Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Continuing Mission: Year Six


If this blog were original Trek, it would presumably be heading back to Starfleet Command at the conclusion of its five-year mission. (Well, if it were really original Trek it would have been canceled by the network two years ago.)

I am still not caught up, so will again have to a) beg your collective indulgence, and b) rely on the commenter community to bail me out of a lame post.

According to Blogger analytics, through yesterday Rocketpunk Manifesto has had precisely 271,284 visits, and just over half a million page views, from 79,641 unique visitors. I don't know if there is a statute of limitations on being unique, and if you read this blog on two different machines the analytics probably count you as two 'unique' people.

In any case, over the past couple of years traffic has been fairly steady at 2500-3000 'unique' visitors each month. Monthly visits have fallen off slightly - since I haven't been posting as frequently - but 'unique' visitors have held steady or even very gradually risen. Roughly 1700-2000 of you seem to be regulars. Thanks for hanging around!

Again according to the analytics, just over half of you are from the US - the international contingent gradually expanding toward the 50 percent mark. And in the last year or so, I am happy to note, I've picked up a regular Russian readership.

On the production side, this is the 277th published post here, including an initial test post to make sure things would actually show up. The next post, and first substantive one, defined rocketpunk. As it turns out, though, this blog's name has turned out to be a bit of a misnomer. I have talked often enough (but not primarily) about midcentury SF, and have made practically no effort to further define or create an SF subgenre around the midcentury vision, analogous to steampunk.

As it has from the beginning, this blog tends to waver between being about space travel and being about space-oriented SF, conjoined topics that it shares with Atomic Rockets. With occasional broader excursions into the great super-genre of Romance, to which SF belongs.

Expect this general pattern of digressions to continue, perhaps with a little more focus on the literary side, since there are plenty of 'nonfiction' space blogs out there. Last post's comment thread suggests no lack of interest in the meta-fiction side of things.

On the other hand, when I think of new zaps or whacks to be made on the subject of space warfare, I will make them. We should all be ashamed of ourselves, but admitting it won't stop me from doing it.


If anyone wants to suggest topics they'd like to see discussed here, I make absolutely no promises, but suggesting them is one thing the comment thread is for.

As always ... Discuss!




Yeah, I recycled the image of the Enterprise from last year. Why not?

478 comments:

1 – 200 of 478   Newer›   Newest»
Anonymous said...

The digressions and side trips are what makes this site so interesting; that and the way the threads meander and mutate! I look forward to the next six, and the six after that...

As far as subjects for future topics, may I suggest the recent anouncement of Planetary Resources and an expanded discussion about the nuts and bolts of an off-world colony, here in ouer own solar system.

Ferrell

Thucydides said...

The Rocketpunk trope would now be alt history; USAF rocket bombers riding out of their silos on top of towering Titan ICBM boosters and so on.

Except for Das Marsprojekt and Destination Moon, most "real" rocketpunk was concerned with prosecuting the Cold War. The end result would probably be a glowing radioactive Earth, hence the relative lack of interest

Brett said...

Have you done an asteroid mining topic? That might be worth a good discussion, especially in light of recent events.

Since it's going to be All-Robotic is well, we could also discuss how robots and telepresence might change our ability to do orbital construction.

Tony said...

When I find myself in times of trouble, Pachelbel is always following me...oh wait, what?

Seriously, I think Rocketpunk, at the very least, encompasses Heinlein, Clarke, and much of the rest of the Golden Age, to the degree that (despite hyperspace/subspace/"overdrive" FTL) its spaceships were rockets. Heck, a lot of what we think about as "hard" SF from that period was incredibly naive WRT what was already known at the time it was written. Heinelein and (to a considerably lesser degree) Clarke were offenders themselves, believe it or not.

Thoughts on future topics:

The Priam Directive

Science Fan-tasy

Bugs! -- Zillions of 'Em

Planetary Romans

Tony said...

Btw, Shhhsh!

I want to see what incredibly smart things Rick makes of those awesomely dumb puns...

Mukk said...

Mining is interesting for the near future. However I'm pretty sure the gist of the article will be that earth isn't in such a great need of heavy metals as to make it economically viable to bring the minerals back to the ground. The materials would be useful for large scale construction in high orbit but we'd need some reason to want to do large scale production in high orbit. Some other reason to be in space.

The prime directive is mostly an interesting faucet of star trek. The real 'topic' for broad discussion is, "How do we deal with aliens we encounter with different technological levels?" I think the answer is like this. We are not going to find any in the plausible mid future though they could always come to use. If with FTL we do find something they will probably be angels or apes compared to us. We will attempt to beg buy or steal technology from advanced races. We will treat lesser races with a moderate amount of respect because any entity exploiting them too brazenly will be hated by the general population(prosecuted by the government ect.)

I'm not qualified to talk about science fantasy if you mean the old planetary romance stuff. If you want to talk about psychic powers, the force, or FTL then all I have to say is yeah people do enjoy mixing magic into their SciFi. I guess the subject then becomes "How do you mix it in well?"

Bugs are a classic SciFi villian. I love me my bugs, Tyranids, Zerg, Starship Trooper Bugs. They don't seem to have much depth though. The most I can say about them is to quote what SFDebris said about the borg. (The borg were originally intended to be bugs but the budget wouldn't allow for more than humans in gimp suits.) "They are both communism and capitalism taken to their extremes. The individual is so subservient to the whole that they are mere parts to be used. And everything is a resource to be consumed." Something like that anyway. I'm just quoting from memory.

Eh to be honest I get the distinct impression that this blog has been winding down. Posts are less common. The recent subjects are minor or less focused. The things that really needed to be said have already been covered.

That isn't out of disrespect to the blog. I've learned a great deal here. Over the years the posts paint a very clear image of what the probable mid future will probably be, and the variations/handwaving an author can create to get to the fun stuff in space.

Eth said...

"However I'm pretty sure the gist of the article will be that earth isn't in such a great need of heavy metals as to make it economically viable to bring the minerals back to the ground."

Aren't rare earths becoming more and more depleted? I read somewhere that some of the rare metals used in electronics and industry may be completely depleted in a decade or less, and that there is not enough of those to build many things we are promised for the near future (new LCD, more efficient solar panels...)
Does someone know more about that? And if they really are almost depleted on Earth, mining NEOs for it would become interesting, or are we able to find replacements?

Anonymous said...

Mukk,

The prime directive is mostly an interesting faucet of star trek. The real 'topic' for broad discussion is, "How do we deal with aliens we encounter with different technological levels?"

================

In the Plausible Mid-future probably with a Radio-telescope. Maybe one that has been moved into orbit or even deep space.

In other words I expect the problem of Aliens to be much farther into the future than say Trek envisioned.

We will probably be dealing with the Fermi Paradox for centuries to come.


(SA Phil)

Anonymous said...

=Milo=



Mukk:

"Bugs are a classic SciFi villian. I love me my bugs, Tyranids, Zerg, Starship Trooper Bugs. They don't seem to have much depth though."

I would like to see more eusocial species without hive minds. Bonus points if they're non-evil.

Anonymous said...

=Milo=



Oh yeah. I also forgot to point out that even when your species has hive minds, a complete lack of individuality is unlikely: there will be individual hives that see themselves as separate from other hives of the same species.

kedamono@mac.com said...

About aliens... :)

There was an interesting article about the potential density of extrasolar intelligences.

On Centauri Dreams, an article was posted by Dave Moore that worked out what the density would be for extrasolar civilizations. It specifically looked at encountering another civilization that is within 1,000 years of us, technologically. He has an interesting table showing the proposed densities:

Table 1: Density of ETCs at various rates of occurrences

ETC stands for Extrasolar Technological Civilizations.

Based on this article, the chance of you running into an alien race that's within 1,000 years +/- of ours is very slim, unless you have densities to the point that every other world has aliens on them. You're more likely to run into a race that way older than ours or just figuring out that pointy sticks make great weapons.

Anonymous said...

(SA Phil)

In the spirit of the Prime Directive though I have recently been considering a twist.

What if we at some future point develop the ability to colonize part of the Galaxy using Slower than Light Transportation.

We send out our seed ships -- perhaps frozen embryos. They are equipped with self replicating probes as well. With the intention of finding/or even terraforming possible human habitats.

We would have possibly hundreds of worlds colonized by humans all probably hundreds of years removed in development. Perhaps they receive faint signals from Earth.

Farther into the future of whatever reason those signals go silent.

More time passes and some humans figure out some sort of FTL mechanism. Exploration ships go out to see what is out there.

Strange new worlds indeed. With "Alien" cultures. The legacy of those that came before.

Rick said...

Rocketpunk, as I originally imagined it, is considerably broader than USAF rocket bombers. As Tony said, it encompasses the (demi-realistic) space future as imagined in the midcentury era. So much of it would be alt-future - the plausible midfuture as imagined in 1950, give or take.

I am not even touching the puns.

In western tradition eusocial insects - specifically, bees - used to be admired. Bees sting, but they also make honey, and fertilize plants.

Somewhere in rather recent times bees were replaced as the archetype by ants, a nastier bunch from our point of view. I suspect it has to do with the totalitarian era, but may be older.

Mukk is right - I haven't read much about the current space mining buzz, but my first reaction is that it triggers my skept-O-meter.

If I were smarter, I'd figure out how to hop on the bandwagon. If tech-zillionaires are to be separated from some of their money, why not steer some of it my way?


On Mukk's other point, posting has slowed down. The main reason is that my workload has gone up - good news for us, but it does interfere with blogging.

That said, there is a real challenge to avoid beating topics to death!

Thucydides said...

Eth

The Japanese have recently announced they have discovered deep sea deposits of these minerals that can be essentially dredged from the bottom of the ocean and separated from the deep sea mud. We can also find ways to mitigate the potential shortages by recycling old electronics to recover the rare materials, or substitute different technologies that don't use these materials.

Asteroid mining is getting resources for use in space, a classic Rocketpunk trope with a 21rst century twist.

Brett said...

That's certainly a big part of it. There's an element of "self-licking ice cream cone" there (we need space infrastructure to get space resources so that we can make . . . more space infrastructure), but some of the proposed uses would be hugely helpful. I'm particularly keen on the idea of testing and using orbital propellant depots, for which we could use any ice/volatiles found in space.

I think the "Bugs" are interesting because we find the idea of creatures whose identity is genetically subservient to the whole community to be interesting. I'm not sure whether or not they'd actually make great space-faring civilizations - how do they innovate, for example?

Anonymous said...

=Milo=



Brett:

"I think the "Bugs" are interesting because we find the idea of creatures whose identity is genetically subservient to the whole community to be interesting. I'm not sure whether or not they'd actually make great space-faring civilizations - how do they innovate, for example?"

Why shouldn't they?

Just that you're working for the greater good doesn't mean you can't come up with your own ideas, and occasionally even work to undermine tradition. There's such a thing as tough love, after all.

A cooperative society would mean easy sharing of scientific discoveries, with no fuss over patent rights or the like.

Competing with other hives, and with the environment, provides the incentive for a hive to improve technologically.

(You might notice, at this point, that despite the visual appeal, the "bug castes" system of eusocial role division - with phenotypically distinct workers, soldiers, soldiers-with-organic-laser-beams-on-their-heads, etc. for all sorts of different roles - is poorly suited for a sentient species. It's too difficult to breed a new strain of soldiers that can breathe fire, compared to just arming your existing soldiers/workers with technological flamethrowers.)

Sean said...

Thucydides said..."The Japanese have recently announced they have discovered deep sea deposits of these minerals that can be essentially dredged from the bottom of the ocean and separated from the deep sea mud."

If it avoids the destruction of undersea environments then this is a technique that deserves some serious investment.

As for asteroid mining to support an outer space infrastructure, well, if we're to free ourselves from the burden of outrageous surface-to-orbit launch costs then there's really no other viable alternative that's as cost effective as pushing a small rock into orbit and mining it for all it's worth. Not quite as exotic as the 'Belter' lifestyle but still pretty cool.

I just hope that any company bold enough to mine an asteroid is smart enough to avoid any accidents that may occur. The last thing anyone needs is another Tunguska.

Tony said...

By loose definition, humans are "eusocial" too:

1. Reproductive division of labor (with or without sterile castes)

2. Overlapping generations

3. Cooperative care of young

The strict application to the non-human animal kingdom is a bit of an artificiality that has gained currency.

In any case, biological division of labor with sentient individuals has been done. See Poul Anderson's Aleriona in The Star Fox. The Aleriona were not evil, just competitors.

It's even been imagined in humans, through breeding or genetics. See Harry Harrison and Gordon R. Dickson: Lifeship. YMMV -- the actual level of biological specialization vs social casting can be debated. Also, though none of the characters were evil per se, the injustice of caste systems reinforced by genetic engineering does get examined.

On the other hinad, the idea of a non-varied species with essentially a hive mind has also been done quite a lot. One story that I always thought was interesting in this regard was Joseph P. Martino's "Zero Sum" (Analog, July 1971). The premise is humans fighting a race where the individuals aren't particularly smart or valuable by themselves, but when many indvidicuals come together, they make an intelligent entity. So their focus in warfare is not to lose too much equipment, even though every loss of a ship led to a large loss of life, whereas the humans were happy to lose a lot of ships, as long as no ship took too many with it. It turns out that both sides think they're enjoying a favorable exhchange ratio, but in fact their competing values are causing them both the lose.

Tony said...

Milo:

"You might notice, at this point, that despite the visual appeal, the 'bug castes' system of eusocial role division - with phenotypically distinct workers, soldiers, soldiers-with-organic-laser-beams-on-their-heads, etc. for all sorts of different roles - is poorly suited for a sentient species. It's too difficult to breed a new strain of soldiers that can breathe fire, compared to just arming your existing soldiers/workers with technological flamethrowers."

The character and physical traits that make a soldier can be sufficiently generalized to be succeptible to breeding without requiring detailed role specialization. The same goes for laborers, managers, caregivers (of all types), etc. No need to imagine necessary biological over-specialization for breeding or genetics to pay off.

Sean:

"As for asteroid mining to support an outer space infrastructure, well, if we're to free ourselves from the burden of outrageous surface-to-orbit launch costs then there's really no other viable alternative that's as cost effective as pushing a small rock into orbit and mining it for all it's worth. Not quite as exotic as the 'Belter' lifestyle but still pretty cool."

Why move all that useless mass to the point of consumption when local refinement can reduce it by (literally) orders of magnitude? Refining at the extraction site is like standard mining prcatice, you know.

Anonymous said...

Mass Effect did a spin on that as well (must have read the same book) Their AI species the Geth were essentially computer programs. The more robots that were in the same place the "smarter" the local collective got.

-----
In Traveller 2300 the first Alien race with comprable tech to humans encountered had varaible intelligence as well.

Officers would hit the soldiers with a stick first, and then give them orders. Because their intellegence was stimulated by their fight or flight instinct.

(SA Phil)

Anonymous said...

Traveller 2300 actually gets me thinking.

It was a more hard sci-fi type of Space Opera.

Beanstalks and Magnetic catapults..
Guns with binary propellant ..
Spacecraft had spin habitats

No artifical gravity, no transporters, no FTL communications.

It wasnt really Hard SF. But it had its moments.

