Solace

In early modern England, print houses called themselves "chapels," and they had some interesting norms around what they called "solaces," as described in  Joseph Moxon's 1683 Mechanick exercises, or, The doctrine of handy-works : applied to the art of printing.

The Adjacent Possible

I did this interview with The Adjacent Possible about economics and science fiction ...

PS: By the way, there's a bit at the end where it sounds like the UK General Election was in 2008, though it was actually 2010. I really just meant things were starting to go Tory and weird around that time. E.g. that posh racist MP off Have I Got News For You? was suddenly London Mayor.

PPS: And an addendum to the bit about how economists construe "demand": maybe you can also think of payoffs within game theory and mechanism design as an alternative / complementary way in which economics tries to think through desire and satisfaction with a bit more nuance and granularity.

Prompts for economic SF

A version of this list will be appearing in FOCUS in early 2019.

As a writer responding to one of these prompts, you'll probably want to ask two questions: (a) why are things like this in the first place? (b) What are the implications?

• Think of an economic system to which you are politically opposed. Imagine, in as much detail as possible, a working version of this system. Make it a bit like utopia. Take all your objections seriously, but devise science fictional solutions to them. Use this as a setting to tell any kind of story you like.
• A story featuring a designer market or a complementary currency (see e.g. Bernard Lietaer) whose purpose is not to solve a specific set of social problems, but to create them.
• Your story is set in an intimately surveilled (or sousveilled) society. In this society, if an analysis of your behaviour suggests that you want something, you automatically buy it (even if that puts you into debt).
• Write a thriller, a love story, a murder mystery, a coming-of-age-fable, and/or a comedy of manners. Set it in the near future, during the transition to a Universal Basic Income system. Make sure there are lots of kinks in the process.
• Imagine an economy without economies of scale. Why don't they exist? What are the implications?
• Precarious workers in the gig economy start to gain a little more security by developing their own digital tools for distributed solidarity. What data do they gather and how do they share and use it? What might a social media platform look like if it were organised around workers' interests? How might algorithmic curation work if it were trying to drive not engagement, but class consciousness? 
• Imagine an economy in which all prices and wages have a random element. (Maybe things are priced in this format: something like $3d6 means the cost will be $3-18, but with a higher chance of it being $9 than $3 or $18. Something like $1d20 means the cost will be $1-20, with every price equally likely). Why? What are the implications?
• Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has dominated economic policy and politics, despite its many well-demonstrated shortcomings. Various alternatives exist; e.g. Bhutan uses a Gross National Happiness Index. Imagine a world where economic policy is focused on some unusual alternative to GDP. Perhaps the story is about trying to change to a different metric, and the unexpected consequences.
• Imagine an alternative timeline in which the 1973 Chilean coup failed or never happened in the first place. What next for Stafford Beer and Cybersyn? (You may want to read Eden Medina's Cybernetic Revolutionaries first).
• Invent a few new cognitive biases, or exaggerate some existing cognitive biases, and extrapolate how they will reshape the economy. 
• Imagine an alternative timeline in which the Soviet Union pursued the project of a computational command economy in a big way. (You may want to read Francis Spufford's Red Plenty first).
• A tweet-based currency.
• Industrial disputes are handled algorithmically, and/or are gamified.
• An economy that has been designed with institutions specifically to disincentivize all kinds of rational egoist, homo economicus type behaviour.
