I'd love to be able to compare them. My copy is not quite 150 pages long. I'm not sure how many words that is.
I tried to look it up on Amazon, and found 3 paperback versions, two British and one Ace, and none of the covers look like the cover on my copy.
One of them says that it was serialized in Astounding February, March, and April of 1958, and that a "shorter version was published by Ace Books as 'War of the Wing-Men' in 1958." That may be the version I have.
It seems that Astounding at that time ran 150 pages, and serials were 40 pages or so per month, so serialized it would have been about 120 pages. That really sounds like what I remember reading. I'd really love to be able to make comparisons.
The post’s description of the Murderbot situation seems slightly misleading, although ultimately accurate when describing the presumptive attitude of the author.
It envisions Large portions of the galaxy being run by corporations, and only one of the settings (out of five or six?) could be described as a left wing utopia. The others seem more like left wing dystopian visions of anarchocapitalism, where corporate types sometimes cooperate with each other, but always need to have enough firepower nearby to make a credible deterrent to simple piracy.
I was expecting a mention of the Culture series by Iain Banks. It has been long enough since I read it that I have little to say about it, other than it was set in a universe imagined by a left anarchist, run by hyperintelligent benevolent AIs, and has some superficial relevance to the theme of the post.
I described the Corporate Rim part of the setting.
I was writing about books I liked. I've read one of the Culture series, or at least part of one — I don't remember if I finished it — but I didn't like it enough to continue. It is indeed a setting without scarcity for humans, but the fact that it depends on godlike AI's makes it of limited relevance to modern political issues.
I enjoy it too. I remember three corporations from the series. One employed the primary villains of most of the stories. One used to own murderbot and had at least questionable ethical practices, the third had a deal with murderbot's clients but sold them out when the villain corp. offered a better deal, accompanied by some threatening innuendo. So, maybe a biased perspective, but not much Bayesian evidence for a sane attitude toward cooperation.
Positive sum games do require that the rules be enforced. Zero sum games are straightforward. People normally have to be taught to play positive sum games. OTOH, people who do business regularly develop trust.
In the implicit context, business among strangers, I agree. In more intimate and information rich environments, positive sum games are much easier, as they can be reliably regulated by reputation and status.
As for explanations: intellectuals have tended to be left-wing for a long time, haven't they? Since before there was what could be described as indoctrination; and even then, the more recent "woke" indoctrination is more about id pol stuff than economics, isn't it?
Not only do good people compete against good people, there are some ways free market liberalism is clearly suboptimal, at least in a theoretical sense. Inequality is generally suboptimal in sum-of-utility terms due to the diminishing marginal utility of money. Some tragedy-of-commons-equivalents don't have good solutions. Public goods don't get produced. Club goods, and goods with large fixed costs and low marginal costs, may not get produced even if the sum of the potential values to consumers exceeds the total production cost, if information asymmetry prevents price discrimination; even if they do get produced, consumers who would derive a value higher than the marginal cost but lower than the price the producer sets get excluded. All these problems have some popular examples.
If one doesn't think a lot about economics, it's easier to see the problems with the current freeish market systems than how many things free markets do well, or how they could do some things even better if they were even freer. And while it's easy to see that the actual attempts to implement communism worked poorly, it's less obvious that a non-market-based system can't possibly work well. So even if an author isn't a full communist advocate in the real world due to the clear pitfalls of communism, these can explain why someone who's trying to paint a picture of an ideal, utopian world may make it a non-market-based one.
Whether free market liberalism is less an optimal and how depends on what range of possibilities you are considering in your definition of optimal.
I like to describe the optimum implicit in the concept of economic efficiency as a world with a bureaucrat god, a benevolent and infinitely intelligent social planner who knows everyone's utility function and all production functions and has unlimited power to control how other people behave, although not to create food from thin air or to make inventions. Relative to that the market outcome is indeed suboptimal due to the familiar problems of market failure.
But we don't have any bureaucrat gods. If your optimum is relative to all actually possible social structures, it isn't clear that an entirely laissez-faire system doesn't achieve it. Market failure, after all, is not about markets, it's about situations where individually rational behavior is not group rational. It occurs in ordinary markets because individuals are not receiving the benefit or paying the cost of their actions, hence it is sometimes in their interest to take actions with net negative effects, summed over everyone, or not take actions with positive effect. But that situation is the exception in a pure market, the rule in a political system, where almost no actor either pays the costs or receives the benefits of his actions. So switching decisions from the private market to the public market is likely to increase market failure inefficiencies, not decrease them. The contrary intuition comes from the unstated assumption that a government making choices will make them in the general interest instead of in the way that follows from political actors acting in their own rational interest.
Incidentally, the utilitarian case for income redistribution is not as clear as you assume. If the reason some people are richer is that they start with larger endowments or can convert labor to income on more favorable terms, declining marginal utility across people follows. But if the reason is that they have different utility functions for income you get the opposite result.
I discuss a lot of that at greater length in writing and talks that can be found from my web page: www.daviddfriedman.com.
I don't disagree, your dispute isn't with me. It's just that the case you're making isn't obvious to people who haven't thought extensively about economics (and even many who have), which is enough to explain the tendency of many intellectuals to be left-wing.
I'm not happy with that use of "market failure." The narrower use makes sense as a response to the first theorem of welfare economics: It labels situations where that theorem is not valid, because some of its assumptions are not met. But that theorem is specifically about markets. Neither governments nor altruistic institutions are "markets": they lack the process of bilateral exchange and the competitive bidding that gives rise to market clearing prices. Talking about their failure modes (which clearly both of them have!) as "market failure" seems misleading; it's like calling a short circuit in your home wiring a "plumbing failure" or even a "structural failure."
I'm not even sure the criteria for "success" for governments or altruistic institutions are the same as those for markets; it's not obvious that they would have to be. In your terminology, markets are driven by greed, governments by force, and altruistic institutions by love. I think we need to define criteria of success for each, consider whether governments and altruistic institutions have any general expectation of success, and then identify the conditions that, if not met, will lead to failure in these cases. Analogies to markets might be productive, but might be misleading.
I'm an economic imperialist, like Smith and Becker. I want to use the tools of economics to explain human behavior wherever they work, not just in ordinary markets. My first econ journal article was a theory of the size and shape of nations.