(SA Phil)

Anonymous said...

=Milo=



Tony:

"By loose definition, humans are "eusocial" too:"

Humans are social, but not eusocial. According to this categorization, we qualify as "parasocial" (many humans living in one cooperative dwelling, namely a city), specifically "communal" (the odd one out namewise...), which is even less than "quasisocial" (members of the community care cooperatively for all young). Arguably we could qualify as borderline "quasisocial" if you count the school system as a form of cooperative care, even though the majority of adults (those who aren't teachers) care only for their own children, perhaps those of close family members. We definitely do not qualify as even semisocial by that standard, let alone eusocial.

These names might be a little unfortunate - as I would consider humans "truly social" by the common interpretation of the words, even if they do not qualify as "eusocial" as it is used in science. But that's how the names work.

Humans are far more individualistic than eusocial societies. We cooperate for mutual benefit, but we live mainly for our own sake, not the hive's.

Human societies that organized themselves into "clans" are somewhat more analogous to eusocial hives, in that they are large cooperative family units, with a cultural emphasis on collectivism over individualism. However, the waning influence of clans in the modern day developed world shows that such an organization is not natural for humans, or at least, something that we seek to leave once the economy is strong enough that it becomes viable for an individual to strike out on his or her own. Humans organize into clans out of necessity, not as an ideal or psychological desire.


"It's even been imagined in humans, through breeding or genetics."

In principle, we can create a worker caste anytime we want to, as present-day technology allows for sterilization of both male and female children. (Sterilizing them after birth is not really unlike how ants and bees do it - those grow up into either queens or workers depending on what they're fed as larvae, not genetics.)

One hurdle is that mammalian physiology isn't designed to have as many children as ant or bee queens can. Nevermind laying thousands of eggs every day, a human "queen" would be lucky to produce more than one baby a year. With that, any single "queen"'s hive would be limitated to double-digit population. You can go a little higher if you allow multiple queens per hive - either multiple coexisting generations, or a polygynous hive headed by a king.

In any case, I don't think this has ever been attempted in historical societies. Various societies has eunuchs, but as far as I know these were not usually castrated in childhood by their parents with the purpose of encouraging them to stay with their parents rather than starting their own families.

Nor is it likely to be attempted, as the chant of human rights concerns would be deafening, regardless of whether such a society could ultimately work or not.

I have thought way more about this than I should.

nqdp said...

I'll second Ferrell's request for more topics on colonies. One of the things I'm really interested in is how fast you can build a colony. A thousand people per year? A million? It depends on your tech level,I suppose. We could probably get some good ideas going. And the history of Rick's own San Francisco from 1848-1852 would be a good real-world example of nearly instantaneous colony-building.

Thucydides said...

Colony building would be a good topic, but depending on the starting assumptions you can go in many, many different directions...

Rick said...

Regarding hive entities, if they are intelligent things get tricky. Humans are very culture-dominant, in the sense that our culture determines a whole lot of things about us that, in other species, are instinctual. Food habits are a good example.

And consider the Ottomans, using slaves as soldiers. In fact, in a lot of ways the Ottomans look like a human effort to approximate the eosocial model - janissaries, the seraglio, etc. Plato's Republic was a theoretical construct on the same lines.

What all this says about an intelligent species of eosocial background is ... complicated and interesting. (And maybe worth a front page post.


Until I write a new post about colonization, here are some things I've written previously here:

On Colonization.

In Which I Bash Space Colonization Again

And on a more operatic note, at Atomic Rockets (scroll down a bit).

Anonymous said...

=Milo=



Rick:

"Humans are very culture-dominant, in the sense that our culture determines a whole lot of things about us that, in other species, are instinctual."

Less than you might expect! Many animals do learn important aspects of behavior (migration routes, how to hunt...) from their parents. That's why releasing animals raised in captivity to the wild is problematic.

A few of the most intelligent animals even have cultural transmission of tools.

Anonymous said...

nqdp said...

I'll second Ferrell's request for more topics on colonies. One of the things I'm really interested in is how fast you can build a colony. A thousand people per year? A million? It depends on your tech level,I suppose. We could probably get some good ideas going. And the history of Rick's own San Francisco from 1848-1852 would be a good real-world example of nearly instantaneous colony-building.

Anonymous said...

Gah, my Firefox hates me -- I was replying to that snipped cement by nqdp
============

I would think how fast you can build a colony would be a function of your Transportation technology, resources available and required, and the desire to colonize.

Given the proper variables I expect it could be quite rapid. the population of the Americas has skyrocketed in the past 500 years.

On the other hand it could also be painfully slow. Look at the population of Antarctica.

(SA Phil)

Tony said...

Re: Milo

You're being a bit too literal. I don't think anybody would be so silly as to sterilize female humanss for the purpose of further empowering certain select ones. Males don't need sterilization either. You just limit their access to females by force, in the same way that many animal species do.

But that's not really the point I was trying to make. I was simply pointing out that specializing mand through breeding or genetic engineering is a well-developed trope. And it's a trope not foreign to fictional alien races either. I mentioned Anderson's Aleriona, but there's also a much more well-known example in Purnelle and Niven's Moties.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that whenever anyone says, "I would like to see somebody write..." well, it's probably been done. You just have to know your SF bibliography.

Tony said...

Re: Colonies

I think the big weakness with colony settings in general is that the justifications for them can be pretty weak. You don't need an independent Belter society to mine the asteroids. You just need mining camps. You don't need a penal colony on the Moon. You just need penal colonies -- and no, there's no sense in exploiting the agricultural potential of Moon cave and lunar ice, no matter how you do it. I have to agree with Rick that the most plausible future would see communities growing organically out of the support organizations for the mining camps and science stations.

Anonymous said...

=Milo=



Tony:

"You just limit their access to females by force, in the same way that many animal species do."

Using force brews resentment, however, and encourages those who can to fight back and take over.

Permanent sterilization is more stable since it's irreversible, and so you have nothing to fight for. Additionally, there exist forms of sterilization that also kill your sex drive, so you'll be less bitter about it.

All the same, just being sterile would not motivate all humans to stay with their families. Sure, evolutionarily speaking, a worker needs to support her queen in order to gain any sort of fitness advantage (keeping in mind that fitness is measured in how well you pass on your genes). Humans, however, often prioritize other interests over genetic propagation, with many people choosing to go childless, even when there is no evolutionary advantage to doing so.


"But that's not really the point I was trying to make. I was simply pointing out that specializing mand through breeding or genetic engineering is a well-developed trope."

That's different from eusociality though. It has more in common with dog breeds. (You're likely to have a separate breeding stock for each phenotype, as opposed to a single queen that can produce any phenotype on demand.)

I can see an advantage to having several "breeds" with different body types and personality tendencies. They would have to be generalized, though, with each breed still being suited to a wide variety of jobs.

Actually we kinda already have this in real life. Different races are adapted to different environmental conditions - blacks' skin pigment protects them against the harsh sunlight in the tropics, for example. However, this makes up a very minor portion of an individual's identity.

Anonymous said...

If there is casual FTL and a lot of "garden worlds" its easier to justify colonies in a setting.

If instead we have to carve each extra-terrestrial habitat as we go (terraforming or construction) I expect colonies will be a lot farther out time wise.

(SA Phil)

Thucydides said...

"Breeding" humans is a real world trope which gained respectability in the 1920's and 30's under the name Eugenics. In Canada, it was espoused by politicians like Tommy Douglas (later leader of the Socialist NDP party), and in some Canadian jurisdictions people diagnosed with "mental handicaps" were indeed sterilized by the State. There is no need to look to Europe to find distasteful examples, they just took it to the logical conclusion.

Robert A Heinlein also touched on Eugenics a bit with the "Howard Families", who were the result of selective breeding for extended lifespans. I'm sure you can find plenty of "pulp" examples.

Tony said...

Re: Milo

You're taking things waaay too literally, and working waaay too hard at this. Once again, I was just pointing out that it's been done. That's all.

--------------------

WRT breeding and eugenics, the important thing to remember is that it would probably work, to the dgree that useful traits could be identified and bread true, and that the program could be kept on track. I suspect that's why a lot of writers go with genetic engineering. In a way it's more plausible, at least to technological positivists in the audience. ("positivist" in terms of believing that technology can always be made to work, not in terms of the plot consequences.)

BUt what we also need to remember is that we're probably lucky that so far eugenicists have been incompetent. If we ever get the universal state, and it gets under the control of ruthless enoguh people, eugenics may cease to be a joke.

Anonymous said...

I agree with Tony, Eugenics would likely work and is probably a lot "easier" tech wise than genetic engineering.

If you look at engineered crops you will see there are quite a few cases where there are a reduction in desired traits (such as nutritional value) in order to get the traits the Engineers wanted (like pest resistance).

Eugenics however have been performed on domesticated animals for centuries to some pretty impressive results.

The logistics are more simple with faster breeding species .. easier to stay on course.. since it takes generations to get results.

(SA Phil)

Damien Sullivan said...

"Rare earths" seem present in the crust at 1 to 60 ppm. The shortages are primarily from China having bought up a lot of deposits, and using cheap labor to drive others out of business, then shrinking its export quotas. World prices are about twice those in China. Solution: re-open lots of mines. Longer term, reserves at current prices may run out, but there'll be more resources at higher prices, probably still being cheaper than space mining.

Yeah, eugenics was popular with pretty much everyone except conservative Catholics until Nazis gave it a bad name -- and even then, the mentally ill were being sterilized in the US and Sweden into like the 1960s.

Of course, almost no one was any good at it, especially the Nazis, obsessed with superficial or non-genetic traits rather than actual individual quality.

jollyreaper said...

Regarding any bad idea -- it doesn't have to be true, people just have to believe it to be true. And so long as nothing else comes along to forcibly disabuse them of said idea, they could run with it.

One could say that the Hindenburg gave zeppelins a bad name and we'd have kept developing them if only things had gone differently. I think it's more likely that zeps were right at that line between what can't be done and what can be done but never made it to what can be done commercially. There were too many drawbacks. It's undecided as to whether or not modern zeps with modern technology could be practical.

I'll set aside all questions of morality and ethics here when we talk about eugenics. I would agree that the Nazis were instrumental in discrediting the idea but I do think it's seductive. A minstrel could make good coin singing the praises of the king. The priest could earn his bread explaining how the king is king because God will it, not just because he killed every other claimant to the throne. The priest can invoke destiny and fate. The tame intellectual can get in on the same racket.

So, I can totally buy the idea of a civilization thinking eugenics works, even if it doesn't. Mix in genetic screening and a little engineering and I do wonder at what the results could be. Brave New World doesn't seem entirely unreasonable. How likely, I don't know, but I can certainly run with the premise for a story.

The thing that's still unclear is whether eugenics could actually work. I guess the big question is whether we're talking doctrinal or pragmatic eugenics, like the Nazis thought superior characteristics would come from blonde hair and blue eyes whereas a pragmatist would consider those incidental.

We know from modern science that scientific racism is bunk. You look at the bell curve for human attributes ranging from height, athleticism, intelligence and such and you'll get results that are all over the place. If you get any kind of stand-out clusters it's going to be for non-genetic factors like culture. Most of the scientific racist stuff I've read is from before proper genetic studies.

jollyreaper said...

As for the rocketpunk genre, I think it's by necessity going to be a kind of fantasy because it's trying to create worlds that never existed. While science fantasy like Star Wars runs on "rule of cool", I think rocketpunk would try to be "rule of cool yet compellingly plausible." So even though there are compelling arguments for why we'll never have space colonization (Charlie Stross and his depressing High Frontier Redux), rocketpunk says "So long as you can overlook that, this all makes sense."

There's no FTL, everything happens in the solar system. No transporters, no artificial gravity, no antigravity, no aliens, no strong AI. The only assumptions made is that there's a reason for us to be in space and a lot of us are up there now. And maybe that we get some high-performance drives so it doesn't take us a year and a half to make the run to Mars. A fantasy story doesn't make you question the existence of the supernatural, just how things would play out if it did. Rocketpunk makes you question whether you're quite so sure the fundamental assumptions are impossible.

As for where this site can go, there are so many possibilities. One way to go is work out the underpinnings of an actual and proper rocketpunk setting. There's also room for observing where modern tech is going andh ow it diverges from our own scifi expectations.

One thought about any rocketpunk setting -- even if it winds up being set in the 22nd century, it's going to have to start with alternative history in the 20th. A great example is Warren Ellis' Ministry of Space.

Ministry of Space is a three-part alternate history mini-series written by Warren Ellis, published by Image Comics, starting in 2001. The book's art is by Chris Weston, and depicts retro technology in a believably 'British' style.

The story is set in an alternate history where soldiers and operatives of the United Kingdom reached the German rocket installations at Peenemünde ahead of the U.S. Army and the Soviets, and brought all the key personnel and technology to England, in a mirror of the real world's Operation Paperclip. Thus is created the Ministry of Space, whose mission is to develop British space technology and establish a firm foothold in space for Queen and Empire.

Elements of social commentary are present throughout the book, as is typical of Ellis' work, while the drama of the story is found in the lives of the first pioneers of space exploration (as in The Right Stuff). This social commentary is disguised in a snippet of dialogue here and a background detail in the art elsewhere, relying upon the readers' own observations to bring it to light.

Brett said...

@Tony
I think the big weakness with colony settings in general is that the justifications for them can be pretty weak. You don't need an independent Belter society to mine the asteroids. You just need mining camps. You don't need a penal colony on the Moon. You just need penal colonies -- and no, there's no sense in exploiting the agricultural potential of Moon cave and lunar ice, no matter how you do it. I have to agree with Rick that the most plausible future would see communities growing organically out of the support organizations for the mining camps and science stations.

Setting up permanent communities in those places wouldn't be like how they emerged in mining and frontier towns. Those had very low barriers to entry and set-up - you could literally just show up with everything you owned on a wagon and start your business.

But space stations are going to have very specific limits and requirements in terms of life support, and adding on "expansions" for population growth and permanent residents won't be nearly as easy or cheap barring some major break-throughs in space manufacturing. Considering the potential health hazards to young children as well (plus the liability issues), I wouldn't be surprised if the Mining Company or space agency requires everyone to take the future equivalent of a Depo-Provera shot to prevent pregnancies during the mission. After freezing some eggs and sperm at home, of course.

There's really no equivalent for it, although off-shore oil rigs in the arctic might come close. You don't see a lot of communities forming up around those.

Tony said...

Well, racial politics invalidates eugenics, because it interferes with scientific breeding. Having said that, if scientific breeding were practiced, without regard to the skin color or ethnic origin of the subject populations, it could probably create human subspecies, much in the same way that we have created subspecies in all of our domesticated animal breeds. Perhaps for that reason we shouldn't associate scientific breeding with the name "eugenics". Maybe we should just call it "human breeding".

WRT rocketpunk, I don't think it's a workable genre for future writing. We have to remember that all of the other punks emerge from alternate ralities. Yes, even cyberpunk, which relies on a such a canonically awful crapsack world that it beggars credulity -- to the point, IMO, that it has to be in an alternate universe. Rocketpunk as a genre is pretty much synonymous with interplanetary Golden Age SF. And that, at one time, was a genre of the plausible future. It had it's run, and it's over.