• Set your story in a future where regenerative design, redistributive design, and generous design have become normalized. The economy is based on processes that revitalize the resources they need, that distribute value widely instead of letting it pool and concentrate, and that aim to create positive externalities (rather than just no negative externalities. Check out Kate Raworth's Doughnut Economics to find out more about these terms). These features could be in the foreground, or just in the background. You could stress test the world you have invented in various ways. You could explore what happens when these principles are so ingrained, even the bad guys operate by them. E.g. how does a scientist supervillain, or a mercenary company, or a giant killer robot, try to abide by such principles?
• A reputation based currency but with some twist. The twist is up to you, but just for example, you can start by reading Cory Doctorow's critique of his invention reputation currency Whuffie (and this post may be handy too). How might things be different if you had several reputation scores, and any increase in one of your reputation scores meant a decrease in your others?
• Imagine a world in which all "markets" are actually networked barter systems. There is no money as such. Goods and services are "priced" in credits, but there's no such thing as owning credits by themselves. What you can do is request goods or services, and list your own goods and services in exchange. The system gets around the coincidence of wants problem by some kind of multilateral matching algorithm, and clears all requests as quickly as feasible. Think through the details of the system, and imagine how it reshapes the economy and people's everyday lives.
• What we usually call "ownership" is actually a bundle of rights, for instance the right to use something (in certain ways), the right to earn income from it, the right to transfer it, the right to exclude others from using it, the right to dispose of it, etc. Think of different ways of dividing up "ownership." Imagine a society in which these rights are not typically bundled together. 
• Similar to the last one: imagine a world in which it is easy to place complex conditions on how something will be used when it is sold. What kinds of conditions do people place? Why? What are the second- and third-order effects? 
• Again similar to the last one: technology gives most commodities a fine-grained modularity. Ownership as we know it is obsolete, but there are competing ideas about what new forms should take its place. Some producers, still seeking to maximize profit no matter what, want to extract value from micro-licensing long after they have "sold" something. Other actors are trying to establish a circular economy that is restorative and regenerative by design.
• Military science fiction featuring a company of high tech mercenaries that seek to reconcile their chosen profession with being green and sustainable.
• A world of great abundance -- perhaps kind of post-scarcity -- in which anything that is paid for is paid for with on-the-spot by micro-labour (never more than ten minutes).
• Imagine a universe without Nash equilibria.
• Imagine a universe without Pareto optimality.
• Imagine a universe in which Walrasian general equilibrium is not even theoretically possible, although partial equilibrium is.
• Imagine a democracy based on rotating through Nash equilibria rather than political parties.
• Imagine all the people, living life in peace, yoo hoo ooh-ooh-ooh.
• All economic transactions are done through some kind of a Vickrey auction.
• There are already many LETS communities and time banks all over the world. Imagine one system growing until it fundamentally alters the nature of capitalism, or perhaps in some sense replaces it.
• Imagine an economy in which some or all goods aren't characterized by diminishing marginal utility, but by more complex curves that go up and down at different amounts. How? Why? So what?
• Imagine an economy where each quantum of cash bears a record of all the historical transactions it has been involved in. (So a bit like a blockchain, but imagine that the data is a bit more rich than what amounts were transferred).
• Create a magic system based on the stock exchange.
• Imagine a sophisticated form of economics that uses little or no mathematics. Maybe it is mainly visual.
• There is a small close-to-post-scarcity utopia existing at the fringe of a large capitalist society. How do the utopians deal with the arbitrage? 
• Build an economy in which every good or service has a different price depending on who's buying it. Among other things, think about how such an economy handles its complex arbitrage problems.
• Imagine a world in which certain categories of goods periodically "rotate," e.g. all instances of commodity a turn into commodity b, all commodity b into commodity c, c into d, d into e, and e into a. Why? And how do people adjust to this phenomenon?
