The Future
In lieu of real blogging, I thought I’d throw out some ideas from Ian M. Banks’ introductory essay on his Culture novels (via io9). Here’s Banks on the future obsolescence of market economics:
Concomitant with this is the argument that the nature of life in space – that vulnerability, as mentioned above – would mean that while ships and habitats might more easily become independent from each other and from their legally progenitative hegemonies, their crew – or inhabitants – would always be aware of their reliance on each other, and on the technology which allowed them to live in space. The theory here is that the property and social relations of long-term space-dwelling (especially over generations) would be of a fundamentally different type compared to the norm on a planet; the mutuality of dependence involved in an environment which is inherently hostile would necessitate an internal social coherence which would contrast with the external casualness typifying the relations between such ships/habitats. Succinctly; socialism within, anarchy without. This broad result is – in the long run – independent of the initial social and economic conditions which give rise to it.
Let me state here a personal conviction that appears, right now, to be profoundly unfashionable; which is that a planned economy can be more productive – and more morally desirable – than one left to market forces . . .
Intelligence, which is capable of looking farther ahead than the next aggressive mutation, can set up long-term aims and work towards them; the same amount of raw invention that bursts in all directions from the market can be – to some degree – channelled and directed, so that while the market merely shines (and the feudal gutters), the planned lases, reaching out coherently and efficiently towards agreed-on goals. What is vital for such a scheme, however, and what was always missing in the planned economies of our world’s experience, is the continual, intimate and decisive participation of the mass of the citizenry in determining these goals, and designing as well as implementing the plans which should lead towards them.
Of course, there is a place for serendipity and chance in any sensibly envisaged plan, and the degree to which this would affect the higher functions of a democratically designed economy would be one of the most important parameters to be set… but just as the information we have stored in our libraries and institutions has undeniably outgrown (if not outweighed) that resident in our genes, and just as we may, within a century of the invention of electronics, duplicate – through machine sentience – a process which evolution took billions of years to achieve, so we shall one day abandon the grossly targeted vagaries of the market for the precision creation of the planned economy.
And here’s Banks on space travel and anarchy:
The Culture, in its history and its on-going form, is an expression of the idea that the nature of space itself determines the type of civilisations which will thrive there.
The thought processes of a tribe, a clan, a country or a nation-state are essentially two-dimensional, and the nature of their power depends on the same flatness. Territory is all-important; resources, living-space, lines of communication; all are determined by the nature of the plane (that the plane is in fact a sphere is irrelevant here); that surface, and the fact the species concerned are bound to it during their evolution, determines the mind-set of a ground-living species. The mind-set of an aquatic or avian species is, of course, rather different.
Essentially, the contention is that our currently dominant power systems cannot long survive in space; beyond a certain technological level a degree of anarchy is arguably inevitable and anyway preferable.
To survive in space, ships/habitats must be self-sufficient, or very nearly so; the hold of the state (or the corporation) over them therefore becomes tenuous if the desires of the inhabitants conflict significantly with the requirements of the controlling body. On a planet, enclaves can be surrounded, besieged, attacked; the superior forces of a state or corporation – hereafter referred to as hegemonies – will tend to prevail. In space, a break-away movement will be far more difficult to control, especially if significant parts of it are based on ships or mobile habitats. The hostile nature of the vacuum and the technological complexity of life support mechanisms will make such systems vulnerable to outright attack, but that, of course, would risk the total destruction of the ship/habitat, so denying its future economic contribution to whatever entity was attempting to control it.
I’m down with the latter prediction (space subsidiarity, anyone?). Happy commenting.
I don’t have much time to discuss this at the moment, but I will certainly come back to it soon. Iain M. Banks here commits the fallacy first identified by Hayek — that because planning the actions of one’s individual life is good, planning for all of society must be even better. (“Planning lases.”)
This is by no means true, because such planning would require more knowledge than is ever given to any one mind. We may postulate technologies that get around this problem, but these remain daydreams, nothing more.
Indeed, it is only through social institutions like language, the family, and the market that we are even able to “plan” in our own lives — and these institutions are themselves the unplanned products of spontaneous order. They exist in large part to break up the vast, undifferentiated mass of information that we find in society. They permit us to think about and operate within small knowable pieces of it. They make the ability to plan on a small scale possible.