I have no problem with that. But I don't think that "applying the tools of economics to altruistic transactions" (for example) equates to "treating altruistic transactions as markets." That seems like trying to apply the tools of Darwinian evolutionary theory to human societies by assuming that human beings are eusocial, like bees, ants, or naked mole rats. Markets are the first place where those tools were applied, and the place for which they were developed, but successful expansion is going to require recognizing that the other things you apply them to are not markets, and identifying their distinctive features and processes.
The logic of market failure isn't limited to markets. My standard first example is an army running away because of the conflict between individual and group interest.
Considered as a rhetorical strategy, treating "market failure" as I do instead of introducing "political failure" and other versions as separate categories makes it easy to point out that market failure is a stronger argument against government than for government. It isn't just "governments fail too" but rather "the same logic that sometimes makes markets fail makes governments fail much more often."
There is always a market, wherever or whenever people trade something they have for something they want or need. Money need not be involved. It just works better with a medium of exchange.
I'd argue a novel/series with an ideological view (say, e.g., how Lord of the Rings does for Tolkien's Christian thought) doesn't so much "make the world more Christian" as make that specific Christian worldview more legible, that is, easier to explore and engage with. That could make that brand of Christianity more common... but could also just set it up to become readily rejected. Great novels with really stupid worldviews, I think, tend not to make those worldviews more popular, but rather to make the problems with those worldviews more easily named. (E.g., just as you've done with the Scholomance.) And the experience of enjoying novels (admittedly, not on the *first* novel) eventually produces an awareness of novel-enjoyment as relying on a particular human tendency to want to inhabit a clearly noble perspective which graduates to enjoying ambiguity, miscommunication, error, and struggle as much or more than inhabiting teenager love triangles or true benevolence virtuous goodness vs liar malificence rotten badness.
Amusingly, some really celebrated literature turns on misunderstanding and error and struggle so deeply buried in the plot, teenagers often manage to completely miss it and just get the standard 'good vs evil' feeling off the book anyway. For example, it's probably *most* teen readers who read Gatsby and walk away with the sense they've read a sad story about the good guy (Gatsby) not quite winning in the end, because he got money and parties but was not welcomed. On a shallow read it's just a weirdly stuffy poor-guy-gets-rich-but-isn't-welcomed story. It's only the minority of teen readers (probably the very small minority!) that inform everything the narrator has to share with the awareness that the narrator in The Great Gatsby *misunderstands* the advice of his father's which he (the narrator) advances as core to his identity! And the narrator inflates that [failed] insight into a boast about his general power of insight into people, which in turn frames everything the narrator identifies/notices about Gatsby, Tom, and Daisy as subject to similar misunderstanding and inflation... which makes the novel tragic in a much grander, quieter way.
I do also think there's a phenomenon where some novels attract (create?) fandoms which are healthy places to hangout, whereas other novels attract (create?) toxic fandoms. I think the contrast between the Star Wars fandom (notoriously awful, basically, even on the word of people who hang out there) or the Marvel fandom (huge but shallow) or the Tolkien fandom (practically perfect in every way, hahah, but seriously a great place to spend any amount of energy making friends or just chilling.) What accounts for the difference? Is it the embedded ideology attracting certain people (who have other traits that drive the character of the fandom) or is the embedded ideology affecting those people enough to directly make the fandom better/worse?
I agree with your legibility point. Lewis makes it easier for me, as an atheist, to understand how people can be Christians. I think that makes me more sympathetic to the Christian position, just as reading medieval Arabic literature makes me more sympathetic to the Muslim. I don't, in either case, find it makes it easier to reject it.
I think an example of an "easier to reject" case, you need to look for something more objectionable, with less to like. I think reading enough highly-gendered young adult books has given me some insight into something I previously found alien... but the legibility made my decision to reject (and not just for me, but to treat as likely harmful to anyone consuming it in large volumes) whole categories of thinking. Or maybe whole categories of "unthinking" is a better way to point at what I mean. Sometimes fiction is how you present specific, very common, appealing worldviews, but the result is to make (to me anyway) consumers of that fiction feel like they are "missing a mood" and the worldview feel lifeless and flat, a cowardly copout.
I think one example might be how the book Iron Widow suddenly made me understand why a certain flavor of teenage girl book has two male love interests (two is the number, not three, not five, not zero, and much much less often 'one' or even 'one at a time', which are honestly pretty common, than matches my realworld intuitions... all these books converge on 'two'). What's more, both love interests are men, are tortured lonely old souls, who no one understands, and that have extreme high-power levels (across whatever stats, whether it's that they're literal 1000-year-old-vampire lords, or just top 1% for looks, smarts, money, charisma) that nonetheless find this pretty young born yesterday girl interesting and worth their time, but also some major plot element makes it majorly taboo or forbidden or plain dangerous for them to be doing anything remotely sexy-times with her... but they will anyway.
Likewise, there's a kind of prurient interest that powers interest in murder mysteries (versus other high-stakes or fast-paced mystery or spy novels or etc) and so there's some unwritten rules about what Agatha Christie knock-off novels will contain, will do, which is rather opposed to what good world-building would suggest such things would contain.
Maybe another example (I haven't read, but I've seen people have this reaction) is Ayn Rand. The ideas, because made extremely legible (to the exclusion of other frames), produce a kind of in-or-out sorting along a libertarian axis. My impression is, most readers find most Ayn Rand writing off putting, and if forced, will take to arguing directly and more vehemntly against it rather than becoming more sympathetic. But some love it.
"Societies that have attempted to eliminate market transactions, with the exception of very small ones, [Most notably families ...] have a bad track record."
Even families. In my observation (from a rather limited number of examples) a lot of conflict within families is caused by that, on the one hand, people don't keep clear track of who owns what, who owes whom what, on the other hand they are not altruistic enough to not mind if they don't get what they consider their fair shake. There is often no clear way to tell who gets to decide something in the absence of a voluntary agreement to depart from the default (as there normally is in a market-based society), so if preferences differ and people are insufficiently altruistic, it results in a fight. And many people *are* insufficiently altruistic even towards their family members for communism to work well; and—just as in the case of broader society—that's not a fault that can be corrected, but something to adapt to.
A long time ago I read a book, _Streetcorner Society_, by a sociologist who had studied lower class black society, I think in DC or Baltimore. One of the things I still remember is that friends did things for each other for free but kept a detailed mental account of what they owed for favors received, were owed for favors done, an account which came out when the friendship ended and one or both complained that they had gotten an unfair deal.
And yet most families do run on a communist basis, typically with rule by one or both parents. For an account of family, two libertarian economists, that didn't, see:
It would be interesting to know to what extent believe in Marxism correlates to upbringing in a successfully communal family.