• Imagine a society in which the division of labour is done in some radically different way.
• Imagine a functioning economy and financial system in which there is no interest (and also probably no arrangements like buy-to-lease which in some ways functionally approximate interest bearing loans).
• Imagine a world in which all transaction costs are zero. Or, imagine a world in which all or key transaction costs are exotic in some way, perhaps fluctuating predictably according to some irresistible external impulse.
• Imagine a society without what David Graeber calls "bullshit jobs." Or imagine the difficult transition to such a society.
• Imagine a science fictional reason for an unambiguous positive correlation between inflation and unemployment.
• A world in which something called "smart inflation" exists. What is it, and how does it work? How does it reshape the economy and society?
• Some kind of biopunk world in which affect (feelings) can be transferred, commodified, bought and sold. 
• In the near future, the Earth divides into just two societies: one Left Accelerationist, the other Right Accelerationist. What happens?
• In the near future, the Earth divides into just two societies: a Promethean Leftist society, and a Green Leftist society. What goes down?
• Can you imagine a "Promethean deep ecological" society?
• Cash and markets come to an extremely advanced, complex alien society that has never had such things in all their history.
• Another variant on Doctorow's Whuffie, from Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. In the novel, you can't really "spend" Whuffie to buy things. It just goes up and down depending what people think of you. But what if you could spend it? What if you gained credits automatically through conduct people approve of, which you can choose to deplete to buy things? The credits are erased, rather than transferred. 
• Design a blockchain utopia. Make it an ambiguous, critical utopia (think Le Guin's Dispossessed), and don't write it from an anarcho-capitalist perspective.
• Research (or find somebody who knows about) an extremely intricate, dull, and complicated episode of economic history. For instance, research rail fares in the UK 1970-2020. In what ways have they changed? Why? What choices were made? What lessons have been learned? What models are in operation? What challenges are now being faced? Now try to tell the most exciting science fictional story you can, preserving the underlying economic logic. You may want to change the subject matter entirely, but try to preserve (in particular) any insights into the design of policies, institutions and incentives, and/or the counter-intuitive, emergent behaviour of systems whose wholes are greater than the sum of their parts.
• Imagine the transition to full communism from the perspective of someone working in a particular role in a particular organisation (whether it's a business, a non-profit, something else). Try to include the detailed, mundane challenges in your story -- the kind of stuff the protagonist thinks would be too complicated to explain to anybody who didn't do the job they do.
• A freak temporal storm transports Kim Stanley Robinson to 1900.
• It's a highly networked society, and all payments are digital. When you pay for a good or service, there's a suggested price, but you can pay whatever you want for it. If a good or service is unavailable, you can state what price you would have paid for it. Periodically (every month, say) there is a Rebalancing in which a sort of version of a Vickrey auction is computed. The price of the good or service is set at that offered by the highest bidder who would have lost, if this had been a normal Vickrey auction. Everyone's bank balances are then adjusted according to the price (if they paid more, they get some money back; if they paid less, they are charged a top-up). But how does the system deal with the fact that some people have already consumed goods which, if this were a normal Vickrey auction, they would not have any right to? What incentives are there to pay higher rather than lower prices? And what are the wider economic, social, and cultural ramifications of this system?
• The world is a computer simulation, and everyone knows it. It's also a democracy, and elections aren't just about choosing government officials, they're about choosing new realities. Between elections, the main form of currency is backed by story prompts for economic science fiction, and the economic science fiction based on those prompts.