Tony said...

Re: Brett

And, for all the reasons you give, the canonical Belters are that much less likely to ever happen.

Anonymous said...

=Milo=



Jollyreaper:

"The thing that's still unclear is whether eugenics could actually work."

Sure it can. We know it can, because we have successfully applied it to various domestic animals.

The thing is that humans have sex with whoever they feel like (except on certain occasions where they're made to have sex with whoever feels like it), and no state has managed to keep a controlled breeding program running for very long. So we haven't applied the same artificial selection to ourselves that we have to our pets.

In principle eugenics could still succeed, either through the effort of a dictatorial government that manages to remain in power reasonably long without being overthrown, or through a voluntary initiative if enough parents sign up for it.

The idea of "designer babies" can be seen as a form of voluntary eugenics - if enough parents pay for their children to have genes favoring strength, or intelligence, or whatever, then those traits will become more common in the populace. As a bonus, by putting the power in the hands of the parents rather than the government, you avoid a monoculture as different parents have different ideas of what traits are most important.

You and Damien Sullivan correct in that the "superior" traits Nazis and other eugenics supporters tried to breed in are of dubious to non-existant importance. Being blond and blue-eyed gives you no fitness advantage, except possibly a sexual advantage, but then again a lot of people think other hair colors are sexy, and I think they're all pretty in their own way: there's a value in diversity, especially for something as nebulous as beauty. Being super-strong won't help you get a job in computer programming, and Social Darwinists' ideal of over-the-top aggressively competitive people would be detrimental to the functioning of society (see: prisoner's dilemma).

If eugenics were in the hands of parents, most of them'd at least try to select for things that they think would benefit their children. Their judgement is still fallible, but perhaps not quite as much as that of extremist demagogues.

(Also to my knowledge the Nazis weren't actually trying to improve humanity, per se. They believed the Aryan race was already perfect and tried to get rid of other races and "contaminants" like mentally ill people, but did they actually make an effort to breed people with superior traits to the existing Aryans of their time?)

The fact that eugenicists of the past have latched onto horrible ideas of what constitutes a real fitness advantage is not, however, a complete coincidence. The real catch here is that if something really provided that great of an advantage to humanity, we would have already evolved it through natural selection. This suggests that any attempt to direct humanity's evolution away from natural selection is suppressing the traits we really need in favor of the ones that appeal to someone's delusional fantasies.

But it's not quite that clearcut either. Natural selection isn't perfect and often settles for merely "good enough", and besides we originally evolved to live in savannahs, not cities. It's possible that there are improvements to the human genome that can be made with a little nudge, or with genetic engineering introducing traits that couldn't be gained by selection alone. Once again, domestic animals have definitely been improved by breeding, though it should be noted many of those improvements - like improved ability to carry heavy loads, or increased milk production - are relevant only to what humans use the animal for, and would provide little advantage to them in the wild.

Anonymous said...

=Milo=



Jollyreaper:

"We know from modern science that scientific racism is bunk. You look at the bell curve for human attributes ranging from height, athleticism, intelligence and such and you'll get results that are all over the place. If you get any kind of stand-out clusters it's going to be for non-genetic factors like culture."

Race matters for disease resistance. Africans are less prone to skin cancer due to dark skin blocking harmful ultraviolet radiation. On the other hand sickle-cell anemia is more common in tropical Africa because the same genes that cause it also provide a resistance to malaria. Europeans have much lower incidence of lactose intolerance than other ethnic groups.

I won't touch "athleticism" or "intelligence", but saying height doesn't depend on race is clearly wrong - see: pygmies.

If athleticism and intelligence don't vary so much by race, it's because they're useful to all human cultures, and we're likely already near the peak of what can be accomplished without concerted artificial selection.

None of this justifies racist discrimination in any way. However, don't ignore real differences between races for political reasons.



Tony:

"Perhaps for that reason we shouldn't associate scientific breeding with the name "eugenics". Maybe we should just call it "human breeding"."

Well, eugenics has a rather bad name after that whole fiasco with the Nazis. However I feel that breeding humans to select certain traits is fundamentally the same thing, regardless of whether those traits are genuinely useful or not. (Plenty of dog breeds have been bred for traits their owners found "pretty", even when it damages their ability to function.)

The only important difference is whether it is forced or voluntary, and whether it is based on negative feedback (sterilizing people with "undesirable" genes) or positive feedback (encouraging people with "desirable" genes to breed with who the breeding registry thinks they should - note that this can mean artificial insemination rather than sex), or genetic engineering which really qualifies as neither.

Due to the negative connotations of the word "eugenics" today, you might want to associate it only with involuntary selective breeding. But whatever you call it, a spade is still a spade.

Anonymous said...

Brett,

There's really no equivalent for it, although off-shore oil rigs in the arctic might come close. You don't see a lot of communities forming up around those.
----------
To an extent - Outland might be a good example of a more plausible "belter" group demographically.

90+% miners, ~10% support personnel (doctors, security, admin, "other").

Minus the stuff about the protagonist's family of course.

Still has the need for the Macguffin though.

(SA Phil)

Anonymous said...

Tony,

Rocketpunk as a genre is pretty much synonymous with interplanetary Golden Age SF. And that, at one time, was a genre of the plausible future. It had it's run, and it's over.

--------

Still there must be some small niche appeal to aspects of the idea.

Or else we wouldn't be here.

Could be partly nostalgia though.

(SA Phil)

Anonymous said...

Jollyreaper,

The thing that's still unclear is whether eugenics could actually work. I guess the big question is whether we're talking doctrinal or pragmatic eugenics, like the Nazis thought superior characteristics would come from blonde hair and blue eyes whereas a pragmatist would consider those incidental.

--------------

It might be possible to get both given enough generations.

However it seems a real handicap to the idea to worry about cosmetic traits.

I imagine the donor DNA is limited by the number of required appearance traits you want. For example if you want only blonde supermen, you could only pick from blonde donors ... really limiting your available superman donor traits.

Look at what has been done with dog breeding and it seems clear you can both selectively breed for some appearance and other traits at the same time to an extent.

Just because the idea might work doesn't mean its a good one. Nor was the racism justified.

And the cosmetic supermen probably would be less super than the ethnic blind supermen all other things being equal.

(SA Phil)

Anonymous said...

Jollyreaper,

The thing that's still unclear is whether eugenics could actually work. I guess the big question is whether we're talking doctrinal or pragmatic eugenics, like the Nazis thought superior characteristics would come from blonde hair and blue eyes whereas a pragmatist would consider those incidental.

--------------

It might be possible to get both given enough generations.

However it seems a real handicap to the idea to worry about cosmetic traits.

I imagine the donor DNA is limited by the number of required appearance traits you want. For example if you want only blonde supermen, you could only pick from blonde donors ... really limiting your available superman donor traits.

Look at what has been done with dog breeding and it seems clear you can both selectively breed for some appearance and other traits at the same time to an extent.

Just because the idea might work doesn't mean its a good one. Nor was the racism justified.

And the cosmetic supermen probably would be less super than the ethnic blind supermen all other things being equal.

(SA Phil)

Brett said...

@Tony
And, for all the reasons you give, the canonical Belters are that much less likely to ever happen.

I agree. Assuming we form permanent manned colonies in space at all, they won't be in the widely spread out asteroid belt. That will be the province of automated mining platforms.

Tony said...

SA Phil:

"Still there must be some small niche appeal to aspects of the idea.

Or else we wouldn't be here.

Could be partly nostalgia though."


I think you're being a little too literal. People that come here generally come for the discussion of vital subjects, not a dead genre. To the degree that interplanetary fiction is relevant at all, it's as an example of something that's already been done as more or less hard SF. I don't think the genre is any kind of constraint to discussion.

Tony said...

Re: supermen

I don't think that's a valid or realistic objective of selective human breeding. The object would be optimized men -- optimized for labor, for management, for technical work, etc.

-Sean- said...

Regarding the colonization of outer space, we could very well be living in a post-scarcity future by the time the technology to undertake such feats becomes possible - so really the only reason you would need to colonize Mars or some extrasolar garden world would be, "Why the hell not?" But that said you could forget motivations altogether and kindly ask the reader to ignore the man behind the curtain.

Anonymous said...

Tony said...

Re: supermen

I don't think that's a valid or realistic objective of selective human breeding. The object would be optimized men -- optimized for labor, for management, for technical work, etc.

--------
Sure,

I only used "supermen" as a placeholder name since it harkens back to the original propaganda of the idea.

I think what you would actually get is people whose traits were skewed in favor of what the intent was.

So if you wanted to create a group of people taller than average and you selectively bred tall people for 200 years ... those people would be much taller than average. But they wouldn't be 10 feet tall of anything like that.

(SA Phil)

Anonymous said...

Tony,

I think you're being a little too literal. People that come here generally come for the discussion of vital subjects, not a dead genre. To the degree that interplanetary fiction is relevant at all, it's as an example of something that's already been done as more or less hard SF. I don't think the genre is any kind of constraint to discussion.

------------------

Something brought them here in the first place though. Something related to at least some of the Rockepunk ideas. The Internet is a big place.

Of all the gin joints ...

(SA Phil)

Tony said...

SA Phil:

"Something brought them here in the first place though. Something related to at least some of the Rockepunk ideas. The Internet is a big place."

I don't know about others, but the draw for me was intelligent conversation on subjects I'm interested in. It could have been founded on real world spaceflight, SF in general, whatever...actually, that's pretty much what Rick has founded this blog on. Rockeptpunk may have been an original thought, but now it's just a name.

Tony said...

SA Phil:

"So if you wanted to create a group of people taller than average and you selectively bred tall people for 200 years ... those people would be much taller than average. But they wouldn't be 10 feet tall of anything like that."

But height in itself isn't much of a trait. If one were to actually breed humans scientifically, one would breed for a group of traits that fit a job, just like we do with dogs and horses.

Anonymous said...

Tony,


I don't know about others, but the draw for me was intelligent conversation on subjects I'm interested in.
-------------

I somehow doubt you googled "intelligent conversation" and came up with "Rocketpunk Manifesto" however.

No offense Rick of course.

(SA Phil)

Thucydides said...

Breeding animals for specific appearance or traits is a well developed science with 5000 years of practice behind it. Ethical considerations aside, it would be relatively easy to breed humans for particular traits or appearance.

OTOH, it is much faster and more effective to simply train humans to get particular skill sets.

Writing Rocketpunk fiction may be fun so long as everyone keeps the fact it is fiction in mind...

Anonymous said...

Tony,


But height in itself isn't much of a trait. If one were to actually breed humans scientifically, one would breed for a group of traits that fit a job, just like we do with dogs and horses.

-------

Agreed.

I was using height as an example only. One which people might be able to relate to. Everyone knows families where members tend to be taller than average. Height is a trait that is easy to identify.

(SA Phil)

jollyreaper said...

One other thought I had about the rocketpunk genre. With all the talk we're having about how people will make a living and pragmatic concerns about what makes sense, I take a look at our own 21st century America and shake my head.

When you get right down to it, human beings exist, none of us had a choice in the matter of being born, and we'd like to make our time on this Earth a little easier. The whole bloody point of civilization is to get things cooperatively that we could not get individually. Each of us doing what we're good at in return for a universally accepted medium of exchange and buying everything else we need is efficient. If I lived on a desert island, no amount of effort in the world is going to get me a warm bed, hot shower, and cold beer. A 9-5 job used to get us that in the here and now.

What we're looking at right now in America is the failure of capitalism. We joke about being disappointed with our future lacking in flying cars and jet packs but it's worse than that. We're not just falling short of our ambition, we're falling short of the status quo. Parents today know their children will not look forward to a higher standard of living than themselves. This is the first time in the history of the country you can say that.

The jobs are going overseas. Dignity of labor? No such thing. The rich man used to need you. Now he builds his products overseas, invests his money overseas, and lives here for what I can only guess is a sense of nostalgia. Whatever he tips the barman at the country club isn't going to make up for what he's no longer paying a factory full of workers.

I think that this entire situation could be prime, prime rocketpunk fodder.

Consider this scenario. We got our future that never was. Space stations, moon colonies, solar power plants, the works. Why? Because it started as a national prestige project and turned into an investment bubble. We moved into space big-time. We're more 2001 than 2001. Between us and the Reds, there's a million people in space.

And then things started to fall apart.

Every reason put forward in this blog as to why space doesn't make sense, they're all true. Solar power never got any cheaper than nuclear which is still worse than fossil fuels. Space mining has made orbital infrastructure cheaper but it's the self-licking ice cream cone problem. There's no point to any of this but it's only realized too late, after an incredible investment has been made and there's a matter of pride.

Now, why are there that many people up there? Let's say that it was a point of pride that we weren't just going up there to visit, we're going there to stay. This isn't an oil rig where crews fly in for two weeks and fly home, no. People are colonizing. Bad idea? Economically infeasible? So was the whole goddamn Cold War with all those trillions of dollars and rubles wasted.

So, a million people upstairs. Will they all just come home, especially if the economic situation is terrible and they won't have jobs? What would it take to cut ties? Is it even possible? What's the bare minimum required to live off the land?

I think this could be the start of a real rocketpunk, where the future isn't what was promised but people are stuck trying to make a living for themselves in the midst of the consequences.

Anonymous said...

=Milo=



SA Phil:

"So if you wanted to create a group of people taller than average and you selectively bred tall people for 200 years... those people would be much taller than average. But they wouldn't be 10 feet tall of anything like that."

I don't think 10 feet is out of the question. That's less than twice the average human height of today, and we've bred animals across a greater size range than that.

Dunno if 200 years is enough, though.



Thucydides:

"Breeding animals for specific appearance or traits is a well developed science with 5000 years of practice behind it. Ethical considerations aside, it would be relatively easy to breed humans for particular traits or appearance."

If you're willing to completely ignore ethical considerations, another idea that sometimes comes up is uplifting animals by breeding them for increased intelligence until they reach human levels.

The ethical problem here is that to go from animal-level intelligence to human-level intelligence, at some point they're going to pass through a phase where they're human-like enough that people will start wanting to apply human rights to them, yet still only at the mental level of a really stupid human. And then you can't continue breeding them for proper intelligence unless you're willing to enslave sentient beings.

There is also the question of whether something as complicated as intelligence could really be bred in, but I don't think it can be ruled out. And there are animals that are already quite intelligent to start with and shouldn't need that much more work.


"OTOH, it is much faster and more effective to simply train humans to get particular skill sets."

Dogs can also be trained, yet we still found a benefit in specializing breeds above and beyond what training can provide.

You're definitely right on the "faster" part, though.

Tony said...

SA Phil:

"I somehow doubt you googled "intelligent conversation" and came up with "Rocketpunk Manifesto" however.

No offense Rick of course."


Why would anybody google "rocketpunk" to begin with? AFAIK, Rick coined the term. If he didn't, he's the only one that seems to have run with it. So the attraction seems to be purely in the wide variety of serious subjects. Rocketpunk and plausible midfuture seem at most to be (very loose) organizing concepts. They certainly aren't defining or limiting ones.

Thucydides:

"OTOH, it is much faster and more effective to simply train humans to get particular skill sets."