Alternately, it would also be interesting to know to what extent that belief correlates to believing that successfully communal families are plentiful, even if one hasn't been brought up in one.
I've speculated that the shift towards government over the past century or so is due to women getting the vote. In a traditional middle class household, the husband earns money, the wife runs the household. That means that he is used to functioning in a market, she to functioning as the ruler of a tiny planned economy. Obviously not everyone fit that pattern, but enough might to alter the balance of forces in the political system.
And yet, as women have come more and more into the work force and spent more time in market transactions, they don't seem to have shifted their political outlook to favor the market more. Indeed, there are some findings that suggest that women who are employed full time are more left and women who remain outside the paid labor sector are less so.
left/right has a large culture war component at present, and a stay-at-home wife is probably on the right side of that spectrum.
Gordon Tullock used to have a bunch of graphs of government spending in different countries over time, and liked to point out the break point, when spending relative to GNP went up a lot, was different in different countries. I think is theory was that it was when women started voting. I don't have his graphs but I'm working on a post recreating that data, seeing if the pattern is there, and exploring alternative explanations if it is. The one I offered above is one possibility.
Yes, I see the larger pattern. I just have doubts about the specific explanation for it.
My own suspicion is that it's partly psychological. One of the Big Five personality traits, Agreeableness, is generally reported to average higher in women than in men. I suspect that high Agreeableness and high Openness to Experience go with being progressive, and low Agreeableness and high Openness to Experience go with being libertarian. (I think also of C.S. Lewis's remark that the average man is far more respectful of other people's privacy than the average woman, but the average woman is far more ready to put herself out for other people than the average man.)
Per my above comment, I'd argue that, seen from the outside, my extended family would be seen as pretty darned "communal". But all but a few of us are hard-core free market types.
I have been lucky. My extended family (probably some what over 50 most of the time) despite changes in 'membership' over my 77 years has had only one, for sure, and maybe two who kept track of who owed what (when it came to themselves). And every body just accepted it and moved on. We shared with love and the assumption that when we needed someone would help to provide and when others needed we would help as we could. It has continued as long as I can remember, some 70 or so years.
Maybe it helped that we were poor from the early 1900s until around the 1980s when most of us had moved into the middle class. But it only works because we truly love each other.
Who was making decisions? I don't know. Whoever was closest to the problem and had the most knowledge applicable.
Not that we didn't, and don't, have a few knotheads from time to time. But we accept that, too, and move on.
My wife, OTOH, comes from a family that I find very loving but who definitely keep track. It took her a while to accept how my family works, but she adapted and fits right in.
And I suppose if you went to my small hometown, where my sister still lives, and where most of the family lives relatively near, you would find we regard probably another 50 or so people as "part of the family" just because we like them and welcome them into our love. That includes a couple of ex-spouses, ex-in-laws, good neighbors, best friends from growing up, (in my case a woman who I dated for a long while but never married -- my family just likes her), friends we've made as adults that are especially close.
I suspect being based in a small community makes all that easier.
I am strongly pro-market but engage in a good deal of communist/gift economy behavior in my private life. One of my hobbies is making jewelry, especially medieval jewelry for my historical recreation hobby. I give it away, never sell it. I discuss some of that in an old post on gift economies:
I’ve read the whole Murderbot series, repeatedly, so clearly I enjoy it. The socialist utopia doesn’t bother me much because she never tries to explain how it works, so I regard it as a pleasant fantasy: it works by magic. As long as the magic goes on working, I’d be happy to live in it.
It occurred to me some time ago that a better name for Murderbot would be SuperNerd. It’s quite like a Typical Reader except for being stronger, less vulnerable, faster, and cleverer—all of which the Typical Reader would presumably like to be.
Naomi Novik—I tried one or more of her Temeraire books some years ago but didn’t become addicted, and haven’t looked at her other books.
S. M. Stirling—my favourite of his is also The Peshawar Lancers, and I also bounced off the Draka books, which I found I didn’t want to read. I was more surprised to find that I liked the Nantucket trilogy (Island in the Sea of Time) but bounced off the slightly related (and much longer) Emberverse series.
I enjoyed the Temeraire books, although I thought the later ones were not as good as the first. But _Spinning Silver_ persuaded me that I should read more fiction and I have been through the entire Scholomance trilogy at least three times.
I tried the first Nantucket book but it didn't grab me. I'm not sure why.
Part of the fun of Lancers is the clear or implied links to other books, including _Kim_, the Flashman books, and Burroughs' Mars books.
If we're talking about Burroughs, my favorite of Stirling's novels is In the Court of the Crimson Kings, set on a version of Lowellian Mars created by the reshaping of the solar system by sufficiently advanced aliens---not exactly Burroughs' Mars, but akin in spirit, with an ancient civilization based primarily on biotechnology, and with interesting behavioral differences from Earth humans. On the other hand, I started reading Stirling with Under the Yoke, the second Draka book, a dystopia set in a society founded on war, slavery, and rape; it convinced me to go on following Stirling, not least because the repetition of "Service to the State" had an emotional impact that fit my libertarian outlook on such sentiments. I enjoyed the Nantucket books a lot, but especially the scene where an American doctor saves the life of a woman giving birth in the Babylonian court, and the court physician, a woman, pleads with her to teach her what he knows, a deeply moving passage. Stirling is an uneven writer but at his best he's very good.
However, my single favorite SF novel is Kingsbury's Courtship Rite, set on a distant planet with such harsh conditions that in regular famine years people with low "kalothi" are called in to offer their bodies as food—hardly a libertarian practice, but I find the characters and the storyline compelling. The scene where Oelita the heretic confronts her planet's god is perhaps the most moving in the SF I've read.
Yes, I also liked In the Court of the Crimson Kings, especially for the well-imagined scenario; although I felt that the book could have been longer. He seemed to hurry through the plot a bit too quickly.
On the other hand, I don't entirely like the tendency of the current century for all fiction to be damned, fat, thick books. In the Court of the Crimson Kings is quite on the scale of many classics of SF, and is quite long enough not only to resolve the plot but to do some entertaining characterization and culture portrayal. Stranger in a Strange Land and Dune seem to have shown that you CAN published huge books and sell them, but I don't think that making that the dominant length was necessarily a good thing.
I’m not particularly keen on huge novels in general; indeed, I enjoy reading novellas. But each story has its own natural length, and in this case some things seem to happen too fast. For example, they set out on an expedition in search of a lost city, and boom, they find it immediately. They start to investigate the lost city, and boom, they immediately find the main thing that’s worth finding there. Of course, it’s also a very convenient coincidence that their hired guide just happens to be who she is.