Economics for SF Researchers & Writers

A reading list of economics-related titles that may be of interest to researchers working in Science Fiction Studies and/or science fiction writers:

Journals / Series

• Journal of Cultural Economy
• Ecological Economics
• International Journal of Green Economics
• The Real Utopias Project, Vol. 1-6 🔥

Books

• Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money (1900)
• Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital (1913)
• Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology (1922)
• Marcel Mauss, The Gift (1925)
• Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1942)
• Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (1944)
• Robert Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers (1953)
• Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1961)
• Joan Robinson, Economic Philosophy (1962)
• John Maynard Keynes, Essays in Persuasion (1963)
• Jane Jacobs, The Economy of Cities (1969)
• Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (1970)
• Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism (1972)
• Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics (1972)
• James S. Albus, Peoples' Capitalism: The Economics of the Robot Revolution (1976)
• Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976)
• Jean Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (1981)
• Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism 15th-18th Century, Vol. 1: The Structures of Everyday Life (1981)
• Deirdre McCloskey, The Rhetoric of Economics (1985)
• Barbara Bergmann, The Economic Emergence of Women (1986)
• Sara Roy, The Gaza Strip: The Political Economy of De-Development (1987)
• Margaret Levi, Of Rules and Revenue (1988)
• J. Parry and M. Bloch (ed.), Money and the Morality of Exchange (1989)
• Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (1990) 🔥
• Michael Albert, Robin Hahnel, Looking Forward: Participatory Economics for the Twenty First Century (1991)
• Caroline Humphrey and Stephen Hugh-Jones (ed.), Barter, Exchange and Value (1992)
• Paul Cockshott and Allin Cottrell, Towards a New Socialism (1993)
• Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, In the Realm of the Diamond Queen: Marginality in an Out-Of-The-Way Place (1993)
• Viviana Zelizer, The Social Meaning of Money: Pin Money, Paychecks, Poor Relief, & Other Currencies (1994)
• Marguerite Young, Angel in the Forest: A Fairy Tale of Two Utopias (1994)
• Elizabeth Wayland Barber, Women's Work: The First 20,000 Years Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times (1994)
• Jane Humphries, Gender and Economics (1995)
• Farhad Nomani and Ali Rahnema, Islamic Economic Systems (1995)
• T.G. Rawski, Economics and the Historian (1996)
• Barry Eichengreen, Globalizing Capital: A History of the International Monetary System (1996)
• Susan Strange, The Retreat of the State (1996)
• Diana Wynne-Jones, The Tough Guide to Fantasyland (1996)
• Theodor Adorno, Can One Live After Auschwitz? A Philosophical Reader (1997)
• Susana Narotzky, New Directions in Economic Anthropology (1997)
• Susan Strange, Mad Money (1998)
• Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (1999)
• Marilyn Waring, Counting for Nothing: What Men Value and What Women are Worth (1999)
• Martha Woodmansee, Mark Osteen, New Economic Criticism: Studies at the Intersection of Literature and Economics (1999)
• Deirdre McCloskey ed. by Stephen Ziliak, Measurement and Meaning in Economics: The Essential Deirdre McCloskey (1999) 🔥
• Witold Kula, The Problems and Methods of Economic History (2001)
• Peter A. Hall and David Soskice, Varieties of Capitalism (2001)
• Philip Mirowski, Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science (2001) 🔥
• Carlota Perez, Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital (2002)
• Lourdes Benería, Gender, Development, and Globalization: Economics as if All People Mattered (2003)
• David Harvey, Marx, Capital, and the Madness of Economic Reason (2017)
• Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics (2004)
• Ernesto Screpanti and Stefano Zamagni, An Outline of the History of Economic Thought (2005)
• Julie A. Nelson, Economics for Humans (2006)
• Elspeth Brown, Cultures of Commerce: Representation and American Business Culture, 1877-1960 (2006)
• Naomi Klein, Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2007)
• Joyce Jacobsen and Adam Zeller, Queer Economics: A Reader (2007)
• Diane Coyle, The Soulful Science: What Economists Really Do and Why It Matters (2007)
• Margaret Atwood, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth (2008) 🔥
• Karen Ho, Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street (2008)
• Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz, The Race Between Education and Technology (2008) 
• Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart, This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly (2009)
• Nancy Folbre, Greed, Lust, and Gender: A History of Economic Ideas (2009)
• Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer (2009)
• Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism (2009)
• Elinor Ostrom, Understanding Institutional Diversity (2010)
• Francis Spufford, Red Plenty (2010)
• Juliet B. Schor, Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth (2010)
• Viviana Zelizer, Economic Lives: How Culture Shapes the Economy (2010) 🔥
• David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital (2010)
• Charles Wheelan, Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science (2010)
• David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011) 🔥
• Louis Brennan, Alessandra Vecchi, The Business of Space: The Next Frontier of International Competition (2011)
• Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)
• Kalpana Rahita Seshadri, HumAnimal: Race, Law, Language (2012)
• Eric D. Smith, Globalization, Utopia and Postcolonial Science Fiction: New Maps of Hope (2012)
• Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity (2012)
• Irene Aldridge, High-Frequency Trading: A Practical Guide to Algorithmic Strategies and Trading Systems (2013)
• Mary Morgan, The World and the Model: How Economists Work and Think (2013)
• Thomas Piketty, Capital in the 21st Century (2013)
• Brett Scott, The Heretic's Guide to Global Finance: Hacking the Future of Money (2013) 🔥
• Mariana Mazzucato, The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths (2013)
• Ha-Joon Chang, Economics: The User's Guide (2013) 🔥
• Anna Grandori, Epistemic Economics and Organization: Forms of Rationality and Governance for a Wiser Economy (2013)
• Diane Coyle, GDP: A Brief But Affectionate History (2014)
• Nigel Dodd, The Social Life of Money (2014) 🔥
• Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming (2014)
• Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (2015)
• Paul Mason, Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future (2015)
• Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, Inventing the Future (2015)
• Will Davies, Johanna Montgomerie, and Sara Walin, Financial Melancholia: Mental Health and Indebtedness (2015)
• Andrekos Varnava, Imperial Expectations and Realities: El Dorados, Utopias and Dystopias (2015)
• Melanie Swan, Blockchain: Blueprint for a New Economy (2015)
• Martin Ford, Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future (2015)
• Manu Saadia, Trekonomics (2016) 🔥
• Douglas Rushkoff, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus (2016)
• Nancy Isenberg, White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)
• Janelle Knox-Hayes, The Cultures of Markets: The Political Economy of Climate Governance (2016)
• Stuart J. Smyth and José Falck-Zepeda, Socio-Economic Considerations in Biotechnology Regulation (Natural Resource Management and Policy (2016)
• Ram S. Jakhu, Joseph N. Pelton, Yaw Otu Mankata Nyampong, Space Mining and Its Regulation (2016)
• Julian Guthrie, How to Make a Spaceship: A Band of Renegades, an Epic Race and the Birth of Private Space Flight (2017)
• Joseph F. Coughlin, The Longevity Economy: Inside the World's Fastest-Growing, Most Misunderstood Market (2017)
• Peter Frase, Four Futures (2017)
• Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy (2017)
• Ryan Kiggins, The Political Economy of Robots: Prospects for Prosperity and Peace in the Automated 21st Century (2017)
• Kate Raworth: Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think like a 21st-Century Economist (2017) 🔥
• Alexander MacDonald, The Long Space Age: The Economic Origins of Space Exploration from Colonial America to the Cold War (2017)
• Winifred Curran and Trina Hamilton, Just Green Enough: Urban Development and Environmental Gentrification (2017)
• Ҫınla Akdere and Christine Baron (ed.), Economics and Literature: A Comparative Interdisciplinary Approach (2017)
• Will Davies (ed.), Economic Science Fiction (2018) 🔥
• Paulina Golinska, Logistics Operations and Management for Recycling and Reuse (2018)
• Julia Puaschunder, Governance and Climate Justice: Global South and Developing Nations (2018)
• Chrystia Freeland and Lawrence H Summers, The Post-Widget Society: Economic Possibilities for Our Children (2018)
• Annie Lowrey, Give People Money: How a Universal Basic Income Would End Poverty, Revolutionise Work, and Remake the World (2018)
• Cheryl McEwan, Postcolonialism, Decoloniality, and Development (2018)
• Michelle Chihara and Matt Seybold, The Routledge Companion to Literature and Economics (2018)
• Mark Rifkin, Fictions of Land and Flesh: Blackness, Indigeneity, Speculation (2019)