In the short run. In the long run, combining a biological talent for a task or set of tasks, plus any predicpositions that can make the training to task easier, might make sense. Yet another reason to be cautious of a final society and the end of history --

"Writing Rocketpunk fiction may be fun so long as everyone keeps the fact it is fiction in mind..."

What's the audience? The plausible midfuture no longer contains Maritans, Venusians, and atomic rockets. Nor does it seem to contain scope for the more or less common man and young adventurers. Those were all the draws to begin with. They're gone. And you can't justify it a fantasy, because it's already been used as SF.

jollyreaper said...

And you can't justify it a fantasy, because it's already been used as SF.

Of course you can. Fantasy is the last refuge of the impossible.

Tony said...

jollyreaper:

"What we're looking at right now in America is the failure of capitalism."

Here we go again...

What we're looking at is history. Whatever happens happens. It ain't because this or that system failed, or this or that system wasn't tried, or anything of the sort. It just is.

"I think this could be the start of a real rocketpunk, where the future isn't what was promised but people are stuck trying to make a living for themselves in the midst of the consequences."

Yet another canonically awful crapsack world. And not even a dystopian cautionary tale to justify it.

Anonymous said...

Tony,

Why would anybody google "rocketpunk" to begin with?

---------

Personally I came here from the link on the Atomic Rockets website.

I originally was directed there from another website where I was reading about the unlikeliness of Cloaking Devices (how "there ain't no stealth in space")

I suspect quite a few people came from hard SF type topics from around the web.

Rocketpunk being related to that of course.

(SA Phil)

Tony said...

jollyreaper:

"Of course you can. Fantasy is the last refuge of the impossible."

By "justify", I of course mean sell.

WRT fantasy being the last refuge of the impossible, give us a break. Fantasy is generally the first refuge of a lot of authors -- and a lot of readers.

jollyreaper said...


Here we go again...


Remember, you said you'd play nice...

What we're looking at is history. Whatever happens happens. It ain't because this or that system failed, or this or that system wasn't tried, or anything of the sort. It just is.


There can certainly be an impetus towards storytelling. Fact: the Titanic sank. Why? It hit an ice berg. Why? Well, it certainly does lend itself towards being a cautionary tale about hubris and poor design choices. Human beings aren't fond of random chance as an explanation for anything. The Minoan civilization getting wiped out by a quake certainly seems like a rebuke by the gods. It was just geology. If a volcanic sea mount happened to erupt at the exact moment the ship passed over it, we'd still have a sinking and we'd still want to assign blame but the narrative wouldn't fit as well.

If the ship were sailing slower, if the berg were spotted sooner, if the rudder wasn't laid over but they hit it square on and didn't rip a gash along the side, if the watertight compartments went up the whole way, if there were enough lifeboats... The whole thing looks like an entirely man-made disaster and you don't have to be a newspaperman looking to sell papers to see it that way.

I brought up the Titanic because the centennial happened recently. It's also remote enough that we're not really risking getting into contemporary politics.


Yet another canonically awful crapsack world. And not even a dystopian cautionary tale to justify it.


I wouldn't say so, not entirely. The industrial age brought about the death of the craftsman. There's no way you're turning out geegaws in a cottage industry with the same efficiency as a factory. Certainly a car can be built by hand but those are $500k luxury items, not daily drivers for the prole. There's a potential for the second industrial revolution to be in computerized manufacturing, putting factory efficiencies in the hands of the craftsman once more.

Running with those kinds of assumptions, the crapsack future is only the start of the story. The endgame is turning that crapsack into a place you want to live in.

Anonymous said...

I sometimes wonder if one person's "crapsack" world is another person's reality.

Many people in our time, in the real world live in conditions that are worse than some of the grimier "crapsack" fictional worlds out there.

(SA Phil)

Tony said...

jollyreaper:

"Remember, you said you'd play nice..."

Oh, I'll be nice. Just noting that we're still not cured of trendy cliches.

"There can certainly be an impetus towards storytelling. Fact: the Titanic sank...

The whole thing looks like an entirely man-made disaster and you don't have to be a newspaperman looking to sell papers to see it that way."


Gee, people make mistakes and bad things happen. Sometimes those mistakes add up and really bad things happen. There's a word for that: life.

"I wouldn't say so, not entirely. The industrial age brought about the death of the craftsman."

Hardly. It just made it possible to make inexpensive copies of the craftsman's art. We still have craftsmen in design, model and pattern making, software, and one-of-a-kind items. What the industrial age did was take farm laborers off farms and put them in factories. the number of craftsmen hasn't gone down all that much.

"Running with those kinds of assumptions, the crapsack future is only the start of the story. The endgame is turning that crapsack into a place you want to live in."

Yuck. Don't jump in the crapsack to begin with. In fact, that's what most people work at most of the time, in one way or another.

Tony said...

SA Phil:

"I sometimes wonder if one person's 'crapsack' world is another person's reality.

Many people in our time, in the real world live in conditions that are worse than some of the grimier 'crapsack' fictional worlds out there."


It's two different things. The Third World is the Third World. When we talk about crapsack dystopias in SF it's a discussion of how the industrial world winds up turning itself into something like the Third World, while at the same time actually advancing technologically.

Anonymous said...

The "Third World" is still this world.

http://earthtrends.wri.org/features/view_feature.php?fid=66&theme=4

Technology advancing .. while making life harder on people...

------

Not that there aren't plenty of people being left behind in the "1st world"

I don't expect the 24% unemployment rate is doing wonders for the people in Spain for example.

How about Appalachia? The coal they mine powers our industry. Too bad about the health effects though.

http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/mar2011/2011-03-04-091.html

Its even worse in China, which is expected to be a hotbed of innovation at some point in upcoming decades due to their investment in technical education.

(SA Phil)

Thucydides said...

Shifting a bit backwards to breeding, the only real issues with that is you might not be able to get the traits you want (Purebred German Shepard's were prone to having their hips dislocated, for example). The other issue is the traits you want might later become obsolete; "weiner dogs" were working dogs bred to hunt ferrets and other animals that lived in burrows, now they are curiosities.

While it is possible and probably feasible to breed humans for various traits, you might end up stuck with undesirable consequences as a side effect (superbright humans bred for intelligence might be more prone to mental illness, for example). And of course, populations of humans with obsolete traits will be problematic (do you want to breed these people back into the general population?) And of course, who decides on what is a "desirable" trait, and how do you induce people to breed towards it?

jollyreaper said...

When I am talking about making the dystopia a place you want to live I am not talking about accepting it but improving it. Leave it looking nothing like what you started with.

Citizen Joe said...

I've been noticing a lot of analytics going on. It is generally about focused marketing. It really starts getting creepy when the programs become spot on to my likes. It think that is going to be the driving force behind AI's.

jollyreaper said...

Hardly. It just made it possible to make inexpensive copies of the craftsman's art. We still have craftsmen in design, model and pattern making, software, and one-of-a-kind items. What the industrial age did was take farm laborers off farms and put them in factories. the number of craftsmen hasn't gone down all that much.


Yes, that was true up to the 70's. What we've been living through since is the systematic deindustrialization of America.

Our factories have been boxed up and sent overseas. We've lost textiles, steel production, all kinds of manufacturing. Design is being offshored as well. Everything we buy comes from China. Even the garlic in our grocery stores is grown cheaper overseas and shipped in. Call center work is overseas, programming is getting sent there, xray interpretation, back-office financial work, etc.

Kids are graduating from college with five and six-figure debt loads and no jobs in sight. Older workers realize that they're not going to recover from the next layoff. The mortgage bubble represents the greatest transfer of wealth between classes in the history of the country and nobody can even agree if a crime took place.

I worked with a guy at a prior company, professional lobbyist. He'd worked in DC with Karl Rove. He told me with a straight face that making hamburgers was manufacturing and my scoffing at that was an elitist scoffing at the dignity of work for our food service professionals. I told him I wasn't even going to make a comment on the dignity of making burgers in a fast-food restaurant versus working the assembly line at Ford but I'd guarantee the pay and benefits at Ford were better.

I don't know whether the lobbyist truly believed what he said or was just taking the money.

Loconius said...

More about powered armor, since its slowly becoming a reality; with speculation on how it would evolve from what it is currently.

a topic on fully electric infrastructure, if batteris could attain the same density as gasoline, would airplanes have giant batteries in their wings; and how would jets work?

Tony said...

SA Phil:

"The "Third World" is still this world.

http://earthtrends.wri.org/features/view_feature.php?fid=66&theme=4

Technology advancing .. while making life harder on people...

------

Not that there aren't plenty of people being left behind in the "1st world"

I don't expect the 24% unemployment rate is doing wonders for the people in Spain for example.

How about Appalachia? The coal they mine powers our industry. Too bad about the health effects though.

http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/mar2011/2011-03-04-091.html

Its even worse in China, which is expected to be a hotbed of innovation at some point in upcoming decades due to their investment in technical education."


I've seen the Third World in person, Phil. Their problems are much, much bigger than industrial effluents. Until he's seen people sleeping in the street in Mobasa, or "Shit River" in Olongapo, or any one of a million similar things, a person really has no clue.

WRT the overall economic state of the world, we have to be cautious about that too. The recession could be a sign of worse things to come, or it sould just be, well, a recession.

Tony said...

jollyreaper:

"Yes, that was true up to the 70's. What we've been living through since is the systematic deindustrialization of America.

Our factories have been boxed up and sent overseas. We've lost textiles, steel production, all kinds of manufacturing."


To a certain degree -- to the degree that it's real -- it was inevitable. To an even greater degree, it's irresponsible hype. Things are always bad and they're getting worse. BS. My dad used to be all exercised about "Made in China". He did some digging and found out that the portion of end user items that are imported has gone up all of one percent in the last 20 years. Now, it is interesting that almost all of that increase is attributable to China. But that's all it is -- interesting.

"Design is being offshored as well. Everything we buy comes from China. Even the garlic in our grocery stores is grown cheaper overseas and shipped in. Call center work is overseas, programming is getting sent there, xray interpretation, back-office financial work, etc."

More hysteria. And the really funny thing is that all of those things are really 1990s concerns. Programming, call centers, and a host of other things are returnign to our shores (yes, sometimes in the form of immigrants) because customer acceptance of those things wasn't all that great.

"Kids are graduating from college with five and six-figure debt loads and no jobs in sight.

Incorrect. They're graduating and not falling right into their dream jobs. Guess what, even back in the Fifties and Sixties, new college graduates still had to start in the mail room or on the central processing floor, and learn the business from the bottom up. The problem is that kids are being lied to, mostly by themselves, and have ridiculously inflated expectations as a result.

"Older workers realize that they're not going to recover from the next layoff."

That was a lament in the Seventies, G.

"The mortgage bubble represents the greatest transfer of wealth between classes in the history of the country and nobody can even agree if a crime took place."

It wasn't criminal, by the laws that were in place at the time. It was incredibly shortsighted policy.

And let's leave this class warfare nonsense alone. The only people that really made money on the bubble were the people that worked for the banks that took fees. Everyone else took a bath, no matter where they stood in the economy. Even the people in the banks that had big salaries and bonuses took a huge haircut on their reinvestment of those monies.

Tony said...

jollyreaper:

"I worked with a guy at a prior company, professional lobbyist. He'd worked in DC with Karl Rove. He told me with a straight face that making hamburgers was manufacturing and my scoffing at that was an elitist scoffing at the dignity of work for our food service professionals. I told him I wasn't even going to make a comment on the dignity of making burgers in a fast-food restaurant versus working the assembly line at Ford but I'd guarantee the pay and benefits at Ford were better.

I don't know whether the lobbyist truly believed what he said or was just taking the money."


Talk about transfers of wealth. The pay and benefits of the US auto industry are a perfect example. Between high pay and contractual entitlements, the auto workers pretty much extracted from their employers a lot of the money that should have been used to make sure they stayed competitive. More shortsighted, selfish thinking, this time by the very working class heroes many people are so much in love with.

WRT hamburger flipping being manufacturing, I wonder if you heard that correctly. He probably told you something like making a hamburger, rather than selling the meat directly to the end user, was adding value -- which is technically true, as far as it goes. Service industries do add value to raw materials.

Also, the Rove name drop doesn't make the point you think it does. It indicates an agenda. It doesn't add credibility.

Anonymous said...

Tony,

I've seen the Third World in person, Phil. Their problems are much, much bigger than industrial effluents. Until he's seen people sleeping in the street in Mobasa, or "Shit River" in Olongapo, or any one of a million similar things, a person really has no clue.

============

Except that unless you use artificial designations ("third world") you are only reinforcing my point about our world potentially being Crapsack for many real people.

And even if we accept your first/third world distinction the yardstick for this discussion is not comparing the disadvantaged here in the US with the disadvantaged in the third world.

It is comparing the disadvanted in the "first world" to people living in crapsack fictional worlds.

Finally the industrial effluent comment is really missing the point. For all your suggestions that people on this blog are too literal, you seem to be selectively literal in this discussion. The effluent was an example. There are a lot of other problems some of the people of Apalachia deal with, and they arent the only ones.

(SA Phil)

Brett said...

@jollyreaper
Yes, that was true up to the 70's. What we've been living through since is the systematic deindustrialization of America.

That's not really the case. Industrial output in the US has been growing since the 1970s, it's just a smaller percentage of employment (and absolute number of employees). Don't mistake a decline in employment-by-sector for "deindustrialization".


Our factories have been boxed up and sent overseas. We've lost textiles, steel production, all kinds of manufacturing. Design is being offshored as well. Everything we buy comes from China. Even the garlic in our grocery stores is grown cheaper overseas and shipped in. Call center work is overseas, programming is getting sent there, xray interpretation, back-office financial work, etc.


Certain kinds of productions have been moved overseas, mostly in the form of gigantic orders of particular products. The US still produces most of the "small order" production runs of highly diverse products, as the Atlantic recently pointed out in an article.

I don't see the problem with outsourcing, either. All Americans benefit from cheaper services.


Kids are graduating from college with five and six-figure debt loads and no jobs in sight. Older workers realize that they're not going to recover from the next layoff. The mortgage bubble represents the greatest transfer of wealth between classes in the history of the country and nobody can even agree if a crime took place.


I'm not sure how the widespread use of "cash-out refinancing" (most of the subprime mortgages) represented a "great transfer of wealth between classes".


I worked with a guy at a prior company, professional lobbyist. He'd worked in DC with Karl Rove. He told me with a straight face that making hamburgers was manufacturing and my scoffing at that was an elitist scoffing at the dignity of work for our food service professionals. I told him I wasn't even going to make a comment on the dignity of making burgers in a fast-food restaurant versus working the assembly line at Ford but I'd guarantee the pay and benefits at Ford were better.


He has a point, though. There's really no reason why a low-skilled worker assembling pieces of food into a hamburger is "Service Sector employment", while a low-skilled worker assembling a mother drive is "Manufacturing employment".

As for the better wages, that's because they were a protected sector for decades - the lack of trade competition meant that they could pass the cost of their inflated wages on to the consumers. Seeing as how even automotive workers were never more than a fraction of all employees, I don't see why they deserve special protection at the expense of the rest of use.

Tony said...