All this contrasts with, say, the Nantucket trilogy by the same author, where he takes his time and throws in plenty of lengthy anecdotes that are unnecessary to the plot.
Yes. I loved that book when it came out in partial form in Analog Magazine. I have a copy of it under each of its two different names. I have always wondered why that was done.
I liked the idea of your 'value' being tied to recorded predictions of the future outcomes of implemented policies.
I don't have the British version, Geta, but my last reread was of the French version, Parade nuptiale (an elegant joke, as its literal meaning is an animal's courtship display behavior!). I resolved not to look at the English version till I had finished the French one, which took me slightly less than a year, though with occasional breaks when other things kept me busy.
Yes. When Oelita has what I suppose we might call her crisis of unfaith, it's over a truly alien issue, but one that by that point has become completely understandable and moving. Now that is the kind of literary effect I read science fiction for.
I think Stirling was experimenting with charismatic villains. The Draka have many admirable qualities along with their villainy. He did much the same with the main villain in Islander series. The bad guys aren’t orcs. They’re worse.
That ties in with a point that C.S.Lewis makes in _The Screwtape Letters_, that not even Satan can be entirely bad, that if he had no virtues he would not be dangerous. Intelligence, resolution, strength are all virtues broadly defined, even, I think Lewis says, existence. In the real world context I take that as implying that the dangerous people are ones with some admirable characteristics — necessary for them to be able to do seriously damaging things.
Add personal courage, loyalty, duty and even kindness (for values of) to inferiors, hard work, environmentalism (at least partly to make the countryside dangerous and frightening to escaped serfs).
The Draka are _alien_, in many of the ways that classical Romans with modern technology would be. In the alternate history where they conquered Earth, they and their serfs became biologically distinct from humans as well as from each other.
Of scarcity: I suspect a lot of the cultural environment arises from awareness of Marx's economic theory and relative ignorance of other, later, economists' works (George, Coase, Tulloch ...) Marx was considering an era where the factory system was (1) expanding into all sorts of activities that previously had been managed otherwise and (2) succeeding to produce more product that ever before and (3) was "sharing the wealth" in what Marx portrayed as an unfair, even evil, mal-distribution. Products were plentiful, "wealth" wasn't. Extend that into an SF future and one gets to very few physical needs, but even less agency or autonomy.
What we don't see in SF are new arenas of competition and scarcity. Real world, who predicted competition for radio frequency spectrum bandwidth? For license to protected corridors in low Earth orbit? Competing for "clicks" and "eyeballs" among "influencers" ? What SF author thought up imposing artificial scarcity on carbon dioxide with "cap and trade" schemes? Competition for drugs that cost billion$ to develop, pennies to manufacture, and can be pirated in other nations that don't respect artificial scarcity of patents or do much government quality control testing (rejecting "plenty" of imperfect pills) for some price between the pennies and the billion$. Nobody predicted the problems associated with insufficient WASTE -- we can't economically develop a way to recycle our nuclear fuel because we don't make enough of it; we can't recycle our plastic because there's too little of each separate kind in the one big pile.
I think we're sort of in a Julian Simon world where human ingenuity will continue to provide us new and surprising sorts of expensive and scarce resources -- while the traditional resources continue to become cheaper and more plentiful.
I stopped reading The Draka fairly early into the series too. The problem with the story is that, in its own grimdark way, it's just as unbelievable and idealistic as all those post-scarcity utopia stories. It's not a realistic exploration of the horrors of war and conquest and slavery, it's just an outright paean to evil.
The real world is often quite a bleak place, so we're used to equating realism with bleakness, but that only applies up to a point. When you start to approach maximum bleakness, it stops being realistic and just becomes absurd. In a realistic world, the Draka Empire would've fallen apart within a matter of decades. Probably within just a few years, since their entire culture was based around cartoonishly evil values (which don't exactly tend to promote long-term stability) and their entire society loved to indulge in pointless sadism even at the cost of efficiency. At least the creators of Warhammer 40k had the good sense to avoid taking their setting too seriously.
David, have you read Cloud-castles, the Prometheus award winner of last year?
It is the best combination of fun science fiction and libertarian message that I have seen.
No. Perhaps I should.
I tend to think of Socialist societies in SF as being the lazy, convenient way of ignoring the messy parts of how 'things' -- especially manufactured things -- get to be available. That is, the author doesn't have to create in his own mind an economic backstory if he doesn't want to. It's like rogue magic that just happens. You're supposed to ignore it.
E.C Tubb wrote the 33 book series about Dumarest trying to find his way back to earth and almost every book at least implied that the local government was a monarchy or some form of socialism (or some weird mix of both), where everyone got what they needed except the lower classes, who had to 'buy' and travel by spaceship, which was definitely market-based. At least that's how I remembered the books. Like too many series the ending was a disappointment.
I think that science fiction in general tends to be one of the more polarizing forms of fiction - at least politically. While I'm sure they exist, I don't know of too many books in the "literary fiction" genre that would make enough of a political statement for me to dissent with it.
This may be because of the natural tendency of science fiction to lean towards visions of utopia and dystopia. When an author puts aside the mundane and tries to convey what a perfect or pure evil world would look like, they're bound to butt heads with some of their readers. Whereas a normal world may leave room for moral interpretation, an extreme one will often end up taking explicit stances on every moral question.
The pattern you discuss also may hold with older SF. I'm currently reading Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End. The post-Overlord Golden Age is fairly socialist in nature: end of scarcity, end of unpleasant labor, everyone has what they want, etc. Clarke, I believe, was socialist-leaning. But Heinlein was clearly more on the libertarian right-leaning side. Asimov was apparently a traditional liberal. If anyone knows of any other examples, feel free to share.
I've long thought the contrast between Asimov's robot stories and Williamson's humanoid stories significant. The humanoids follow essentially the same rules as Asimovian robots; but whereas robots are essentially helpful, societies that accept humanoids are nightmarish, the nanny state as a horror story. And yet both of them could be viewed as a symbolic image of a socialist state. I don't know that I would call Williamson libertarian, but he seems more conservative than Asimov.
Heinlein's history is complex. His early Beyond This Horizon projects a future quasi-utopian society that has solved many of the problems of the time when he wrote it. Its economy is centrally planned (clearly he had never encountered "Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth"), and while it has a market economy, it also has currency provided by the state in accordance with the Social Credit scheme, with the new currency going for such uses as providing everyone with free food in governmental refectories. By the 1960s his economic views appear to have been more libertarian.
