Post-capitalist economics

One frustrating aspect of being a Star Trek fan is that despite us being told that “we don’t use money anymore”, very little detail is given on how the Federation actually works, economically. Of course, ST hand-waves over a lot of things, like warp drives, transporters, and so on. The writers are smart enough to know what they don’t know, and to avoid violating the suspension of disbelief by spouting obvious nonsense.

There are any number of SF works that declare themselves utopian / post-capitalist by authorial fiat (The Culture Series, The Disposessed, Accelerando, etc.), but I’m curious to know whether there are any works that really get into the economic nuts and bolts.

In particular, I’m interested in fictional depictions of societies that continue to use money and property in some form, but which do so in a way that mitigates the excesses of our current capitalist framework - just as our economic system today mitigates the worst aspects of 18th-century capitalism. This also may include different flavors of capitalism, varieties democratic socialism, and so on.

I’m also very interested in stories that depict the path of “how you got there”.

The challenge of writing about alternative economic systems is hard - the space of unintended consequences is vast, and many of those consequences aren’t discovered until decades later. (As I’m fond of saying, “The more mature the ecosystem, the more sophisticated the parasites”). I’d be most impressed with authors who can foresee some of these consequences.

I’d prefer if this not get into political arguments, I am primarily interested in literary references (which can include both fictional works and academic papers). We can discuss whether a given idea would work (or not), but I’d like to keep this academic, and steer away from advocating that we actually adopt (or not) any given idea.

Bonus credits if the idea is presented in sufficient detail that it’s possible to model the system mathematically.

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Hmm. I think it will be a big ask to hope for a story that manages to combine plot with detailed ‘nuts and bolts’. For the latter, I suggest some recent non-fiction publications (which I suspect you already know of):

  • ‘Doughnut Economics’ by Kate Raworth is a serious attempt to break free from the mantra of GDP modelling with ‘homo economicus’ (who ain’t us)
  • ‘The Invisible Doctrine’ by George Monbiot and Peter Hutchinson is a brief history of Capitalism and Hayek’s Neoliberalism.

On the fictional side, Eric Frank Russell plays with the economic underpinnings of passive resistance in his short story ‘… And Then There Were None’ (later incorporated into the novel “The Great Explosion”

Two relevant works of fiction are Bellamy’s Looking Backwards and the much more recent Manna by Marshall Brain. Heinlein’s For Us the Living and Beyond this Horizon also have post-capitalist economies (Social Credit)

Cory Doctrow’s “Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom” has such a scheme and alludes to how it happened.

The Incorporated Man, is a novel that discusses a world wracked by virtual reality addictions and where individuals can capitalize themselves and sell shares in themselves to live the lifestyle they desire. Interesting idea but the writing wasn’t fleshed out enough.

Hi Nabil – this sounds like The Unincorporated Man (2009) by Dani and Eytan Kollin (which is now a series of four books.)

Yep that’s the one. I enjoyed it, but not enough to invest in the other books. Sounds like a vaguely Ferengi like scheme.

Hi Talin
I recently re-read a short novel on exactly this subject
IMHO it would NOT work the way it does in the book
The Great Explosion - Wikipedia

I do recall reading the EFR stories in Analog many years ago.

BTW, another novel that describes a post-capitalist utopia, but which handwaves over all of the details, is Ecotopia, which is less of a novel than it is a new-age political tract.

I have to agree… It’s a lovely idea, but I fear that the Terran Ambassadoe may have been right in predicting its breakdown once overpopulation created serious shortages of anything.

Yanis Varoufakis treads the ‘political tract disguised as a story’ path in ‘Another Now’.

The premise is that people in our world make contact with an alternate reality which appears to have split off from ours around 2008. They compare notes on economic systems, which have developed in very different ways.

Varoufakis uses this device to explore whether a form of ‘liberal socialism’ could help us avoid some of the problems we currently have.

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