SA Phil:

"Except that unless you use artificial designations ("third world") you are only reinforcing my point about our world potentially being Crapsack for many real people.

And even if we accept your first/third world distinction the yardstick for this discussion is not comparing the disadvantaged here in the US with the disadvantaged in the third world.

It is comparing the disadvanted in the 'first world' to people living in crapsack fictional worlds."


I would gladly make that comparison. Crapsack worlds tend to be worlds without hope. A lot of what we hear about the disadvantaged in the West is framedi n the context of the hopes they should have and realize. In crapsack worlds the disadvantaged are essentially without hope.

"Finally the industrial effluent comment is really missing the point. For all your suggestions that people on this blog are too literal, you seem to be selectively literal in this discussion. The effluent was an example. There are a lot of other problems some of the people of Apalachia deal with, and they arent the only ones."

Yes, but those problems are in comparison to the rest of us, who are, as a group, the wealthiest society in history. And, once again, they can have hopes that crapsack worlders can't.

It's played out in my own life. My parents both came from poor, working class backgrounds. (We're talking making dresses out of floral print flour sacks and heating up bath water on the stove poor here.) My grandparents' generation broke out of that mold and became foremen and senior technicians. My parents' generation became managers, administrators, and professionals, some of them with college educations. Most of the family in my generation is solidly middle class, with college educations, professions, and investments. Now, understand, this all started in my grandparents' generation, during the Depression, when poor people -- just like today -- were supposed to have no hope at all.

So I see the crapsack world in fiction and all I see is invocation of an unrealistic hopelessness. If that was all, it would just be bad fiction. But it is pernicious in that it reinforces all of the cliches popular in some circles about the world going to hell in a handbasket, and there's no hope of it ever getting better. Apply a little historical perspective and you see that world has always been going to hell, but it never seems to really get there.

Anonymous said...

Brett,

Seeing as how even automotive workers were never more than a fraction of all employees, I don't see why they deserve special protection at the expense of the rest of use.

============

This one is partly psychological, there is a motivational challenge related to trying to produce consumer goods that the worker themselves can not afford.

This was one of Henry Ford's observations and he started paying his assembly line workers a fair amount more than the going rate. Even before unionization.

Not that they deserve special protection. Just that there are more reasons than greedy unions, etc.

(SA Phil)

Brett said...

Tony beat me to most of these points.

It's worth pointing out that most of the mass-manufacturing jobs would have disappeared even if every single attempt at outsourcing had never happened. It's just that they'd be replaced by heavily automated factories, like what has happened in much of the US's remaining mass-manufacturing sector (and which is happening in China, particularly in its Foxconn plants).

Brett said...

@Anonymous
This was one of Henry Ford's observations and he started paying his assembly line workers a fair amount more than the going rate. Even before unionization.

I've heard that story quite a bit, but it's a myth. Ford started paying his workers higher wages because he implemented Frederick Taylor-style management at his plants, and his company was suffering from issues with employee turnover, sabotage, and labor unrest. Raising wages was how he hoped to increase retention.

Thucydides said...

Phil

First off, for the purposes of discussion (especially in a medium like this) some well understood shorthand like first world/ third world speeds things up.

Secondly, there is a continuum of existence from people who are very well off to people living in very deprived circumstances. Even in a dystopia (real or imaginary) this will be true. Kim Jung Un in the DPRK or O'Brien in "Airstrip One" represent the top end of their societies. In our culture, this is a thing to be decried and remedied as much as possible (although people can and do disagree as to how this is to be done); in other cultures this is often accepted as the way things are and always will be.

WRT SF as a medium to explore these issues, I would suggest the American centric nature of the medium actually limits the possibilities; Americans by and large do believe there is a positive solution for everything (hence the "happy ending" of most American SF; scientist "X" discovers the solution to the problem, the intrepid hero warps into orbit in time to save the day, a well aimed blaster shot kills the pirate...).

I too have been deployed to second and third world locations, and recognize that solutions like this are simply inappropriate or impossible with the scale and scope of resources we are willing to deploy. It might be an interesting question if post scarcity economics will change that; either the recipient culture will reject the help or the post scarcity crowd won't care one way or another...

Anonymous said...

Brett,

I've heard that story quite a bit, but it's a myth. Ford started paying his workers higher wages because he implemented Frederick Taylor-style management at his plants, and his company was suffering from issues with employee turnover, sabotage, and labor unrest. Raising wages was how he hoped to increase retention.

---------

Interesting. That is not how the story is told at Ford. I worked in the same building as Henry for 3 years. (decades removed of course)

Still my understanding of events could possibly have been Ford company propaganda/spin.

(SA Phil)

Tony said...

Brett:

"I've heard that story quite a bit, but it's a myth. Ford started paying his workers higher wages because he implemented Frederick Taylor-style management at his plants, and his company was suffering from issues with employee turnover, sabotage, and labor unrest. Raising wages was how he hoped to increase retention."

Yep. Ford was interested in making a car that the average working man could afford, not necessarily one that his own workers could afford. One way of doing that was getting the most out of each worker, all of the time. That's why he had company agents monitor workers in off hours, to make sure that they weren't doing things -- like gambling and drinking -- that created absenteeism and slow, imprecise work.

Tony said...

Thucydides:

"Secondly, there is a continuum of existence from people who are very well off to people living in very deprived circumstances. Even in a dystopia (real or imaginary) this will be true. Kim Jung Un in the DPRK or O'Brien in "Airstrip One" represent the top end of their societies. In our culture, this is a thing to be decried and remedied as much as possible (although people can and do disagree as to how this is to be done); in other cultures this is often accepted as the way things are and always will be."

WRT some comments I made previously, the abject acceptance of hopelessness in the Third World is in fact one of its defining characteristics. Note that countries emerging from a Third World existence, like India, tend to sell a lot of hope to an essentially Third World underclass within their own borders. See Bollywood for an example.

"WRT SF as a medium to explore these issues, I would suggest the American centric nature of the medium actually limits the possibilities; Americans by and large do believe there is a positive solution for everything (hence the 'happy ending' of most American SF; scientist 'X' discovers the solution to the problem, the intrepid hero warps into orbit in time to save the day, a well aimed blaster shot kills the pirate...)."

I wouldn't say the happy ending was a uniquely American trope. I would say that it's a trope for positivist writers. Clarke certainly didn't create the perception that many American SF readers have of bleak British SF. By the same token, the at best ambiguous and ambivalent Farenheit 451 was written by the thoroughly American Bradbury. (Bradbury, a resident of Los Angeles most of his life, never learned to drive a car -- an interesting insight into his character and attitude, I think.)

Now, if you would like to say that America is mcuh fuller of positivists than other places, I might agree. But it's just a phenomenon of where the country is in its historical arc. The ridiculously exagerated positivism of Late Imperial British writers (out of whom Clarke and Shute emerged, somewhat toned-down) would put a lot of Golden Age SF and American space opera to shame.

Anonymous said...

=Milo=



Thucydides:

"I too have been deployed to second and third world locations, and recognize that solutions like this are simply inappropriate or impossible with the scale and scope of resources we are willing to deploy."

The problems in the third world are far too ingrained to be solved with a single brilliant solution. It will require a long period of steady and gradual improvement. That does not mean it's impossible, however.


"It might be an interesting question if post scarcity economics will change that; either the recipient culture will reject the help or the post scarcity crowd won't care one way or another..."

I do think they'll care. People will often put their own interests ahead those of others, but when people feel comfortable enough that their own interests are satisfied, that's when our natural inclination to charity reaches its peak.

Tony said...

Further thoughts on Titanic...

I find the quest for meaning in the Titanic tragedy particularly curious. The fact that it sticks out in our memory at all is precisely that it was so unusual. Thousands of voyages, each carrying hundreds to over a thousand passengers, were made safely across the Atlantic every year. The Olympic class liners were actually a reaction to that situation. They represented an unprecedented expression of technological power, but they weren't some kind of departure. They were a logical step in the progression.

Was Titanic an example of overweening hubris. Yes, to a certain degree it was an example of that. But such hubris was hardly something new, nor even particularly concentrated in the English-speaking Atlantic culture of a century past. So Titanic is just an example of common human failing, not a metaphor for an age.

Anonymous said...

Thucydides said...
Phil

First off, for the purposes of discussion (especially in a medium like this) some well understood shorthand like first world/ third world speeds things up.


============

I wasn't debating the definitions of first/third world.

I was just saying that the third world is still part of the world and that crapsack conditions there are still crapsack conditions.

Tony mentioned that people would have to suffer the negative effects of industrialization/technology. And in many cases people int he third world do.

I suppose since it was my assertion that the real world in some people's eyes is crapsack - I get to decide whether the 3rd world counts or not when explaining why I said it.

Other commenters don't have to agree of course.

(SA Phil)

Tony said...

SA Phil:

"I suppose since it was my assertion that the real world in some people's eyes is crapsack - I get to decide whether the 3rd world counts or not when explaining why I said it.

Other commenters don't have to agree of course."


The Third World is of course part of our world. I think some of us here may recognize that better than others. But in recognizing how the Third World is part of our world, and how it interacts with the rest of the world, one has to also recognize that projecting First World sensibilities onto its institutions and people is simply not valid.

WRT agreement, of course nobody has to agree about something. (Or disagree -- let's not forget that.) But we have to be talking about the same thing for agreement or disagreement to have any meaning. And that's not up for individual interpretation.

In the case of the canonical crapsack dystopia, we are generally talking about a highly industrialized, technologically sophisticated world -- or part of the world, if you insist -- that is at the same time somehow full of Third World tropes and Third World hopelessness. I don't think that's debatable. I also don't think that it's particularly plausible either, given the hope that technological society tends to want to give people, and the broadened avenues of realizing hopes that it provides.

Anonymous said...

I guess a lot depends on crapsack vs dystopia

It looks like we both agree that there are parts of the real world that are crapsack. They just might not fit the classic definition of a crapsack dystopia

(SA Phil)

Tony said...

SA Phil:

"I guess a lot depends on crapsack vs dystopia

It looks like we both agree that there are parts of the real world that are crapsack. They just might not fit the classic definition of a crapsack dystopia"


It's not so much about definitions -- as long as we agree on them -- as it's about recognizing that the crapsack dystopia is not very plausible, given what we know about technological society, what it tries to accomplish, and what people in thechnological societies will in fact put up with, in comparison to what crapsack dystopia writers imagine they would put up with.

Anonymous said...

Wasnt jollyreaper's scenario more a case of a non-dystopia that devolved though?


(SA Phil)

Tony said...

SA Phil:

"Wasnt jollyreaper's scenario more a case of a non-dystopia that devolved though?"

IMO, the original setting was implausible, for reasons of you can't get there from here (or from the 1970s, which I gather is the notional point of divergence). The devolution of that situation -- or any technologically competent society -- into a crapsack dystopia is equally implausible, for reasons already given.

Nothing personal against jollyreaper, but you just can't work from tired, unsupportable cliches (like the "failure of cpaitalism") and expect to be taken seriously by anything more than a sub-audience that implicitly buys into the cliche.

Anonymous said...

Is it not possible that you could set up a technological system that was not sustainable?

Resulting in a Crapsack Dystopia.

Lets say your system depended on you expending X resources per person.

But eventually you end up with only X/2 resources per person.

And the adjustment to the new usage levels leads to a loss of hope, poor living conditions, etc, for the masses.

(SA Phil)

Tony said...

SA Phil:

"Is it not possible that you could set up a technological system that was not sustainable?

Resulting in a Crapsack Dystopia.

Lets say your system depended on you expending X resources per person.

But eventually you end up with only X/2 resources per person.

And the adjustment to the new usage levels leads to a loss of hope, poor living conditions, etc, for the masses."


In short form, Peak Oil? Sure, it's possible, but what's the attraction to the reading audience? Popular fiction doesn't have to be unredeemably positivist, but if it's without hope, nobody wants to read it. IOW, Romance has rules.

jollyreaper said...

Wasnt jollyreaper's scenario more a case of a non-dystopia that devolved though?


Yes. In real-life, we never got the space future and now we look at the assumptions and realize why it never could have been. In the rocketpunk scenario, we spend all the money to get to space only to realize later that things aren't panning out the way we assumed. It's like independent farmers and fishermen trying to earn a living in a way that's killing them an inch at a time. It's the Stardust Bowl, Steinbeck in space.

As for Tony:
it's about recognizing that the crapsack dystopia is not very plausible, given what we know about technological society, what it tries to accomplish, and what people in thechnological societies will in fact put up with, in comparison to what crapsack dystopia writers imagine they would put up with.

So I suppose that North Korea doesn't exist because nobody would put up with this. The Soviet Union didn't persist, either. And the CIS is now peaches and cream, everybody having a grand old time. The Great Depression just happened, nothing to do with the games played by business and finance; it resolved itself without government intervention, without regulation, and continued just fine until our current Great Recession which, again, just happened. Nothing to draw conclusions from here, never you mind. *deep sigh*

Nothing personal against jollyreaper, but you just can't work from tired, unsupportable cliches (like the "failure of cpaitalism") and expect to be taken seriously by anything more than a sub-audience that implicitly buys into the cliche.

I did spell it right though you're implying otherwise.

There's no point in discussing this further with you since it will only lead to more talking down to and condescension.

Anonymous said...

=Milo=



Tony:

"Popular fiction doesn't have to be unredeemably positivist, but if it's without hope, nobody wants to read it."

In order to have hope, there must be something you don't like about your current life that you're hoping to fix.

If everything is just fine, no need for hope.

Tony said...

jollyreaper:

"Yes. In real-life, we never got the space future and now we look at the assumptions and realize why it never could have been. In the rocketpunk scenario, we spend all the money to get to space only to realize later that things aren't panning out the way we assumed. It's like independent farmers and fishermen trying to earn a living in a way that's killing them an inch at a time. It's the Stardust Bowl, Steinbeck in space."

And it could never happen, because long before it did, the money would run out. It's just unrealistic under any set of assumptions.

"So I suppose that North Korea doesn't exist because nobody would put up with this."

Not a modern technological society. And we know that the industrial police state can't last.

"The Soviet Union didn't persist, either. And the CIS is now peaches and cream, everybody having a grand old time."

The subjects of the Soviet empire were dragged into the 20th Century by sacrifice and regimentation that was ultimately unsupportable economically, and much resented by the people. It didn't even take revolution -- it just went away when it was no longer relevant.

As for what remains? It is more or less economically supportable, even if somewhat unstable. It will either eventually grow more liberal and more successful, or it will slide back and join the Third World. Or it may just live in the Second World limbo it has long lived in, for decades or even centuries. In any event, it's not symbolic of anything other than what it is -- a failed empire trying to pick up the pieces.

"The Great Depression just happened, nothing to do with the games played by business and finance; it resolved itself without government intervention, without regulation, and continued just fine until our current Great Recession which, again, just happened. Nothing to draw conclusions from here, never you mind. *deep sigh*"

The problem here is that nobody -- and certainly not myself -- has ever said that it "just happened". It took real people, and a combination of real values, real ideologies, and real mistakes to make depressions and recessions. But the causes and effects are not explained by facile, caricatured stereotypes and epithets.

"I did spell it right though you're implying otherwise."

