Table at BOSKONE!
I shall be hawking my wares at the Boskone science fiction convention from 2:00 PM to 4:00 PM on Saturday 2/15/2025 and 12:00 PM to 2:00 PM on Sunday 2/16/2025. For tickets, see their website. To the two people who live in Boston, consider dropping by~
SFWA Blog post! An Introduction to Reading Economic History
My short blog post is being featured on the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association website! Read it here:
https://www.sfwa.org/2025/01/07/enriching-your-worldbuilding-economics/
I must admit that while I’m reasonably happy how it turned out, I could easily write thousands of words on economic worldbuilding or the analysis of economic history haha. Constraining my point to just 1000 words wasn’t easy!
Book released!
After way more small changes than I thought I would make, First Contact is now available for purchase! Find it wherever books, consumer appliances, and cat trees are sold.
Building a plausible utopia p3 - Competent government is the wildest dream of all
To answer a question no one has has asked: one of the reasons a utopia is so exciting to me is because it gives me an excuse to think about solving problems. But what is the problem? Why have we not, for example, ended world hunger? Certainly the resources are there. The technology is there, even today. What’s missing? Given that we don’t have another 300 page book and several years of research, I would tend to sum it up in one word: Incentives.
It’s something of a truism. The reason that we have not solved world hunger is because the global rich do not have the incentives to do so. The reasons we haven’t done a lot of things is because we lack the incentive to do so. But despite the seeming obviousness of the statement, the structure of macro incentives can be quite complicated, and very interesting to think about!
Let’s explore an example: You probably don’t like politicians. In general, it seems that almost every culture on Earth agrees that politicians, as a species, kinda suck. But why do they suck? One might criticize greed, or lack empathy, or cowardice, even some kind of ontological evil-ness. And perhaps for a given politician, those critiques might be true. But, in my view, those explanations are misguided, in that I don’t particularly find them useful.
When I look to characterize a problem, I want to understand how to fix the problem. I want to think about structural flaws not outputs. A politician being an all around not-cool guy is an output of a system, a government, a moment in time. We do not intend to fix someone’s personality when we elect them; the selection of a politician is the output to the system we have selected to answer the problem of political control.
So the question I would ask is: “Is there a way to consistently select good politicians?” As a base, I begin with democracy, described by Winston Churchill as “the worst form of government except all the other ones”. It is obvious that democracy (along with every other form of government) suffers from a key structural problem: misaligned incentives.
What do you want a politician to do? Broadly speaking, we might define the idealized role of a politician to be: “maximize the social welfare of the citizenry”. They might build trains because transit allows people to be more productive, build hospitals because health and welfare are closely linked, and build schools because education improves society. And here we can trivially see the problem: that’s not why they do those things, or at least not quite. In a democracy, a politician does not act for the maximum social welfare of the citizenry. In a democracy, a politician acts to maximize the chance that they will win an election.
In idealized cases, winning elections and maximizing social welfare might incentivize the same behavior. But one can come up with uncounted examples where they do not. Gerrymandering, for example, serves primarily to purposefully disenfranchise voters, yet remains mysteriously popular to those it benefits. The topics that dominate headlines and win elections are often of little to no practical economic consequence. Voters themselves are often completely unaware of the policy platform they profess to support. And, in the end, the day-to-day of governance tends to drift rather far from any sort of academic ideal, as anyone who has ever worked with any government agency might attest.
These things are the result of a design. A politician is incentivized only to get 51% of the vote, however that comes about. The citizenry does not have the time, energy, or expertise necessary to do deep analysis of all policy. Which is reasonable when you think about it. Policy analysis is incredibly complicated! Voting as a mechanism for control serves to ward against the absolute worst behavior, but expecting it to do more is perhaps a little optimistic. And so politics is filled with what I might call “blunt” signals.
It is easy, sometimes, to forget that there are things that the vast majority of people agree on. Outcomes that we all want. We agree that traffic is bad, and water should be clean, and healthcare available. And in an ideal world, the marginal efficiencies of competing plans for transportation infrastructure or the maintenance of utilities would loom large in political debate. But those are not the things that tend to be at the forefront of politics, at least not most of the time.
So how do we fix this? We know the structural problem, but it has persisted for hundreds of years. Its presence is so ubiquitous that the very idea that a government might be efficient raised more questions than me randomly connecting stars with wormholes!