CfP: Science Fiction and Economics

Vector is pleased to invite proposals for short articles (2,000-4,000 words) exploring science fiction and economics. CfP can be found here. Some ideas for topics include:

• The economics and political economy of utopias and dystopias
• Imagined systems of economic thought
• The role of speculation about the future across SF and financial markets
• Property and its alternatives in SF
• Imagined collapses of and alternatives to capitalism
• Near future SF and the socio-economic impacts of emergent technology
• The idea of “rigor” in science fiction and the social sciences
• Picturing and pitching the future: futurism, entrepreneurship, design fiction, and diegetic prototyping
• Economic extrapolations of the novum
• Fintech, cryptocurrency, blockchain
• Debt in SF, e.g. Margaret Atwood’s Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth meets the speculative fiction of Margaret Atwood
• Adhocracy, commoning, and self-governance, e.g. Cory Doctorow’s Walkaway (2017) meets Elinor Ostrom
• “Adam Smith’s invisible great clomping foot of nerdism”: the economic dimension of worldbuilding
• Science fictional demoi and publics
• Scarcity, post-scarcity, “alt scarcity”
• Automation
• Matter replicators
• Latinum, Melange, Adamantium: precious science fictional commodities
• Capitalism, communism, third ways, fourth ways, fifth ways ... nth ways
• The corporation in cyberpunk, post-cyberpunk, and other SF
• Malthus and immortality
• Markets, data science, and algorithmic governance
• Complexity economics and chaos, complexity, and non-linear dynamics in SF
• Algorithmic governance and the socialist calculation debates
• Commensurable and non-commensurable value, e.g. Viviana Zelizer meets Karl Schroeder’s Permanence (2012)
• Economic models as science fiction; readings of the thought experiments and pedagogic narratives within political economy texts as science fiction, e.g. Georg Simmel meets Ruth Levitas
• AI and economic decision-making. How should economic agency be understood when it is dispersed through digital constructs – including Intelligent Personal Assistants and financial investment robo-advisors – whose algorithmic ‘reasoning’ is intrinsically opaque?
• Communism and alternate reality SF
• SF and capitalist realism
• Science fictional experience; SF as lived experience
• Science fictional estrangements of markets and money
• Alienation, reification, commodification, and estrangement
• Unreal estate
• Economics without economies, economies without economics
• Subjective theories of value and the Quantified Self
• Neural interfaces, affective computing, and the formation of economic demand and political will
• Homo economicus, “xeno economicus”, and economic rationality in SF
• Prisoners’ Dilemma and other game theory in SF
• Platform capitalism and SF, e.g. Tim Maughan’s ‘Zero Hours’
• SF and platform co-operativism: imagining just, democratic, and sustainable digitally-mediated labour relations
• Division of labour in SF
• Affective labour and technologies of quantification
• Barter in SF
• Interstellar trade
• Money and the trees it grows on, e.g. Nalo Hopkinson’s ‘Money Tree’, Clifford D. Simak’s ‘The Money Tree’
• SF and ecological economics
• Quantifying, representing, and/or marketising the unquantifiable
• Markets as computation, computation as markets
• SF’s non-capitalist markets
• Class in SF, e.g. Samuel R. Delaney’s Nova (1968)
• Secular trends, e.g. Rosa Luxemburg meets Michael Swanwick’s ‘From Babel’s Fall’n Glory We Fled...’ (2008)
• Social credit and financial credit in Karen Lord’s Galaxy Game (2015)
• Gift economies and other non-market exchanges in SF, e.g. Erik Frank Russell’s ‘And Then There Were None’ (1953)
• Economics and deep time, economics and galactic scale, economics of terraforming, economics of megaengineering
• Markets and states on interstellar scale, e.g. Susan Strange meets Charles Stross’s Neptune’s Brood (2013)
• Estranging money
• Energy and value, e.g. Starhawk’s Fifth Sacred Thing (1993)
• SF in relation to time banking: e.g. LETS, ECHO, time-based currencies, Falk Lee’s ‘Time is Money’ (1975)

Commodity Theory & the Origins of Money

ECONOMIST: "It is not from the benevolence of"

ECONOMIC SOCIOLOGIST: Hi please stop

ECONOMIST: Imagine I have some economic lectures, and you have some animal skins. Now what? Unless you happen to want what I have, and I happen to want what you have, we can't trade!

ECONOMIC SOCIOLOGIST: That would never happen although you're right about not wanting the economics lecture

ECONOMIST: In primitive society, it must have been pretty inconvenient to get what you want!

ECONOMIC SOCIOLOGIST: I mean no more inconvenient than this. Look I'll just give you the skins. We can remember or write it down. I'll give them to you

ECONOMIST: Nowadays, economists like to say

ECONOMIC SOCIOLOGIST: They like to say "economists like to say"

ECONOMIST: that a barter society would have "high transaction costs."

ECONOMIC SOCIOLOGIST: You guys really like to say that, waaay more than economic sociologists like to say "economic sociologists like to say" anyway. Although I kind of liked saying that just now.

ECONOMIST: But not only that!

ECONOMIC SOCIOLOGIST: Oh God.

ECONOMIST: Not all commodities are easy to carry or divide. If you have to cut one of your skins in half

ECONOMIC SOCIOLOGIST: I won't do that. It's not a problem. Do you want the skins? Take my skin. Take my actual skin.

ECONOMIST: it might be worth a lot less!

ECONOMIC SOCIOLOGIST: Please don't say Jevons. Please don't say double co

ECONOMIST: What Jevons called "the double coincidence of wants"

ECONOMIC SOCIOLOGIST: He didn't invent that idea and he didn't call it that.