Poul Anderson started his career in the Golden Age, I believe, and became the Libertarian Futurist Society's second most frequent recipient for Hall of Fame Awards, after Heinlein. His stories portray widely varied societies, but often show libertarian sympathies; see for example the interstellar not-government of "Starfog."
I loved, and have all I believe, his Nicholas van Rijn. van Rijn was a citizen (originally) a citizen of Djakarta, apparently of mixed Dutch and Indonesian ancestry. A true Swashbuckler. Given the Dutch's role in early laissez faire capitalism and trading that was perfect.
Interstellar trade in the stories is "ruled" by various groups of traders, who join loosely together as the Polesoltechnic League whose main goal is always profit. And they compete fiercely, sometimes illegally, and sometimes militarily. Van Rijn's battle cries include "God send the Right!", "Kristmenn, Krossmenn, Kongsmenn!", and "Heineken Bier!" He's a wonderful character.
And the fact that Algis Budrys didn't care much for the character just makes it all the better. He says, van Rijn (is) "the boorish slob who makes unblushing use of his naked power, wallows in the sensual luxuries attendant on his commercial success and thus makes a splendid pulp hero". Gotta love it.
The short story titled (I think) "The Man Who Mattered) compares van Rijn's intelligent practical approach to solving a serious problem to the "pointy-headed intellectual" who tries to use a philosophical/ideological approach and fails.
It's good stuff, and pretty highly libertarian.
My favorite Van Rijn story is "Margin of Profit" because it makes an important true point, that preventing someone from doing something you don't want him to do doesn't require you to make it impossible, just unprofitable. You can leverage your opponent's rationality.
That assumes that your opponent’s goals require a profit. Some opponents don’t care if their country turns into a dung heap, so long as they come out on top. See Iran and Hamas. Putin may fit in that category, too.
You are using "profit" more narrowly than I am. In the story, a small and nasty empire is sitting on an important interstellar trade route, seizing passing ships and brainwashing their crew to add to its navy. Arming all of the trade ships is too expensive to be worth doing, so although the wealthy trade firms, of which Van Rijn's is one, could afford to, they won't (first example of the point).
Van Rijn calculates that arming one ship out of four will reduce the profit on the trade route but not eliminate it. War ships have much larger crews than trading ships. Three times out of four the trading ship is seized by a warship, giving the bad guys four crew. One time out of four, the attacking warship is defeated and seized by the armed trading ship, costing the bad guys twenty crew. On average they are losing men not gaining, so they stop. (Second illustration of the point)
https://docplayer.net/101441796-Margin-of-profit-poul-anderson.html
I remember that story.
Is that the same as "The Man Who Counts" (also published as "War of the Wing-Men" by a publisher with a tin ear), which contrasts van Rijn with a hard-working engineer (title taken from a poem by Kipling)? Or is there a different van Rijn story that I'm not remembering?
That's the one. I think it was originally published in Analog as a novelette, but I could be wrong. I don't have the War of the Wingmen in front of me (my 'library' is in the basement and I have difficulty now with stairs), but I seem to remember something to that effect on the frontispiece.
It was published in book form as a novel. And the Internet Science Fiction Database classifies it as one, though it does list its serial publication in Astounding in 1958.
That's what I was remembering. Astounding was in my nearest public library. A nice Carnegie library in a town of 2500. I loved the place.
Astounding became Analog. I probably started reading it in 1956 or 1957. My librarian was quite solicitous of me. I lived on a gravel road about 15 miles away, so once she trusted me, when my mom brought is to town once every two weeks or so she would let me check out pretty much as many books as I wanted. I took them out 15 and 20 at a time.
Looking back, I wonder if she subscribed to Astounding because I had read all the SF she had and asked for more.
Anyway, I think the serialized version was somewhat shorter than the paperback I have from the 19060s. I'd love to be able to compare them. My copy is not quite 150 pages long. I'm not sure how many words that is.
I tried to look it up on Amazon, and found 3 paperback versions, two British and one Ace, and none of the covers look like the cover on my copy.
One of them says that it was serialized in Astounding February, March, and April of 1958, and that a "shorter version was published by Ace Books as 'War of the Wing-Men' in 1958." That may be the version I have.
It seems that Astounding at that time ran 150 pages, and serials were 40 pages or so per month, so serialized it would have been about 120 pages. That really sounds like what I remember reading. I'd really love to be able to make comparisons.
Thank you for triggering wonderful memories.
The post’s description of the Murderbot situation seems slightly misleading, although ultimately accurate when describing the presumptive attitude of the author.
It envisions Large portions of the galaxy being run by corporations, and only one of the settings (out of five or six?) could be described as a left wing utopia. The others seem more like left wing dystopian visions of anarchocapitalism, where corporate types sometimes cooperate with each other, but always need to have enough firepower nearby to make a credible deterrent to simple piracy.
I was expecting a mention of the Culture series by Iain Banks. It has been long enough since I read it that I have little to say about it, other than it was set in a universe imagined by a left anarchist, run by hyperintelligent benevolent AIs, and has some superficial relevance to the theme of the post.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_series
I described the Corporate Rim part of the setting.
I was writing about books I liked. I've read one of the Culture series, or at least part of one — I don't remember if I finished it — but I didn't like it enough to continue. It is indeed a setting without scarcity for humans, but the fact that it depends on godlike AI's makes it of limited relevance to modern political issues.
I enjoy the Murderbot stories. I like to think that there must be some sane corporations in it somewhere.
I enjoy it too. I remember three corporations from the series. One employed the primary villains of most of the stories. One used to own murderbot and had at least questionable ethical practices, the third had a deal with murderbot's clients but sold them out when the villain corp. offered a better deal, accompanied by some threatening innuendo. So, maybe a biased perspective, but not much Bayesian evidence for a sane attitude toward cooperation.
Positive sum games do require that the rules be enforced. Zero sum games are straightforward. People normally have to be taught to play positive sum games. OTOH, people who do business regularly develop trust.
In the implicit context, business among strangers, I agree. In more intimate and information rich environments, positive sum games are much easier, as they can be reliably regulated by reputation and status.
Broken link: https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/dreadlocks
Thanks. Fixed.
As for explanations: intellectuals have tended to be left-wing for a long time, haven't they? Since before there was what could be described as indoctrination; and even then, the more recent "woke" indoctrination is more about id pol stuff than economics, isn't it?