The solution is simple in principle. If politicians were incentivized to do good, we might find they would do good! Therefore, as economist scum, I took the simplest possible solution: we pay them.
Let’s reset to square zero, forgetting all the barriers and difficulties and inefficiencies. Let us remember the core problem: that incentives are misaligned. An easy way to incentivize people to do things is to pay them more money when they do what you want.
This may sound somewhat amoral. After all, it feels dirty to be depending on money to do the heavy lifting. This government is no more noble then ours then, if money greases the wheel. But that is just the thing! They don’t have to be good people! A system of this type might work with mediocre people and bad people! In other words, the system might be plausible!
We are extremely confident that Jamie Diamond (CEO of JPMorgan Chase) is going to do what he can to make the shareholders of JPMorgan Chase richer. Because when shareholders get richer, Jamie Diamond gets richer. What if we could do that for politicians and citizens? As of today, the USA spends about USD 900 bln on its military every year, so it’s not like we don’t have money to spare.
Again, I’m still defining a goal here, not necessarily even saying it’s achievable (and indeed, I’m not sure it would be achievable in any sort of real world sense). But I find the goal at least somewhat plausible, and that alone is exciting for me as a world builder!
Imagine if you will, that we can somehow determine the exact metrics for what a “good society” looks like (more on that in future articles). Let’s explore a dumb fantasy:
Richard Nixon stays up late at night, cracking the whip so that his army of economists can get him that data on exactly how he might effectively reduce the levels of poverty in America! And he demands to know, the next day, why the average hospital wait time is still 12 days rather than 4 days, as was targeted by the last round of investment! He scours the country for experts in medical systems because he’s just got to figure out what he’s doing wrong!
And he does these things, not because he is a good person, but because hundreds of millions of dollars are on the line. He does these things because if poverty levels can be reduced to 2%, he’ll get a check for ten million dollars right then and there. He does these things with money bags in his eyes and an “arooooo” on his lips.
And that’s not to say that I think Nixon is going to be perfect or something, far from it actually! Even if he is really truly trying and so are all his senators, these are very complicated problems. But ask any civil infrastructure engineer about government civil infrastructure policy. Ask any doctor about government health policy. Ask any economist about government economic policy. Even when the preferred option is in office, almost all will agree that, by their professional standards, the actions of the government are almost nonsensical, if not directly harmful in many cases.
Imagine how beautiful a world might be. Imagine the upgrades that might be possible when we move from “nonsensical” to “following at least basic academic theory” and then to “iterating on the results of real-world policy research”.
Maybe it always collapses into a dictatorship, who knows. But it’s fun to think about, at least!
Building a plausible utopia p0: Why a utopia?
There is a tendency in science fiction to be pessimistic. And, on balance, that tendency is not necessarily wrong. After all, for all of human history, we have not managed to build a utopia. And indeed, in some sense creating a dystopian, or at least deeply flawed, society mirrors the real world in many ways, and may be more believable to readers.
But, for me, writing is an act of creation. And creating a thing that is difficult, and strange, and complicated is much more compelling to me than creating a thing which aims to mimic the conditions of today. It is no accident that the aliens live in a hellish dystopian warscape while the humans live in a state of governmental competence that has been described as “way harder to believe than the wormhole network”.
As well, this is one challenge which in my opinion is not addressed in quite the way that I would prefer in science fiction. In my “real” life, I work as professional economist, usually in antitrust and often with government authorities on policy. Fiction and even the news unfortunately does not often characterize anything quite correctly (think of any time you’ve seen your own area of expertise in the news!). As I read, I find very often what I would term: “good enough, but not quite right”. Truly great stories abound of course, but even the hardest scifi often falls short when it comes to those areas closest to my economist brain. (And I’m sure some engineers or military personnel or astronomers might feel the same about my work!)
But this gives me an opportunity to make a utopia that was personally satisfying to me. For me, the most important part was plausibility. I need to believe that this could work. To summarize the series of questions I found most interesting to think about:
What is the practical limit of bureaucratic efficiency, and how might we approach it?
Given a level of technology, and given that I get to just make up government structures from ground-up, what is the practical limit to the efficiency of the people at the top? How do I push it there? What is the incentive/enforcement structure? For example, might an efficient government be able to pass policy in days? Hours? What is the lower limit for the functionality we can imagine?
What does the government look like if and when it is able to achieve a higher level of efficiency through technology and organization?
