Welcome to Part 3 of my WorldCon, CoNZealand panel write ups.
The panelists for the “Future Economics were Jesper Stage, Karl Schroeder, and Katherine Quevedo. While panel descriptions are always an idea of what the panel might be, and not a promise of what it will contain, they’re always a lovely teaser. For ‘Future Economics’, the description was as follows:
Will we ever fully disentangle from the physical? Blockchains, cryptocurrency, differently organic sentience. Will economic concepts of supply, demand, money, resources hold up? Evolve? Or be completely different? And what might they look like?
Economics is usually seen as a dry topic, full of game theory and calculated systems.
But economic systems do not exist in a vacuum. Here are:
5 Things To Consider When Designing Future (or Fantastical) Economic Systems
- Remember when looking at the model, that you must consider the humanity of the situation if you want both more nuanced and more accurate predictions
- Most of the labor in this world is not done for money — most labor is caretaking, and is usually done by women
- When IP (Intellectual property) is owned by a corporation, it is typically very secure. What about the people who create that IP?
- Computer translation gets better by analysing translated works that are online, but what about the people who are doing the translations? Where is their compensation for training the automation that will eventually leave them jobless.
- If Corporations are legally considered people and have a right to free speech, does that make them somehow potentially immortal beings?
- Where do the arts get their funding?
- In this day and age, many get their funding through Patreon or similar entities — and projects get their funding based on popularity — both of the idea and the creator. This leads to success for those who are already successful and oftentimes nothing for those who have not yet had the opportunity for success.
- What are the roles for AI (artificial intelligence) and computers in the future?
- Consider AIs representing natural resources like rivers/mountains/etc, programed to act in the resource’s best interests
- What if google or facebook or what have you granted you a sort of ‘universal income’ for use of your picture and your data in their algorithms?
- If you are unfamiliar with the concept of a ‘universal income’, in this day and age where more and more things are becoming automated, more and more jobs are almost more like ‘make-work’ than needed to sustain humanity or civilization. In such a world, it has been suggested that humanity itself makes one worthy of rent and food, with work something done because of a desire to do the job, a wish for purpose, or done for extra luxuries.
A world fantastic doesn’t have to be built on the economic principles that we live with today. Exploring the alternatives, and finding our way to the extrapolations of what that means for humanity can help create a world of nuance, with a core of truth holding it together.
What real world influences do you bring to world-building economics? What theories do you like to explore in your writing?
WRITING TIPS & WRITERLY MUSINGS 
Jobs as make-work, aka “paper shuffling”, have been an issue since the fifties or sixties. You already started seeing people complaining back then.
And “people who train machines to do their job” is no different than “training people offshore to do your job”.
Capitalism, actually, economics is all based on trade. In what I have referred to for 25 and more years, the “post-Adamic world”, where you no longer have to earn your bread by the sweat of your brow, what do you do? When machines do it all faster, cheaper, and in many cases safer, how do the people who own the machines expect you to pay for the product?
UBI is the only viable answer. And regardless of whether the government that provides that gets its money through taxes, or direct ownership (i.e. nationalization), why, gee, we’re back to who owns the means of production?
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I’ve been exploring this in one of my fantasy books. There’s a little city with a wartime economy and now they’re a peace. In a month they’ll have replaced all their wartime equipment expenditures…. what will happen then?
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