I made a typing error and didn't catch it. Why did you inflate it into a hostile act, without even asking if might have been a simple mistake?

"There's no point in discussing this further with you since it will only lead to more talking down to and condescension."

I'm trying very hard to address ideas, not people. I've made it very clear that when it comes to your ideas, it's not personal, both now and in the past. If you perceive condescension, it seems to me that it's because it's a constant attitude you seem to face. ISTR that you've said as much in the past. Perhaps it's time to consider why it is that your ideas come in for so much criticism, rather than assume that everyone who criticises your ideas is out to ridicule you personally.

Anonymous said...

Tony,

I'm trying very hard to address ideas, not people. I've made it very clear that when it comes to your ideas, it's not personal, both now and in the past. If you perceive condescension, it seems to me that it's because it's a constant attitude you seem to face. ISTR that you've said as much in the past. Perhaps it's time to consider why it is that your ideas come in for so much criticism, rather than assume that everyone who criticises your ideas is out to ridicule you personally.

========

Having been pretty much bounced around like Jollyreaper before; I can't help but wonder who these other criticizers are you seem to be alluding to.
-------

Not that I think you have been hard on anyone, really, since you came back. Incuding myself. Except maybe the author of the Watchmen.

There is a trend begining there though, the comment by JR was a liberal/commie/pinko one (Failure of Capitalism)

And the Moore criticism was his percieved Anti-Reagan, Anti American rationalle. Again .. Commie liberal pinko.

heh

(SA Phil)

Brett said...

@Tony

Was Titanic an example of overweening hubris. Yes, to a certain degree it was an example of that. But such hubris was hardly something new, nor even particularly concentrated in the English-speaking Atlantic culture of a century past. So Titanic is just an example of common human failing, not a metaphor for an age.

I've never thought of it as a case of "hubris", just bad luck and outdated safety rules. The Olympic was the Titanic's twin sister ship, and she had an illustrious career that lasted a quarter-century (including a bunch of close calls in World War I when she was ferrying troops and materiel across the Atlantic). Before the sinking of the Titanic, though, she'd been making the same trips as Titanic across the Atlantic with the same safety equipment and lifeboats, and nothing went wrong.

@jollyreaper
The Great Depression just happened, nothing to do with the games played by business and finance; it resolved itself without government intervention, without regulation, and continued just fine until our current Great Recession which, again, just happened.

It was a government action - the Hawley-Smoot tariff - that arguably turned the Great Depression into a worldwide calamity, and prevented it from being resolved in 3-4 years (as with the equally bad Panic of 1893), or even shorter (the Savings & Loans collapse of 1987, which had a stock market drop worse than that of Black Tuesday).

@Tony
Not a modern technological society. And we know that the industrial police state can't last.

If North Korea wasn't getting hand-outs and food aid from China and others, it very easily could have collapsed in the 1990s. Millions starved, and it would have been even worse if outside nations hadn't delivered food aid to the North Korean government.

Anonymous said...

=Milo=



Tony:

"And we know that the industrial police state can't last."

Stories are never about situations that last. If everything is exactly the same for everyone at the end of the story as it was at the beginning, what's the point? Readers want to read about turbulent times.

Also, North Korea has existed since 1948. That's almost 64 years.

Anonymous said...

Brett,

It was a government action - the Hawley-Smoot tariff - that arguably turned the Great Depression into a worldwide calamity

-----------

Very arguably.

Others might argue that the Great Depression was a worldwide event, and might never have happened if Germany's economy hadn't been under such strain following World War 1.

Keynesians would argue that it was Hoover's attempts at austerity that prolonged the Depression, helped along by FDR ratcheting back on stimulus in response from political pressure from the right.

Still others argue it was rampant speculation by the "Banksters" (FDR himself was fond of that one) in an ERA of poor regulation.

Some (the MMT types) claim it was the huge surpluses of the previous year's budget (the 1928 federal budget was a whopping 25% surplus.) Which invariably would lead to a deficit in the private sector due to the way reserve currency accounting works.

Some even claim it was an inevitable Boom-Bust cycle caused by rapid technological advance. (For example there were 2000 US car companies in the 1920s, most never even made it to the crash)

How many licks does it take to bring down the world economy? The world may never know.

(SA Phil)

Thucydides said...

In economic history, many bad events are actually amplified by government actions. Read the history of the South Sea Bubble, for example.

The British Government was looking for a way to regularize its finances, and the chance to convert the chaotic system of annuities into a more liquid form of investment as one of the driving forces that persuaded the government of the day to issue the South Sea Company a monopoly and allow such lax rules for selling shares and financing using margins (a severe paraphrase; the entire history is much more complicated).

If the government had not been so eager to convert annuities to shares, it is possible the "bubble" might still have been inflated, but not to the extent it was, and the consequences would not have been so dire. Fast forward from 1720 and many economic crisis are still usually either triggered or amplified by the actions of governments. The Great Depression and the 2008 crash were caused by overleveraging (the massive debts of WWI in 1929, and the huge public debts the welfare states of the West had racked up in 2008), the trigger events were manipulation of the interest rate by the Federal Reserve in 1929 and the realization that a massive amount of "toxic" debt had been assumed by (and implicitly guaranteed by) the government in 2008.

Like the Titanic, many implicit assumptions were made as starting conditions and events proved them wrong (the number of lifeboats on the Titanic actually exceeded the then current standard, the assumption of the day was a ship in trouble would be close enough to other ships that passengers could simply be ferried over; ship traffic of the day was dense enough this was a reasonable assumption).

Tony said...

SA Phil:

"There is a trend begining there though, the comment by JR was a liberal/commie/pinko one (Failure of Capitalism)

And the Moore criticism was his percieved Anti-Reagan, Anti American rationalle. Again .. Commie liberal pinko. "


Please, don't put words in my mouth. Here in the past I've criticised 2nd Amendment talk too. I just don't appreciate, nor do I give credit to, Cause talk -- of any kind. Like I said, it's facile and caricatured.

Call me crazy, but I think we should be above that here.

Milo:

"
Stories are never about situations that last. If everything is exactly the same for everyone at the end of the story as it was at the beginning, what's the point? Readers want to read about turbulent times.

Also, North Korea has existed since 1948. That's almost 64 years."


WRT the NKs, as already pointed out, they couldn't maintain what they have without outside help. They use what they do have to extort that. NK isn't even really a state, it's a racket.

Yes, stories require plot progression, but they also require plausible settings. You want to have an NK-like place in your story? Don't forget the support system of much richer and much nicer places -- even the PRC in the case of NK.

SA Phil:

"How many licks does it take to bring down the world economy? The world may never know."

The collapse of the world economy -- or any large economy -- has to overcome the economy's inertia. We should remember that bad times, even really bad times, are only relatively bad in truly large economies. There's a base of inventory, capabilities, and activity that's going to keep moving forward.

Rick said...

Tony, please lighten up. Even when I agree with you, the tone grates. Yes, really this applies to everyone - but you have a way of generating aggravation all around.

Don't make me have to look into the Blogger comment management options.

Anonymous said...

Tony,


The collapse of the world economy -- or any large economy -- has to overcome the economy's inertia. We should remember that bad times, even really bad times, are only relatively bad in truly large economies. There's a base of inventory, capabilities, and activity that's going to keep moving forward.

===========

Well sure .. the religious dogma that is our complete monetary exchange/economic system can't completely override the actual resource driven activity that occurs.

We have economic downturns because we don't know any better.

(SA Phil)

Tony said...

SA Phil:

"Well sure .. the religious dogma that is our complete monetary exchange/economic system can't completely override the actual resource driven activity that occurs.

We have economic downturns because we don't know any better."


Religious dogma? Hmmm...

I thought the business cycle existed because business intelligence is never perfect and trends take time to work their way through the market.

Anonymous said...

"Money" is just a cultural invention, our economic system is a cultural development.

No different than religion.

We needed some way to prioritize/ develop / use / distribute resources on larger and larger scales.

"Businesses" are just organizational structures that are part of the same.

The whole system is entirely imperfect. Just like every other cultural adaptation.

(SA Phil)

Tony said...

SA Phil:

"'Money' is just a cultural invention, our economic system is a cultural development.

No different than religion."


You're asserting here that there could be something else to support commerce besides portable stores of value, which is all money is. Or are you asserting that commerce itself is a culturally invented? Even though all cultures that have a used for trade have in fact invented it?

Anonymous said...

All cultures did not have money based resource trading. Quite the opposite. Money appears fairly late in the human experience on a relative scale.

The fact that the idea arose in multiple places is hardly unique to money. It also applies to Religion, etc.

Not to mention the idea was often shared between cultures, not independently invented by each.

If "money" had some true intrinsic value beyond what is assigned by those who use it - then the people who described what money was would be Einstein and Hawking, not Mises and Keynes.

(SA Phil)

Damien Sullivan said...

Mises and Keynes? Odd names to join together on the concept of money.

Brave New World actually wasn't very eugenic at all. "Fetuses chosen to become members of the highest caste, 'Alpha', are allowed to develop naturally while maturing to term in "decanting bottles", while fetuses chosen to become members of the lower castes ('Beta', 'Gamma', 'Delta', 'Epsilon') are subjected to in situ chemical interference to cause arrested development in intelligence or physical growth."

It's almost an anti-eugenic society, based on the blank slate, manipulating the physical and mental development of everybody with that chemical interference and hypnotic conditioning and such.


As for politics, we can blame the gold standard for the Depression as well. For the current Great Recession, the problem wasn't bad government debt, but bad debt in general. Krugman says the US crisis was basically an old-fashioned bank run, but in an unregulated shadow banking sector.

Over in Europe, Greek government debt sparked the problem, but the crisis has spread to countries that were running surpluses. Problem there is the euro, under current policies acting much like a gold standard, sacrificing monetary policy without a balancing fiscal union.

Tony said...

SA Phil:

"All cultures did not have money based resource trading. Quite the opposite. Money appears fairly late in the human experience on a relative scale.

The fact that the idea arose in multiple places is hardly unique to money. It also applies to Religion, etc.

Not to mention the idea was often shared between cultures, not independently invented by each.

If 'money' had some true intrinsic value beyond what is assigned by those who use it - then the people who described what money was would be Einstein and Hawking, not Mises and Keynes."


I said that trade has been invented by every culture that needs it.

Money, in the form of commodity money, is a technology for making value portable. It makes trade easier. Also, the actual material involved has other technological uses, which often contributes to its value. Yes, even gold, though the other primary technological use was, until quite recently, adornment.

Now, if you want to talk fiat money, yes, the value is defined by some entity, but the value is not as arbitrary as some people think. As always, a portable store of value has to be based on something useful and valuable. In the case of fiat money, it's the strength of the sponsoring economy, and the faith that people have in the money's exchangeability for hard goods of some value, at some future date.

Anonymous said...

=Milo=



Damien Sullivan:

"Brave New World actually wasn't very eugenic at all. "Fetuses chosen to become members of the highest caste, 'Alpha', are allowed to develop naturally while maturing to term in "decanting bottles", while fetuses chosen to become members of the lower castes ('Beta', 'Gamma', 'Delta', 'Epsilon') are subjected to in situ chemical interference to cause arrested development in intelligence or physical growth."

It's almost an anti-eugenic society, based on the blank slate, manipulating the physical and mental development of everybody with that chemical interference and hypnotic conditioning and such."


Which is actually more like eusocial caste systems than eugenics is.

Anonymous said...

Damien,

Mises and Keynes? Odd names to join together on the concept of money.

------

I was trying to get both ends of the spectrum.

(SA Phil)

Anonymous said...

Tony,

Money, in the form of commodity money, is a technology for making value portable. It makes trade easier. Also, the actual material involved has other technological uses, which often contributes to its value. Yes, even gold, though the other primary technological use was, until quite recently, adornment.

----------

Nothing here precludes money being a cultural invention.

The value of gold besides it being money .. is just that.. resource/other value that is beside it being money.

The money part of that value however is no more real than the fiat currency.

Paper has a value as well. Its just not as significant as that of gold. A number on a spreadsheet also has some very tiny value seperate from being money.

(SA Phil)

Thucydides said...

These arguments about money sound oddly familiar (probably hashed them out in the thread about post scarcity economics), so I will make two hopefully new observations:

1. Even non humans have a sort of trade relationship, usually between males of the species offering shiny pebbles, food or other enticing items to the females of the species in return for sex.

2. In the book "Lost Civilizations of the Stone Age" there is an intriguing observation that very early humans would wrap symbolic objects in clay "wrappers" and then fire them. One possibility is these are some form of receipt, suggesting that once you got to the village and broke open the wrapper it would tell the recipient that he was entitled to (say) two sheep out of the herd. IF this is truly a form of accounting or record keeping, then formalized trade could be more than 10,000 years old. This was probably still barter trade, and there were still issues of conversion (a sheep= how much grain, or choice flint, or women?)

Tony said...

SA Phil:

"Nothing here precludes money being a cultural invention.

The value of gold besides it being money .. is just that.. resource/other value that is beside it being money.

The money part of that value however is no more real than the fiat currency.

Paper has a value as well. Its just not as significant as that of gold. A number on a spreadsheet also has some very tiny value seperate from being money."


Actually, I was a little bit loose with terminology. Money is aactually the tool used in the technology of exchange. (Using the definition of "technology" as the combination of tools and techniques used to do a task. In the case of exchange: task = exchange; technique = negotiation; tool = money (in any of its forms).)

In any case, as an instrument of a technology, money is not a cultural invention, at least not in the sense of being arbitrary and replaceable or avoidable altogether. If it didn't exist, it would have to be invented.

WRT to value, you're right -- money has no value in and of itself. It has utility as a means of exchange. In the case of commodity money, it also has technological utility. The value placed on that utility is entirely dependent on how much that utility is prized in one way or another.

Anonymous said...

Tony,


In any case, as an instrument of a technology, money is not a cultural invention, at least not in the sense of being arbitrary and replaceable or avoidable altogether. If it didn't exist, it would have to be invented.

----

I disagree. It is entirely possible for an "instrument of technology" be a cultural invention.

If God did not exist it would be necessary to invent him.

It will also be possible at some point to exist without money and still support our civilization.

(SA Phil)

Tony said...

SA Phil:

"I disagree. It is entirely possible for an 'instrument of technology' be a cultural invention.

If God did not exist it would be necessary to invent him.

It will also be possible at some point to exist without money and still support our civilization."


1. Religion, to the degree that it has an objective purpose (albeit a psychological one), has techniques of application (services, evangelism, conquest) and tools (texts, icons). It could easily be considered a technology.

2. Since I don't for a second believe in post-scarcity, we'll always need a means of economic exchange. Even in a post-scarcity economy, not all persons are created equal in ability. So some form of exchange, including exchange markers, would have to be developed to manage the allocation of the services of the gifted. For example, if a person is painter, he can only make so many paintings. If he's a popular painter, he will have more people wishing to possess his works than he has works to pass around. How does he allocate his works? He has to score the suitability of all commers. How does he do that? A system of merit? How is that system mediated? Say somebody is a particularly good athlete or policeman. He will perform for one person or group rather than the other, if he gets some form of compensation, even if it is only in the form of kudos he can use to trade for the uniques works of other artists.