How do the people in my government act, given the structure I imagine? What are their powers? What do they do? How are they viewed and how do they view others? For example, can I create a system of incentives that ensures that even a normal person would attempt to act virtuously?
What are the economic and societal implications of the government we so create? How is day to day life different? How are expectations and morals different? How is culture changed?
With a combination of technology and governance, life is fundamentally changed. How do those changes ripple outwards, both in concrete terms but also in cultural terms? For example, in the same way a child might as “but why don’t they just … ?”, a citizen might be fundamentally unable to understand to concept of widespread starvation.
Building a plausible utopia p2: Technological achievement
A big part of the plausibility of a utopia, for me, were the systems of governance and resource distribution. Speculative fiction is more meaningful to me when I can see our own world within that fiction.
But, as I have previously argued, 140 years is actually a very, very long time. Smartphones came into being only in 2011 after all, a mere 20 years after personal computers even started to become common. Given that pace, the technological advancement which we may play with can be almost-magic, as we see with relativistic speed ships, nanite bandages, and personal use drones.*
There is a danger, when utilizing sci-fi technology, to accidentally lose what for me is the soul of a speculative utopia. That is, the world we create is completely disconnected from the world we live in by virtue of the powers of its technology. For example, while I love Star Trek, the utopian society is built on, functionally, infinite wealth machines (replicators). The government structure and bureaucracy of Starfleet is largely uninteresting, and serves mainly as a stand in for the flaws of today (in other words, their purpose is to get in Picard’s way most of the time). This serves the plot of the show just fine, as it is primarily a character drama. However, even the show begins to walk back on their abilities when larger-scale war or economics comes into play (e.g. the introduction of non-replicable goods, the implication that replicated food is worse, the introduction of replication production bottlenecks during DS9). This is because, while they may work just fine when exploration is the focus, infinite resource machines are not interesting to think about.
And so when I created the setting of First Contact, I wanted a world where the concerns of now are still mirrored to some extent. Relative to today, resources are abundant, and life convenient. But the machines are just larger, more efficient versions of what we have today. People still need space to live, logistics on large scales still isn’t trivial, and resources are, to some extent, constrained. Jane still needs to check the medical cabinets and replace them every now and then.
Because there are challenges, forming that into something better is fun! We can have policy debates! Bureaucratic efficiencies! Economic planning! And when a colossal challenge comes in the refugee crisis, the government I imagine gets to really flex its bureaucratic muscles. We see the ridiculous logistics of moving people in action, which is all the more impressive because it is still difficult.
The utopia is built on a combination of human ingenuity / societal progress and technology. Technology is a tool and a method. But ultimately the sentients of the setting need to take hold of it to make something better.
*I admit the inertial dampeners are more “magic” than the rest of the technology, but drone fighters (which would have been required if human pilots just couldn’t keep up) would have been lame as hell.
Building a plausible utopia p1: Choosing a year.
If you are one of the like five people who has read my book, you might wonder: “Why 2164?” Or you might not, which is fair. But this is my hypothetical, so I’m a-runnin with it.
2164 is, after all, not so far in the future for a semi-utopian government to have taken hold. Often in science fiction, especially Utopian science fiction, you’ll find 2300, 2400, anything that puts a couple centuries between the world of the stories and the world of the present day.
And the change does, on reflection, seem quite dramatic. The world of First Contact sees a humanity that has moved beyond poverty, beyond hunger, beyond war. It is a world where the government is both efficient and effective, where the resources of a hundred stars are gathered and put to use for the betterment of mankind. Quite the departure from the present.
But I’d remark that, for me, 140 years felt like a long time. Or at least long enough to be plausible. After all, it was not until the 1960s that a woman could open her own bank account (and even then only with a signature from her husband). It was not until 2015 when gay marriage was legalized in the United States. Tech-wise, smart phone adoption had juuuust started in 2011.
In 9 more years, in 60 more years, what absurd injustices might I look back on and say: “Huh, they were still doing THAT?”. And in 2140, what injustice might a future generation scoff at, looking with bemusement and horror at the barbarians of 2080? What uncounted generations of ubiquitous technologies might have passed?
It is possible of course that 2164 looks nothing like what I imagine. And things have not always gone well in human history. But, based on our own history, perhaps the thing I have created is not so strange or unattainable as it may seem.
Hello world!
I must remark that it seems faintly amazing that I’ve been advised to start a blog and/or mailing list. But to the two of you reading, woo!