ECONOMIST: prompted barter societies

ECONOMIC SOCIOLOGIST: He did say "coincidence between persons wanting and persons possessing"

ECONOMIST: to eventually agree to use

ECONOMIC SOCIOLOGIST: "Agree"? Wait Menger basically made up you guys's commodity theory and Menger would have hated that. And he was being a bit literal but he almost had a point, it wasn't like one day in the olden days the olden day guys all sat down and agreed

ECONOMIST: some intrinsically valuable commodity

ECONOMIC SOCIOLOGIST: But it's funny you should say agree because you know what economic historians and anthropologists and sociologists agree on they agree there have never been barter societies that is a thing they agree

ECONOMIST: such as tea, or beads, cowrie shells

ECONOMIC SOCIOLOGIST: That reminds me we're almost out of cowrie shells sorry I will shut up and listen what is next

ECONOMIST: or, of course, gold!

ECONOMIC SOCIOLOGIST: Never has been a "barter society" in the way you mean it anyway. Wait, what, gold?

ECONOMIST: What we then see is the gradual evolution of money, from some intrinsically valuable commodity

ECONOMIC SOCIOLOGIST: Gold is not intrinsically valuable -- I'm like right here, why do you never, why are you, why

ECONOMIST: to coinage, to paper money backed by precious metal, to what

ECONOMIC SOCIOLOGIST: Why are you doing this. Gold is not intrinsically valuable it's not even intrinsically pretty

ECONOMIST: we have today

ECONOMIC SOCIOLOGIST: I don't

ECONOMIST: namely, fiat money.

ECONOMIC SOCIOLOGIST: Phew cool well that was quite a ride now maybe we can

ECONOMIST: This progression, from barter, to commodity money, to modern fiat money, took a long time.

ECONOMIST SOCIOLOGIST: thousands of years of diverse and complex monetary systems, their transformations and their collapses, all ignored, so not that long

ECONOMIST: But it had to! It had to be gradual in order to build up the necessary trust

ECONOMIC SOCIOLOGIST: Okay cool so the stability of the dollar is at least partly because of the confidence of the Babylonians had in their priest class I totally get that cool, cool, cool

ECONOMIST: since today it is really only trust that makes money valuable.

ECONOMIC SOCIOLOGIST: Nothing to do with the law then? And, like, what taxes are denominated in and

ECONOMIST: Money is backed by trust. If we lose our trust in money, money has no value!

ECONOMIC SOCIOLOGIST: You know what, for what its worth? Trust is a weird sentiment to be privileging here. I know what you're getting at, but your language is loose and misleading. By saying that money is "backed" by trust, you make it sound like using money is an efficient way of trusting each other -- just like using money backed by gold is an efficient way of reassigning claims to that gold. Whereas in reality, just the opposite is true. Money doesn't require that we trust each other. If anything, it requires that we don't. What money is really good at is co-ordinating the activity of people without those people having to gain any intimate knowledge of each other. Here's Henry Peacham telling a kind of joke about that in The Worth of a Penny, or, A Caution to Keep Money (1667):

ECONOMIST: What?

ECONOMIC SOCIOLOGIST: What?

ECONOMIST: I feel like you're being a bit nit-picky. This is an ideal model. Of course it has lots of assumptions, but it also has explanatory force.

ECONOMIC SOCIOLOGIST: So where did money really come from?

ECONOMIST: You should just trust me on this stuff. So yeah anyways how about a cheeky wee animal skin? I can pay you back Monday.

Shallow Markets

Over on Economic Humanities, another necessarily bonkers foray into economic sociology, trying to develop the notion of shallow markets. Inspired in the first place by trying to capture what is distinctive about the market structures of platform capitalism (Uber, Airbnb, the "sharing" economy, etc.), but in a way which can also be used to refine our understanding of "traditional" market structures.

Glancing over it now, I'm less confident about the centrality of negative externalities. Perhaps what I'm really interested in here is the old notion of a producer entering a market in expectation of profit, and leaving a market in response to losses. In this context, are there differences between platforms and markets? Platforms are designed to easily assimilate productive capital which was recently used for some other purpose, but is that really lowering barriers to entry, or is it cultivating a spectrum of market presence, where producers are neither completely in nor completely out of the market, but ghosts with a transparency slider, 0% to 100%? What is the status of a seller who has developed a good reputation profile, and still has all the productive capital necessary to compete on a particular platform, but just isn't bidding and/or checking that particular inbox any more? Have they exited the market or not? What if they start checking more frequently after a few months? Should this change the way we think about sunk costs / transitional costs / stranded costs?