But the fact that we can operate within these small, knowable domains does not imply that we should dismantle spontaneous institutions in favor of universal social planning. On the contrary, it should be taken as evidence of just the opposite. We need to preserve such institutions so that we may plan even on the small, individual scales we see today.Report
@Jason Kuznicki, I think that misses the constraints of the hypothetical situation. In a closed society where cooperation is absolutely essential to survival, planning for all mission critical functions has to occur. Does that leave room for innovation and spontaneity, yes of course. However the flux capacitors have to be maintained and the dylithim crystals need to be conserved or the damn romulans will get us all.Report
@gregiank,
In a closed society where cooperation is absolutely essential to survival, planning for all mission critical functions has to occur.
Certainly. But here as well, the answer has not historically been an egalitarian socialism. It’s been the military chain of command.Report
@Jason Kuznicki, Well the United Federation of Planets has a democratic civilian struc…………………..ummm maybe i’m getting off on a tangent.Report
The United Federation of Planets also has no money. How do they pay for their synthohol?Report
Three words: “Socialist calculation controversy.”
The early twentieth century economic academy was divided pretty cleanly into those who believed that human society is capable of calculating optimal allocations of resources with reasonable accuracy and completeness and those who believed that such calculations were necessarily, not accidentally, impossible.
The latter turned out to be entirely correct, but that hasn’t stopped people who like the idea of a planned economy from keeping on about it. They just tend to gloss over the actual planning part. So instead of centralized planning, we have centralized hand-waving, i.e. utopian pipe-dreams elevated to firmly-held ideology.Report
@Ryan Davidson,
Exactly. In the books I’ve read (Consider Phlebas and Matter) Banks implicitly proposes that the socialist calculation debate will be solved by the advent of hyperintelligent autonomous computers that make plans for all of society (“Minds”) in consultation with one another.
To my mind this doesn’t even work as a plot device, because once you have hyperintelligent autonomous computers, they each become data points that the planning agents have to account for. The whole can’t plan for itself, but only for something simpler.Report
@Jason Kuznicki, Although really, it seems as each Mind is solely responsible for its ship, orbital, or whatever and each of those is more-or-less completely autonomous in resources. There doesn’t actually seem to be any trade as such. The humans and drones live in a planned economy planned by their local Mind, but there doesn’t really seem to be any economic cooperation between the Minds themselves – just military cooperation.Report
At least in Matter, it’s pretty clear that they are working in concert about foreign policy. Also, saying that an Orbital is an isolated economy doesn’t really solve the problem — it’s still tens of billions of people, many of whom are cybernetically enhanced, as well as their computers, various drones, aliens, visiting Minds, and what have you. Even without trade, it’s ridiculously complex.Report
@Jason, Yes, I agree its not realistic. In the actual novels he really avoids the topic of planning and how it would actually work. I’m thinking more about how he manages to get away with it in the novels without making it jarring – I’ve really enjoyed most of them.Report
@Jason Kuznicki, yeah, and in addition, he’s basically dealing with a post-scarcity economy. I think the socialists probably win the calculation debate if there’s more than enough stuff to go around.Report
In Jean-Luc Picard voice: “Will, make it so”Report
All of this papers over what is to me the bigger questions; those of humanism itself.
Space is really really big (gigantinormous) and faster than light travel remains a pipe dream in the realm of science fiction.
The human body, by contrast, is small and while it is immensely intricate the mysteries and challenges of our own biology are finite while the expanses and challenges of space are not. I personally suspect that the people who finally are able to colonize the distant stars will be very fundamentally (and intentionally) different from people today. I’m mainly thinking of things like Linda Nagata’s books “Vast” or “Deception Well” (if anyone here has read any of them).Report
The economics of the Culture are completely unconvincing, apart from anything else because the novels don’t contain any trade or any other kind of economic dependence between groups in the Culture or between the Culture and anyone else – each group seems to be in a state of permanent, self-contained, super-abundance. The only novel that gives any insight into how the Minds themselves coordinate things is “Excession”, and the cooperation there seems to be entirely military in nature. And of course the ships don’t need any fuel or ammunition, so the tricky business of figuring out where these would come from is skipped completely.
Ken McLeod is much more convincing in portraying the economic and political consequences of various forms of politics and of anarchism in the presence of machine hyper-intelligences. Ken is in fact a friend of Iain’s (and I have in fact drunk beer with them, although they probably don’t know that) and there are common themes in their novels. In fact I think it was Ken who originally posted that essay to Usenet on Iain’s behalf many, many years ago.Report