Not only do good people compete against good people, there are some ways free market liberalism is clearly suboptimal, at least in a theoretical sense. Inequality is generally suboptimal in sum-of-utility terms due to the diminishing marginal utility of money. Some tragedy-of-commons-equivalents don't have good solutions. Public goods don't get produced. Club goods, and goods with large fixed costs and low marginal costs, may not get produced even if the sum of the potential values to consumers exceeds the total production cost, if information asymmetry prevents price discrimination; even if they do get produced, consumers who would derive a value higher than the marginal cost but lower than the price the producer sets get excluded. All these problems have some popular examples.
If one doesn't think a lot about economics, it's easier to see the problems with the current freeish market systems than how many things free markets do well, or how they could do some things even better if they were even freer. And while it's easy to see that the actual attempts to implement communism worked poorly, it's less obvious that a non-market-based system can't possibly work well. So even if an author isn't a full communist advocate in the real world due to the clear pitfalls of communism, these can explain why someone who's trying to paint a picture of an ideal, utopian world may make it a non-market-based one.
Whether free market liberalism is less an optimal and how depends on what range of possibilities you are considering in your definition of optimal.
I like to describe the optimum implicit in the concept of economic efficiency as a world with a bureaucrat god, a benevolent and infinitely intelligent social planner who knows everyone's utility function and all production functions and has unlimited power to control how other people behave, although not to create food from thin air or to make inventions. Relative to that the market outcome is indeed suboptimal due to the familiar problems of market failure.
But we don't have any bureaucrat gods. If your optimum is relative to all actually possible social structures, it isn't clear that an entirely laissez-faire system doesn't achieve it. Market failure, after all, is not about markets, it's about situations where individually rational behavior is not group rational. It occurs in ordinary markets because individuals are not receiving the benefit or paying the cost of their actions, hence it is sometimes in their interest to take actions with net negative effects, summed over everyone, or not take actions with positive effect. But that situation is the exception in a pure market, the rule in a political system, where almost no actor either pays the costs or receives the benefits of his actions. So switching decisions from the private market to the public market is likely to increase market failure inefficiencies, not decrease them. The contrary intuition comes from the unstated assumption that a government making choices will make them in the general interest instead of in the way that follows from political actors acting in their own rational interest.
Incidentally, the utilitarian case for income redistribution is not as clear as you assume. If the reason some people are richer is that they start with larger endowments or can convert labor to income on more favorable terms, declining marginal utility across people follows. But if the reason is that they have different utility functions for income you get the opposite result.
I discuss a lot of that at greater length in writing and talks that can be found from my web page: www.daviddfriedman.com.
I don't disagree, your dispute isn't with me. It's just that the case you're making isn't obvious to people who haven't thought extensively about economics (and even many who have), which is enough to explain the tendency of many intellectuals to be left-wing.
I'm not happy with that use of "market failure." The narrower use makes sense as a response to the first theorem of welfare economics: It labels situations where that theorem is not valid, because some of its assumptions are not met. But that theorem is specifically about markets. Neither governments nor altruistic institutions are "markets": they lack the process of bilateral exchange and the competitive bidding that gives rise to market clearing prices. Talking about their failure modes (which clearly both of them have!) as "market failure" seems misleading; it's like calling a short circuit in your home wiring a "plumbing failure" or even a "structural failure."
I'm not even sure the criteria for "success" for governments or altruistic institutions are the same as those for markets; it's not obvious that they would have to be. In your terminology, markets are driven by greed, governments by force, and altruistic institutions by love. I think we need to define criteria of success for each, consider whether governments and altruistic institutions have any general expectation of success, and then identify the conditions that, if not met, will lead to failure in these cases. Analogies to markets might be productive, but might be misleading.
I'm an economic imperialist, like Smith and Becker. I want to use the tools of economics to explain human behavior wherever they work, not just in ordinary markets. My first econ journal article was a theory of the size and shape of nations.
I have no problem with that. But I don't think that "applying the tools of economics to altruistic transactions" (for example) equates to "treating altruistic transactions as markets." That seems like trying to apply the tools of Darwinian evolutionary theory to human societies by assuming that human beings are eusocial, like bees, ants, or naked mole rats. Markets are the first place where those tools were applied, and the place for which they were developed, but successful expansion is going to require recognizing that the other things you apply them to are not markets, and identifying their distinctive features and processes.
The logic of market failure isn't limited to markets. My standard first example is an army running away because of the conflict between individual and group interest.
Considered as a rhetorical strategy, treating "market failure" as I do instead of introducing "political failure" and other versions as separate categories makes it easy to point out that market failure is a stronger argument against government than for government. It isn't just "governments fail too" but rather "the same logic that sometimes makes markets fail makes governments fail much more often."
"Political failure is a more frequent and more destructive problem than market failure. And this is unavoidable because . . . "
There is always a market, wherever or whenever people trade something they have for something they want or need. Money need not be involved. It just works better with a medium of exchange.
I'd argue a novel/series with an ideological view (say, e.g., how Lord of the Rings does for Tolkien's Christian thought) doesn't so much "make the world more Christian" as make that specific Christian worldview more legible, that is, easier to explore and engage with. That could make that brand of Christianity more common... but could also just set it up to become readily rejected. Great novels with really stupid worldviews, I think, tend not to make those worldviews more popular, but rather to make the problems with those worldviews more easily named. (E.g., just as you've done with the Scholomance.) And the experience of enjoying novels (admittedly, not on the *first* novel) eventually produces an awareness of novel-enjoyment as relying on a particular human tendency to want to inhabit a clearly noble perspective which graduates to enjoying ambiguity, miscommunication, error, and struggle as much or more than inhabiting teenager love triangles or true benevolence virtuous goodness vs liar malificence rotten badness.
Amusingly, some really celebrated literature turns on misunderstanding and error and struggle so deeply buried in the plot, teenagers often manage to completely miss it and just get the standard 'good vs evil' feeling off the book anyway. For example, it's probably *most* teen readers who read Gatsby and walk away with the sense they've read a sad story about the good guy (Gatsby) not quite winning in the end, because he got money and parties but was not welcomed. On a shallow read it's just a weirdly stuffy poor-guy-gets-rich-but-isn't-welcomed story. It's only the minority of teen readers (probably the very small minority!) that inform everything the narrator has to share with the awareness that the narrator in The Great Gatsby *misunderstands* the advice of his father's which he (the narrator) advances as core to his identity! And the narrator inflates that [failed] insight into a boast about his general power of insight into people, which in turn frames everything the narrator identifies/notices about Gatsby, Tom, and Daisy as subject to similar misunderstanding and inflation... which makes the novel tragic in a much grander, quieter way.