Partly what I'm trying to capture is what these relatively new modes of provisional and flexible market participation mean for competition as it is traditionally conceived in mainstream economics. Okay, yes, platform capitalism has discovered devious new ways of continuing neoliberal trends of casualization and deregulation. But also: many of these markets are not only de facto extremely exploitative, they are also uncompetitive or only ambiguously competitive.

It is true that producers encounter pressure to improve the quality and cost of their offering, in ways which are favorable to the consumer. But other features of competition are not present. The relative ease with which producers may defer or offload costs, and may come and go from the market, means that the market does not cultivate technical innovation, robust structures of intangible capital, nor real growth. Instead of facing pressure to improve productivity, producers face pressure to begin their "going out of business, everything must go, big bargain sale" from the moment they enter the market.

(Some of these incentive dynamics may be obscured, at the moment, by the institutionally and culturally originated waves of innovation (and innovation marketing and rhetoric) which are a compulsory feature of any tech company's existence. The provisional, one-foot-in-and-one-foot-out quality of these microentrepreneur markets may also not entirely hold true in the case of flagship platforms like Uber and Airbnb, since there's a big physical capital investment involved: the situation of some Uber drivers if it were to continue would verge on indentured slavery. TaskRabbit et al. are slightly more clear-cut examples).

Perhaps an interesting model to play with would be a market in which all firms are loss-making, average total cost is greater than price, but marginal variable cost is less than price per unit. Barriers to entry are not low but negative.

(You could perhaps get clever and explain these negative barriers in terms of a kind of "grass is greener" epistemology of capital asset valuation. New producers do not literally have a monetary incentive to enter; they have a sort of accounting incentive to enter, in that by switching their underperforming capital, its value rises on the basis of anticipated returns. But underperformance is the rule across all platforms. The producer's incentive to enter a market is their own capital, which appears constantly undervalued in whatever market it is participating in, and overvalued in whatever markets it's not).

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

Elsewhere: passive control rights

I came across the intriguing notion of the "passive control rights" of bondholders, which strikes me as one way in which the strict distinction between debt and equity need not always be as strict as we tend to think.

I'm gathering evidence to support the unpopular opinion that money, which is sometimes seen as a form of debt, might also be fruitfully approached as a special form of equity. This aspiration belongs to my broad sense that more needs to be done before money comes properly into focus as, in Geoffrey Ingham's words, a social relation. Ingham writes in The Nature of Money:

by a ‘sociology of money’ I intend more than the self-evident assertion that money is produced socially, is accepted by convention, is underpinned by trust, has definite social and cultural consequences and so on. Rather, I shall argue that money is itself a social relation; that is to say, money is a ‘claim’ or ‘credit’ that is constituted by social relations that exist independently of the production and exchange of commodities

Anyway, the rather dry excerpt about passive control rights is over at the Economic Humanities blog.

Another case where debt and equity may become blurred, by the way, is in the case of very short term money market securities, especially where issuers are continually rolling over their commercial paper-type debt. Such relationships can be short-term in one sense and long-term in another: that is, a company borrows money, pays it back, borrows it again, pays it back again, perhaps even on a daily basis, perhaps for years. So the lenders may not have any voting rights or collateral, but they may still be respected and even feared stakeholders with influence over the company's dealings. One thing I don't really understand yet is the extent to which a group of lenders in an arrangement like this really can be thought of as an agent or actor or even a continuous (albeit evolving) entity over long spans of time.

It's also interesting that whereas "debt" always implies "credit" -- to the extent that in certain contexts the terms become interchangeable, although always with distinct nuance -- there doesn't seem to be any equivalent language that differentiates equity as either owning or being owned by. Or perhaps there is but I just don't know about it?

Elsewhere: how many capitals can you name?

On the Economic Humanities blog, what do we talk about when we talk about intangible capital?