See, we've already got the necessity for an economy, and a requirement to mediate it somehow. The object is no longer the material goods of survival or simple confort, and the means of gaining wealth are no longer daily drudgery. But there is still scarcity and demand, simply because some people are better, more expert than others at this, that, or the other thing. Whatever you call the economy, and whatever you call it's means of exchange, it's still money, in practical effect.

tkinias said...

It’s been a while since I posted here, but I had a few thoughts I wanted to share on this thread.

First, on the Third World–crapsack thing: I lived in a Third World country for several years, working in the local economy. Things are a lot more complicated than “they’re poor; life sucks.” (My experience was in Egypt, a ‘midrange’ developing country, BTW.) The biggest thing that’s notable about living and working in a country like that is the constant friction; things just don’t work like they should. You never count on things like the electricity being connected, and you build that in to your planning. You don’t buy an electric stove, because you need to be able to cook and (especially) make tea when the lights are out. You are flexible—I taught night school, and more than once I held class by candlelight because we had no power. This strikes Europeans and Americans as pretty ‘crapsack’, but for storytelling purposes it can be quite interesting, and people’s ability to overcome constant obstacles can be part of an uplifting narrative.

Another thing that’s widely overlooked is that within developing countries (and by extension, within a crapsack SF society), there is wide disparity in wealth, and you can live quite well in some ways on a quite modest income. One of the things that characterizes ‘crapsack’ in my mind, in fact, is extreme inequality. But also, the relative value of things is distort relative to our assumptions: manufactured goods are expensive; labor is cheap. So having a computer at home might be well beyond the means of university-educated middle-class people, but these same people will have live-in servants. (Conversely, in a more utopian SF setting, having real humans perform services might be the ultimate luxury...)

@jollyreaper:

I like your idea about quasi crapsack rocketpunk. If I understand properly, the premise is that the Cold War space race continued under its own momentum and pushed space development to where it was “supposed” to be by now—and then it turned out to be a house of cards (or a “space bubble”).

In the setting I’m working on there’s some element of that. It’s not at all crapsack, but the economic motivation for space development is not at all clear. It’s largely state-sponsored and a matter of national ego; it’s a net drain on the economies of the great powers. There’s a lot of money to be made, though, and the economic sectors who benefit use national-glory narratives to sell the projects. It’s not necessary for space to be a net economic benefit to society as a whole for it to be beneficial to some subsector, and if the subsector which benefits wields sufficient political power, then space development will happen.

The obvious corollary is Victorian/Third Republic imperialism. Most colonies, as I understand it, were a net drain on the resources of the imperial power, but they enormously enriched some influential groups and provided steady employment for others.

@SA Phil:

I loved Traveller 2300! It’s not wholly hard SF, but it had a much higher emphasis on plausability than is the norm (especially compared Traveller, GDW’s other setting, though I loved Traveller, too, for other reasons).

Anonymous said...

Tony,

See, we've already got the necessity for an economy, and a requirement to mediate it somehow. The object is no longer the material goods of survival or simple confort, and the means of gaining wealth are no longer daily drudgery. But there is still scarcity and demand, simply because some people are better, more expert than others at this, that, or the other thing. Whatever you call the economy, and whatever you call it's means of exchange, it's still money, in practical effect.

------------

You could instead develop/allocate all resources using a computer. You could even design in the incentives "money" provides now.

It wouldn't have to be perfect, because a monetary economy is not perfect. Indeed much less perfect than it could be due to dogma and zealots.


(SA Phil)

Tony said...

SA Phil:

"You could instead develop/allocate all resources using a computer. You could even design in the incentives 'money' provides now."

Talk about crapsack worlds...

Still, the computer has to have a scoring system, and a means of awarding points. People would presumably know how they could earn points, and have a way to register their desired rewards. It would, after all, make no sense for somebody interested primarily in baseball to be awarded a Romantic Revival painting, while an appreciator of fine art was awarded a signed jersey from last year's MVP. The system to register preferences would be a market, and the points that people could earn would be money.

"It wouldn't have to be perfect, because a monetary economy is not perfect. Indeed much less perfect than it could be due to dogma and zealots."

Isn't the idea that money is culturally constructed a kind of dogma? Especially in light of considerable evidence to the contrary?

Anonymous said...

Tony,

Isn't the idea that money is culturally constructed a kind of dogma? Especially in light of considerable evidence to the contrary?

-------

What evidence?

(SA Phil)

Tony said...

SA Phil:

"What evidence?"

The fact that it is a tool in a technological system, not a cultural practice or belief. This alone puts money beyond cultural construction, since technologies are about accomplishing tasks. Now, if you wish to claim that the exchange system of trade and it's related tools are an irrational technology, I'd love to hear your argument.

Anonymous said...

Tony,

The system to register preferences would be a market, and the points that people could earn would be money.

----

Only if people could trade those points.

That wouldnt be a requirement.

As to the crapsackiness .. what difference does that make? My assertion was that it was possible.

Not that it was likely.

(SA Phil)

Tony said...

SA Phil:

"Only if people could trade those points.

That wouldnt be a requirement."


Trading the points wouldn't be a requirement for a market either. It would work like an auction. people would look at the available rewards, register their preferences, and record the number of points they'd be willing to spend. Whether it was blind or competitive would be irrlevant in the end.

Now, what happens to those points is an interesting question. Do we allocated them to the creator of the work for sale? Or do we dev/null them, presumably awarding points to the creator of a work through some other mechanism?

Anonymous said...

Tony,

The fact that it is a tool in a technological system, not a cultural practice or belief. This alone puts money beyond cultural construction, since technologies are about accomplishing tasks. Now, if you wish to claim that the exchange system of trade and it's related tools are an irrational technology, I'd love to hear your argument.
-------------

That is not evidence, that is rhetoric.

You have just elevated your opinion expressed in previous comments to the status of fact.

Then you suggest I need to modify my claims to conform to your "facts".

Ill make it easy on you.

No.

(SA Phil)

Tony said...

Another thought on post-scarcity economy...

Is it run like a semi-potlatch, where all items that cease to have usefulness are trashed? Do we require that items no longer desired be turned in for recycling? Why not, in the interest of efficiency,* have a secondary market in which used items could be traded or even sold?

*Recycling does take energy and time.

Tony said...

SA Phil:

"That is not evidence, that is rhetoric.

You have just elevated your opinion expressed in previous comments to the status of fact.

Then you suggest I need to modify my claims to conform to your "facts".

Ill make it easy on you.

No."


It's hardly my opinion alone.

I suggest you google "'technology of exchange'" ("About 23,100 results"), do a little reading, and get back to us.

Anonymous said...

AHA!

The classic "do your own research" bit.

Assisted by claiming everyone agrees with you. 23,100 no less!

You read fast.

I get over 2 million results if I google "money is a cultural adaption"

Does that make me 100 times more right than you?

(SA Phil)

Tony said...

SA Phil:

"AHA!

The classic 'do your own research' bit.

Assisted by claiming everyone agrees with you. 23,100 no less!

You read fast.

I get over 2 million results if I google 'money is a cultural adaption'

Does that make me 100 times more right than you?"


Nope. The classic "if you want independent evidence, here it is" bit.

If you put "money is a cultural adaptation" in quotes, like I put "technology of exchange" in quotes, you get:

No results found for "money is a cultural adaptation".

Since I'm not interested in being more right than anybody, just accurate, I'll simply note that we have a divide by zero error.

("technology of exchange" without quotes gets you "About 1,300,000,000 results" for some reason, probably because the string has fewer constraining terms in it.)

I know I shortcut past the foundation of my point, but exchange is a valid task in human society that goes beyond culture, and there are various technologies of exchange, including everything from simple barter to computer-mediated stock trading. Money in some form is a tool for mediating exchange in all but the simplest of those technologies. I won't say it is self-evident, but it is pretty well understood.

Anonymous said...

I will again point out that being a "technology of exchange" does not preclude it being a cultural invention/ adaptation.

Anymore than language being a "method of communication" prevent it from being a cultural invention/adaptation.


-----
I was more objecting to how you framed your argument. Which you doubled down on by throuwing in the "do your own research" fallacy (whatever the technical term is).

The Google response part of that comment was obviously a joke. You didnt read those links. It was silly.


-----
You are also suggesting some narrow window that a cultural adaptation/invention must fall into in order to say that money is somehow more than that.

The narrow window dies not exist, and thus the conclusion money is more than that is unecessary.

(SA Phil)

Tony said...

SA Phil:

"I will again point out that being a "technology of exchange" does not preclude it being a cultural invention/ adaptation."

A technology exists to do a task. If the task is farming, you have farming technology. If the task is RAdio Direction And Ranging, you have RADAR technology. If the task is exchange, you have exchange technology. Simply put, if a valid task exists, a technology will emerge to perform it. There can be many variations on the solution, but they are all technologies matched to necessary tasks.

So, unless exchange is somehow a culturally constructed thing, technologies to accomplish the task aren't culturally derived either, except, as noted, that different cultures may develop different solutions.

"Anymore than language being a method of communication prevent it from being a cultural invention/adaptation."

Spoken language is actually a human capability. How people use it may have cultural components, but the language facility itself is an inherent tool of humans as a species.

"I was more objecting to how you framed your argument. Which you doubled down on by throuwing in the 'do your own research' fallacy (whatever the technical term is).

The Google response part of that comment was obviously a joke. You didnt read those links. It was silly."


Once again, it was not a "do your own research" play. It was an invitation to check my work for yourself.

Also, I did follow and read several of the links, to make sure they were talking about what I thought they were, and using the term "technology of exchange" in the sense I meant.

"You are also suggesting some narrow window that a cultural adaptation/invention must fall into in order to say that money is somehow more than that.

The narrow window dies not exist, and thus the conclusion money is more than that is unecessary."


Sorry, but no. I am simply identifying money as a mediating tool in the technology of exchange. It's form may be culturally constructed,* but it's fundamental utility isn't. The utility derived from the fact that exchange is a necessary task (even in hunter-gatherer societies), technologies have arrisen to facilitate the accomplishment of that task, and most of those technologies require a tool for mediation. So money, as that tool, is no more culturally constructed than the plow or or the water bucket.

jollyreaper said...

Tony,

do a little reading, and get back to us.

For the record, this is exactly the sort of thing that really makes people see red. This is what I'm talking about with condescension. It removes the possibility of having a productive exchange of ideas because there's no room for give and take, just lecturing to people.

Your last comment to me implied that if I think I'm being condescended to by people, maybe it's because I have very stupid ideas. Why is it everyone else can have fun with purple vs green debates but things get contentious wih you? It's not what you're saying but the way you say it.

I'm going to recuse myself from any further comments. There's nothing to be gained from it. I'd meant to do so already but what you said compelled me to speak.

Anonymous said...

@SA Phil:

I loved Traveller 2300! It’s not wholly hard SF, but it had a much higher emphasis on plausability than is the norm (especially compared Traveller, GDW’s other setting, though I loved Traveller, too, for other reasons).

==========

With a little work, maybe it could be closer.

The owner of the rights I believe is working on a revision.

Add radiators to the space-craft, remove the stealth idea, make some other updates to bring it up on 20 years of real world changes .. who knows?

---

Some other ideas which were really interesting was how the space exploration occurred along arms... consisting of multiple star hops less than 8 light years apart.

Or how true garden worlds were fairly rare. Most had something wrong with them. Interesting for a Space Opera.

(SA Phil)

Anonymous said...

=Milo=



Tony:

"Even in a post-scarcity economy, [...] For example, if a person is painter, he can only make so many paintings. If he's a popular painter, he will have more people wishing to possess his works than he has works to pass around. How does he allocate his works?"

If it's a post-scarcity economy, any given painting the painter makes can be copied indefinitely at neglible cost. So if there's just one famous painting that everyone wants a copy of, that's not a problem, they can have it. (Of course, there can still be only one original painting, which, while it may look identical to the copies without very close scientific scrutiny, has historical value. Facts show some people are willing to pay for this, even though I personally wouldn't care if the copy is good enough.)

What would be at a premium is the ability to commission the painter to draw something you want drawn, to your specifications. This would be worth paying for, using whatever passes for money in the post-scarcity economy, or by offering another service in return.

Anonymous said...

=Milo=



Tony:

"Another thought on post-scarcity economy...

Is it run like a semi-potlatch, where all items that cease to have usefulness are trashed? Do we require that items no longer desired be turned in for recycling? Why not, in the interest of efficiency,* have a secondary market in which used items could be traded or even sold?

*Recycling does take energy and time."


Our society has found that people generally prefer to buy an item new rather than used, even at some extra cost. The advantages of buying something new are assurance of quality (brand new items will almost always be in mint condition, while used items will have gone through an unknown amount of wear and tear), and convenience (it's easier to buy something directly from its original manufacturer - or have it made at a local replicator site - than to track down a secondary source).

Recycling/secondhand sale is generally done due to either (A) extreme resource scarcity forcing available resources to be conserved, which per definition doesn't apply in a post-scarcity economy, or (B) environmentalist agendas with no short-term economic benefit, which people largely have to be coaxed into cooperating with.

In a post-scarcity economy, I expect the disposability of items will increase and stuff will get casually thrown out all the time. One can only hope the trash doesn't pile up WALL-E style. This might motivate above-mentioned environmentalist agendas.



SA Phil:

"I will again point out that being a "technology of exchange" does not preclude it being a cultural invention/adaptation."

Every technology is a cultural invention. We would not have computers, airplanes, or lasers if they were not invented by our culture.

Every technology is also an adaptation. We observe the present lack of a suitable tool for some task, and adapt.

Anonymous said...

=Milo=



SA Phil:

"It will also be possible at some point to exist without money and still support our civilization."

Yes, but it would make economic transactions go significantly less smoothly. In an economy as large and intricate as ours, that's a huge problem.

Picture this. In Hyrule, there live 12 NPCs who have and want the following items:
Arthur wants an apple, and has a broken clock.
Bertha wants a broken clock, and has a comfy chair.
Cecil wants a comfy chair, and has a donut.
Diane wants a donut, and has an encyclopedia.
Elliot wants an encyclopedia, and has a flower pot.
Fiona wants a flower pot, and has a gold bar.
George wants a gold bar, and has a harmonica.
Hannah wants a harmonica, and has an inkwell.
Igor wants an inkwell, and has a jacket.
Jasmine wants a jacket, and has a kite.
Kevin wants a kite, and has a lantern.
Laura wants a lantern, and has the Master Sword.
Meanwhile, over the course of his travels, Link happened to come across an apple, and so can now begin his trading sidequest.

So how this would proceed in an actual game is:
Link trades his apple to Arthur for his broken clock.
Link trades his broken clock to Bertha for her comfy chair.
Link trades his comfy chair to Cecil for his donut.
Link trades his donut to Diane for her encyclopedia.
Link trades his encyclopedia to Elliot for his flower pot.
Link trades his flower pot to Fiona for her gold bar.
Link trades his gold bar to George for his harmonica.
Link trades his harmonica to Hannah for her inkwell.
Link trades his inkwell to Igor for his jacket.
Link trades his jacket to Jasmine for her kite.
Link trades his kite to Kevin for his lantern.
Link trades his lantern to Laura for her Master Sword.
So in the end, all the NPCs and Link got what they wanted. However, in many of these trades it is not at all obvious that this was a favorable exchange, as Link was simply trading an item he doesn't want for another item he doesn't want. The only way Link would know to make these trades (other than "well the game wouldn't let me do this if I wasn't supposed to") would be if he knew in advance what all 12 NPCs wanted and had to offer, and calculated the proper trading sequence ahead of time. This would be pretty difficult to do in real life.