I do also think there's a phenomenon where some novels attract (create?) fandoms which are healthy places to hangout, whereas other novels attract (create?) toxic fandoms. I think the contrast between the Star Wars fandom (notoriously awful, basically, even on the word of people who hang out there) or the Marvel fandom (huge but shallow) or the Tolkien fandom (practically perfect in every way, hahah, but seriously a great place to spend any amount of energy making friends or just chilling.) What accounts for the difference? Is it the embedded ideology attracting certain people (who have other traits that drive the character of the fandom) or is the embedded ideology affecting those people enough to directly make the fandom better/worse?
I agree with your legibility point. Lewis makes it easier for me, as an atheist, to understand how people can be Christians. I think that makes me more sympathetic to the Christian position, just as reading medieval Arabic literature makes me more sympathetic to the Muslim. I don't, in either case, find it makes it easier to reject it.
I think an example of an "easier to reject" case, you need to look for something more objectionable, with less to like. I think reading enough highly-gendered young adult books has given me some insight into something I previously found alien... but the legibility made my decision to reject (and not just for me, but to treat as likely harmful to anyone consuming it in large volumes) whole categories of thinking. Or maybe whole categories of "unthinking" is a better way to point at what I mean. Sometimes fiction is how you present specific, very common, appealing worldviews, but the result is to make (to me anyway) consumers of that fiction feel like they are "missing a mood" and the worldview feel lifeless and flat, a cowardly copout.
I think one example might be how the book Iron Widow suddenly made me understand why a certain flavor of teenage girl book has two male love interests (two is the number, not three, not five, not zero, and much much less often 'one' or even 'one at a time', which are honestly pretty common, than matches my realworld intuitions... all these books converge on 'two'). What's more, both love interests are men, are tortured lonely old souls, who no one understands, and that have extreme high-power levels (across whatever stats, whether it's that they're literal 1000-year-old-vampire lords, or just top 1% for looks, smarts, money, charisma) that nonetheless find this pretty young born yesterday girl interesting and worth their time, but also some major plot element makes it majorly taboo or forbidden or plain dangerous for them to be doing anything remotely sexy-times with her... but they will anyway.
Likewise, there's a kind of prurient interest that powers interest in murder mysteries (versus other high-stakes or fast-paced mystery or spy novels or etc) and so there's some unwritten rules about what Agatha Christie knock-off novels will contain, will do, which is rather opposed to what good world-building would suggest such things would contain.
Maybe another example (I haven't read, but I've seen people have this reaction) is Ayn Rand. The ideas, because made extremely legible (to the exclusion of other frames), produce a kind of in-or-out sorting along a libertarian axis. My impression is, most readers find most Ayn Rand writing off putting, and if forced, will take to arguing directly and more vehemntly against it rather than becoming more sympathetic. But some love it.
"Societies that have attempted to eliminate market transactions, with the exception of very small ones, [Most notably families ...] have a bad track record."
Even families. In my observation (from a rather limited number of examples) a lot of conflict within families is caused by that, on the one hand, people don't keep clear track of who owns what, who owes whom what, on the other hand they are not altruistic enough to not mind if they don't get what they consider their fair shake. There is often no clear way to tell who gets to decide something in the absence of a voluntary agreement to depart from the default (as there normally is in a market-based society), so if preferences differ and people are insufficiently altruistic, it results in a fight. And many people *are* insufficiently altruistic even towards their family members for communism to work well; and—just as in the case of broader society—that's not a fault that can be corrected, but something to adapt to.
A long time ago I read a book, _Streetcorner Society_, by a sociologist who had studied lower class black society, I think in DC or Baltimore. One of the things I still remember is that friends did things for each other for free but kept a detailed mental account of what they owed for favors received, were owed for favors done, an account which came out when the friendship ended and one or both complained that they had gotten an unfair deal.
And yet most families do run on a communist basis, typically with rule by one or both parents. For an account of family, two libertarian economists, that didn't, see:
https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/two-libertarian-families
It would be interesting to know to what extent believe in Marxism correlates to upbringing in a successfully communal family.
Alternately, it would also be interesting to know to what extent that belief correlates to believing that successfully communal families are plentiful, even if one hasn't been brought up in one.
I've speculated that the shift towards government over the past century or so is due to women getting the vote. In a traditional middle class household, the husband earns money, the wife runs the household. That means that he is used to functioning in a market, she to functioning as the ruler of a tiny planned economy. Obviously not everyone fit that pattern, but enough might to alter the balance of forces in the political system.
And yet, as women have come more and more into the work force and spent more time in market transactions, they don't seem to have shifted their political outlook to favor the market more. Indeed, there are some findings that suggest that women who are employed full time are more left and women who remain outside the paid labor sector are less so.
left/right has a large culture war component at present, and a stay-at-home wife is probably on the right side of that spectrum.
Gordon Tullock used to have a bunch of graphs of government spending in different countries over time, and liked to point out the break point, when spending relative to GNP went up a lot, was different in different countries. I think is theory was that it was when women started voting. I don't have his graphs but I'm working on a post recreating that data, seeing if the pattern is there, and exploring alternative explanations if it is. The one I offered above is one possibility.
Yes, I see the larger pattern. I just have doubts about the specific explanation for it.
My own suspicion is that it's partly psychological. One of the Big Five personality traits, Agreeableness, is generally reported to average higher in women than in men. I suspect that high Agreeableness and high Openness to Experience go with being progressive, and low Agreeableness and high Openness to Experience go with being libertarian. (I think also of C.S. Lewis's remark that the average man is far more respectful of other people's privacy than the average woman, but the average woman is far more ready to put herself out for other people than the average man.)
I have added your comment to my notes for writing that post.
Per my above comment, I'd argue that, seen from the outside, my extended family would be seen as pretty darned "communal". But all but a few of us are hard-core free market types.
I have been lucky. My extended family (probably some what over 50 most of the time) despite changes in 'membership' over my 77 years has had only one, for sure, and maybe two who kept track of who owed what (when it came to themselves). And every body just accepted it and moved on. We shared with love and the assumption that when we needed someone would help to provide and when others needed we would help as we could. It has continued as long as I can remember, some 70 or so years.
Maybe it helped that we were poor from the early 1900s until around the 1980s when most of us had moved into the middle class. But it only works because we truly love each other.
Who was making decisions? I don't know. Whoever was closest to the problem and had the most knowledge applicable.
Not that we didn't, and don't, have a few knotheads from time to time. But we accept that, too, and move on.
My wife, OTOH, comes from a family that I find very loving but who definitely keep track. It took her a while to accept how my family works, but she adapted and fits right in.
And I suppose if you went to my small hometown, where my sister still lives, and where most of the family lives relatively near, you would find we regard probably another 50 or so people as "part of the family" just because we like them and welcome them into our love. That includes a couple of ex-spouses, ex-in-laws, good neighbors, best friends from growing up, (in my case a woman who I dated for a long while but never married -- my family just likes her), friends we've made as adults that are especially close.
I suspect being based in a small community makes all that easier.
I am strongly pro-market but engage in a good deal of communist/gift economy behavior in my private life. One of my hobbies is making jewelry, especially medieval jewelry for my historical recreation hobby. I give it away, never sell it. I discuss some of that in an old post on gift economies:
https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/gift-economies
I’ve read the whole Murderbot series, repeatedly, so clearly I enjoy it. The socialist utopia doesn’t bother me much because she never tries to explain how it works, so I regard it as a pleasant fantasy: it works by magic. As long as the magic goes on working, I’d be happy to live in it.
It occurred to me some time ago that a better name for Murderbot would be SuperNerd. It’s quite like a Typical Reader except for being stronger, less vulnerable, faster, and cleverer—all of which the Typical Reader would presumably like to be.
Naomi Novik—I tried one or more of her Temeraire books some years ago but didn’t become addicted, and haven’t looked at her other books.
S. M. Stirling—my favourite of his is also The Peshawar Lancers, and I also bounced off the Draka books, which I found I didn’t want to read. I was more surprised to find that I liked the Nantucket trilogy (Island in the Sea of Time) but bounced off the slightly related (and much longer) Emberverse series.
I enjoyed the Temeraire books, although I thought the later ones were not as good as the first. But _Spinning Silver_ persuaded me that I should read more fiction and I have been through the entire Scholomance trilogy at least three times.
I tried the first Nantucket book but it didn't grab me. I'm not sure why.
Part of the fun of Lancers is the clear or implied links to other books, including _Kim_, the Flashman books, and Burroughs' Mars books.
If we're talking about Burroughs, my favorite of Stirling's novels is In the Court of the Crimson Kings, set on a version of Lowellian Mars created by the reshaping of the solar system by sufficiently advanced aliens---not exactly Burroughs' Mars, but akin in spirit, with an ancient civilization based primarily on biotechnology, and with interesting behavioral differences from Earth humans. On the other hand, I started reading Stirling with Under the Yoke, the second Draka book, a dystopia set in a society founded on war, slavery, and rape; it convinced me to go on following Stirling, not least because the repetition of "Service to the State" had an emotional impact that fit my libertarian outlook on such sentiments. I enjoyed the Nantucket books a lot, but especially the scene where an American doctor saves the life of a woman giving birth in the Babylonian court, and the court physician, a woman, pleads with her to teach her what he knows, a deeply moving passage. Stirling is an uneven writer but at his best he's very good.
However, my single favorite SF novel is Kingsbury's Courtship Rite, set on a distant planet with such harsh conditions that in regular famine years people with low "kalothi" are called in to offer their bodies as food—hardly a libertarian practice, but I find the characters and the storyline compelling. The scene where Oelita the heretic confronts her planet's god is perhaps the most moving in the SF I've read.
Yes, I also liked In the Court of the Crimson Kings, especially for the well-imagined scenario; although I felt that the book could have been longer. He seemed to hurry through the plot a bit too quickly.
On the other hand, I don't entirely like the tendency of the current century for all fiction to be damned, fat, thick books. In the Court of the Crimson Kings is quite on the scale of many classics of SF, and is quite long enough not only to resolve the plot but to do some entertaining characterization and culture portrayal. Stranger in a Strange Land and Dune seem to have shown that you CAN published huge books and sell them, but I don't think that making that the dominant length was necessarily a good thing.
I’m not particularly keen on huge novels in general; indeed, I enjoy reading novellas. But each story has its own natural length, and in this case some things seem to happen too fast. For example, they set out on an expedition in search of a lost city, and boom, they find it immediately. They start to investigate the lost city, and boom, they immediately find the main thing that’s worth finding there. Of course, it’s also a very convenient coincidence that their hired guide just happens to be who she is.
All this contrasts with, say, the Nantucket trilogy by the same author, where he takes his time and throws in plenty of lengthy anecdotes that are unnecessary to the plot.
Yes. I loved that book when it came out in partial form in Analog Magazine. I have a copy of it under each of its two different names. I have always wondered why that was done.
I liked the idea of your 'value' being tied to recorded predictions of the future outcomes of implemented policies.
I don't have the British version, Geta, but my last reread was of the French version, Parade nuptiale (an elegant joke, as its literal meaning is an animal's courtship display behavior!). I resolved not to look at the English version till I had finished the French one, which took me slightly less than a year, though with occasional breaks when other things kept me busy.
Thanks. Hadn't considered it just being a different national edition. Still a great story.
Yes. When Oelita has what I suppose we might call her crisis of unfaith, it's over a truly alien issue, but one that by that point has become completely understandable and moving. Now that is the kind of literary effect I read science fiction for.
Also Draka. I read several, and by the last one it was 'Oh, bad guys win again. No thanks.' I don't like stories where the bad guys win.
Not do I, but I am afraid that is part wishful thinking. I don't like to imagine it as possible and, obviously, it is.
I think Stirling was experimenting with charismatic villains. The Draka have many admirable qualities along with their villainy. He did much the same with the main villain in Islander series. The bad guys aren’t orcs. They’re worse.
That ties in with a point that C.S.Lewis makes in _The Screwtape Letters_, that not even Satan can be entirely bad, that if he had no virtues he would not be dangerous. Intelligence, resolution, strength are all virtues broadly defined, even, I think Lewis says, existence. In the real world context I take that as implying that the dangerous people are ones with some admirable characteristics — necessary for them to be able to do seriously damaging things.
Add personal courage, loyalty, duty and even kindness (for values of) to inferiors, hard work, environmentalism (at least partly to make the countryside dangerous and frightening to escaped serfs).
The Draka are _alien_, in many of the ways that classical Romans with modern technology would be. In the alternate history where they conquered Earth, they and their serfs became biologically distinct from humans as well as from each other.