Anonymous said...

=Milo=

(continued)



Or maybe Link isn't up for that. Then maybe you could do it like this:
Link trades his apple to Laura for her Master Sword.
Laura trades her apple to Kevin for his lantern.
Kevin trades his apple to Jasmine for her kite.
Jasmine trades her apple to Igor for his jacket.
Igor trades his apple to Hannah for her inkwell.
Hannah trades her apple to George for his harmonica.
George trades his apple to Fiona for her gold bar.
Fiona trades her apple to Elliot for his flower pot.
Elliot trades his apple to Diane for her encyclopedia.
Diane trades her apple to Cecil for his donut.
Cecil trades his apple to Bertha for her comfy chair.
Bertha trades her apple to Arthur for his broken clock.
Except now, instead of Link needing the be prescient, all of the NPCs need to be prescient. None of them except for Arthur hold the apple to have any intrinsic value, and so they would not accept it in trade unless they knew ahead of time that they could get what they want for it - which they have no reason to expect, since the person they're planning to trade the apple to also has no reason to want it.

But now, let us consider that in addition to the apple, Link also starts out with a dollar, which is acknowledged as valuable legal tender by everyone. Then you could do:
Link trades his dollar to Laura for her Master Sword.
Laura trades her dollar to Kevin for his lantern.
Kevin trades his dollar to Jasmine for her kite.
Jasmine trades her dollar to Igor for his jacket.
Igor trades his dollar to Hannah for her inkwell.
Hannah trades her dollar to George for his harmonica.
George trades his dollar to Fiona for her gold bar.
Fiona trades her dollar to Elliot for his flower pot.
Elliot trades his dollar to Diane for her encyclopedia.
Diane trades her dollar to Cecil for his donut.
Cecil trades his dollar to Bertha for her comfy chair.
Bertha trades her dollar to Arthur for his broken clock.
Arthur trades his dollar to Link for his apple.
Result: Link can start slaying stuff much sooner, everyone is happy, and at the end, Link still has his dollar. And in every trade step, each person receives either the item he or she wants, or the dollar. This scenario requires no prescience, only that all involved acknowledge the dollar as a valuable trade good (as opposed to the apple from the previous sequence, which is valuable only when Arthur is hungry), with all 13 characters otherwise looking out only for their own interests.

Money is a catalyst, or perhaps a lubricant. It enables something that could happen anyway to happen much more easily and hassle-free. In that, it serves a demonstrably useful, and major, purpose, the lack of which would seriously hurt the economy.

I am in possession of many items which are worth significantly less than the market value of a sheep. However, I have neither the skill nor the space to properly raise a sheep, and so I would not accept such a trade unless I could count on being able to resell the sheep immediately afterwards. If we were still using a barter economy, this would put a serious hurdle in my ability to sell anything to a shepherd.

Rick said...

I'm hazy on what makes some human institutions 'cultural constructions,' while others are not.

So far as I can see, trade of any sort is a social interaction, thus a cultural construction, along with anything used to facilitate it.

This includes Phoenicians and West Africans assembling two piles of goods, adjusting them, then each taking the other's pile. It may not be as smooth as Paypal, or even little lumps of gold stamped with Athena's owl, but it is a mutually agreed upon arrangement, cultural cooperation, a shared cultural construction, call it what you will.

Anonymous said...

Milo,


Every technology is a cultural invention. We would not have computers, airplanes, or lasers if they were not invented by our culture.

Every technology is also an adaptation. We observe the present lack of a suitable tool for some task, and adapt.

---------------

I didn't mean anything quite as broad as that.

I was think monetary systems have more day to day utility than religions,

Perhaps less than language.

But in the same general theme of those two cultural adaptations.

=============

I could also term it as a mutually affirming shared delusion. In that money has value because everyone believes it does. And our entire economy is tied up in the faith we all have in it.

It of course runs there into real resources and there are limits to what a lack of confidence can detract from. Which is where this tangent started.

==========

I don't dispute your example into the shortcomings of barter at all. You need some way to deal with the complexity of the interactions.

Using Money is one way. As I suggested it should be possible at some point to use a Computer to replace it.

Using Money was a scalable solution to the problem since it works in a simple sense that expanded in structure as people needed it. (much like language)

While any resource computer system would have to be amazingly complex for anything more than a small group of people.

(SA Phil)

Anonymous said...

Rick said...

I'm hazy on what makes some human institutions 'cultural constructions,' while others are not.
======

Hopefully my response to Milo clears up what I had meant anyway.

I have been thinking about this for the last few years when it became obvious the Economists in any of the camps don't really know how to "fix" the current slump.

I think it is because the whole system is wrapped up in belief. On a several levels.

Since money's value is intrinsically tied to demand. It requires "consumer confidence"... The god of money needs you to believe in him.

Money's value is also tied up in the confidence that whatever country issues debt (borrows) will repay its obligation ... the god of debt requires faith.

The process of business acquires capital to meet demand, it also separates the winners from the losers... the god of capital requires blood.

The Economists don't really know how to deal with this level of human interdependency. Thus they are closer to theologians than scientists.

(SA Phil)

Anonymous said...

=Milo=



SA Phil:

"Using Money is one way. As I suggested it should be possible at some point to use a Computer to replace it."

A computer that keeps track of everyone's want-to-sell and want-to-buy lists and automatically calculates the best trade patterns?

You realize that's a planned economy. AKA communism.

Anyway, a more efficient way to handle the same result would be for people to sell their want-to-sell stuff to a pawn shop, then have the want-to-buy people go look for it at that pawn shop. Even if you can make do with only one centralized pawn shop, I think you would still benefit from having that pawn shop give out some sort of money that it then accepts in return. You might still use your communist supercomputer to determine what price the pawn shop buys and sells each item for. (The pawn shop will be taking some cut of the profit itself, if only to pay for maintaining the computer.)

Once that money exists, occasionally, people will choose to bypass the pawn shop and just trade directly. At least assuming the pawn shop lets them (this could be avoided by having all money be digited rather than carried as cash, so it can't be transferred without approval).

How exactly do you expect this to work better than a non-centralized economy?


"I have been thinking about this for the last few years when it became obvious the Economists in any of the camps don't really know how to "fix" the current slump.

I think it is because the whole system is wrapped up in belief. On a several levels."


I've heard that in a sense, there is a depression because people believe there is a depression.

You think the economy is in a slump, so you hold off on buying anything until prices go back down, which causes the economy to go on a slump.

jollyreaper said...


The Economists don't really know how to deal with this level of human interdependency. Thus they are closer to theologians than scientists.


I've often thought the same. A little more advanced than priests. They're more like alchemists. Sure, the alchemists did make a lot of important discoveries that later got rolled into a real science like chemistry. They could demonstrate enough knowledge about the composition of the physical world that you might suppose their theories on lead and gold could be true. Of course, they were bunk.

Frankly, so much of economics seems like a confidence game but one that could be turned to good or evil.

"Civilization is a very complex system in which we use symbols - words, numbers, figures, and concepts - to represent the real world of nature. We use money to represent wealth. We use the clock to represent time. We use yards and inches to represent space. These are very useful measures. But you can always have too much of a good thing. You can easily confuse the measurement with what you are measuring, such as confusing money with wealth. It is like confusing the menu with dinner. You can become so enchanted with the symbols that you entirely confuse them with reality. This is the disease from which almost all civilized people are suffering. We are, therefore, in the position of eating the menu instead of the dinner, of living in a world of words and symbols. This causes us to relate badly to our material surroundings.

...

Think about the Great Depression. One day everything was going along fine - everybody was pretty wealthy and had plenty to eat - and the next day, suddenly, everybody was in poverty. What happened? Had the farms disappeared? Had the cows vanished into thin air? Had the fish of the sea ceased to exist? Had human beings lost their energy, their skills, and their brains? No. This is what happened: On the morning after the beginning of the Depression, a carpenter came to work, and the foreman said to him, 'Sorry, chum, you can't work today. There ain't no inches.'

The carpenter said, 'What do you mean, there ain't no inches?'

'Yeah,' the foreman said. 'We got lumber, we got metal, but we ain't got no inches.'

'You're crazy,' the carpenter said.

And the foreman replied, 'The trouble with you is you don't understand business.'

jollyreaper said...

What happened in the Great Depression was that human beings confused money with wealth. And they didn't realize that money is a measure of wealth, in exactly the same way that inches are a measure of length. They think it is something that is valuable in and of itself. And as a result of that they get into unbelievable trouble."

source

I'd always marveled at that and Alan Watts put my ill-formed musings into words. In the Great Depression we had people starving to death, starving in America! and yet there was milk being dumped in the sewer, animals destroyed and buried by the government to help prop up prices.

It's the same kind of disbelief I have when looking at a real historical screwed up tyranny. Joseph Stalin wasn't Darth Vader. If he told you to do something and you didn't, he couldn't kill you with his mind. You would most certainly die but someone else would be pulling that trigger.

There's something just twisted and horrifying and human about the thought of your typical tyrant sitting in a room with a group of subordinates and ordering them to kill one. They could simply say no. If every single person decided to just ignore the tyrant, he couldn't do a damn thing. But it's that fear! The fear that someone else will listen, that by being the first to act you have now marked yourself for death. It's the way a man with six bullets in his gun can hold a crowd a hundred-strong at bay -- nobody wants to be the martyr and the first mover will surely be the first to die.

I find it completely fascinating to see when the entire mesmerism of power breaks. The defenestration of Queen Jezebel, the power Stalin maintained in victory and Hitler maintained even unto his suicide, rulers capable of convincing people to follow them into death like Jim Jones. It's astounding to me how seemingly normal, intelligent people can rationalize themselves into going along with this sort of thing, banality of evil and all. But even if it's not something as dramatic as a death cult, the holocaust, or a dystopian dictatorship, you can still find good people going along with crap that just ain't right, they know it, but they still obey.

Damien Sullivan said...

"I have been thinking about this for the last few years when it became obvious the Economists in any of the camps don't really know how to "fix" the current slump."

Obvious? Not to me. The Keynesians have evidence and theory backing up their fixes. What they don't have is politicians who'll listen to them and fully implement the fixes. Though Germany came close, and in fact is doing quite well -- just trying to prevent anyone else in the eurozone from enjoying the same benefit.


Third World... I've spent some time in Chile. GDP/capita $10,000 exchange, $15,000 PPP, 1/3 that of the US, but 10-30 times that of really poor countries. Third World? I dunno. You can get a maid or a good education for your kid for about $4000/year. You can also get fairly reliable electricity and running water and non-corrupt cops and an excellent metro system in the capital, and these days pay rents comparable to those in the US. The inequality is steep, like twice that of the US by one measure. Growth is rapid.

tkinias said...

@SA Phil (in re Traveller 2300):

The owner of the rights I believe is working on a revision.

WP says that Mongoose released a new version just this March.

Add radiators to the space-craft, remove the stealth idea, make some other updates to bring it up on 20 years of real world changes .. who knows?

I think a big challenge for the setting is that there was no global nuclear war in the 1990s. Without the war, it’s very hard to account for France being a great power.

I was never really comfortable with stutterwarp as an FTL tech. The limit on ‘jumps’ always felt very gamey and artificial to me. But I did really like the way it produced the ‘arms’ of exploration...

Plasma guns have to go, too, of course, if we’re going to harden 2300...

Anonymous said...

Damien

Obvious? Not to me. The Keynesians have evidence and theory backing up their fixes

==========

Ahh but those fixes would involve the Austerians giving up their sacred deficit watch. We cant have that.

One problem with the Keynesians is that the government lies about real inflation (among other things). Without an accurate inflation metric you cant know when to back off on the stimulus.

Keynes is also the one who advocated burying gold and then digging it up. Provides twice the employment of just mining it.

Something there doesn't add up.

Still, I suppose there is something to be said for turning on the "money" until everyone is working again.

-----------

Jollyreaper, great story.

One group of Economists would say we borrowed inches for so long we just cant borrow any more. Even though we made them up in the first place.

Another group would say .. it doesn't matter how many inches you borrow .. even if everyone already has 2 houses.


(SA Phil)

Anonymous said...

tkinias,


I think a big challenge for the setting is that there was no global nuclear war in the 1990s. Without the war, it’s very hard to account for France being a great power.

===========

I suppose you could do some variation on resource/energy scarcity scenario.

France having reliable and cheap nuclear power might give it an edge.

Or you could always move the war back 50 or 100 years.

----------

I never used Plasma guns in my games anyhow, heh.

Ill take a look at the revision info.

(SA Phil)

jollyreaper said...

One other thought about post-scarcity. You can divide it into two classes: practical and theoretical. Theoretical post-scarcity means you have a genie in a lamp and anything you can imagine is given to you. You want a palace the size of a city, a personal starship, a private planet, you've got it. That of course is completely impossible even in Star Trek's Federation or the Culture. You could only really swing it in a VR simulation like Red Dwarf's Better Than Life.

Practical post-scarcity would work on the buffet model. Am I allowed to sample everything at the buffet? Yes. As many plates as I want? Yes. What is my limit? What can fit in my stomach without coming back up my esophagus. No doggie bags, no stuffing shrimp in my pockets.

Seeing as it's practical, resources are not unlimited, even though every citizen has access to more riches via personal and communal property than any sultan could dream of. But no one is launching a private space probe to Pluto on his own dime. That's just not possible. But people can pool their resources, voting with your dollars as it were. However much surplus GDP the post-scarcity society has beyond meeting the needs for clothing, shelter, and food for the population, it's divided among everyone. You like space exploration, historic costume dramas and archaeology? That's how you allocate your votes. One citizen makes a sufficient case for a Pluto probe, he gets a Pluto probe. You like the pitch a director makes for a brand new costume drama, you cast your vote and maybe he'll get enough to pay for it.

It seems a bit insane on the face of it but what do you have when there are more people in a society than there are jobs to go around and their efforts are no longer needed to keep the lights on and farms operating? It might not fit the scifi standard for post-scarcity but it's certainly different from the way things used to work. it's like an abundance paradox.

tkinias said...

Damien Sullivan:

Third World... I've spent some time in Chile. GDP/capita $10,000 exchange, $15,000 PPP, 1/3 that of the US, but 10-30 times that of really poor countries. Third World? I dunno.

Chile and Argentina are pretty much right on the bottom edge of being developed countries. There was a mention in a recent Foreign Policy article that no country poorer than Argentina had successfully maintained a democratic government for more than seven or so years, but countries richer than that seemed to become stably democratic once they made the transition.

Damien Sullivan said...

"no country poorer than Argentina had successfully maintained a democratic government for more than seven or so years"

What's India, chopped liver?
Costa Rica has $11,000 PPP, which is 2/3 of Chile, and of course these countries have gotten richer over time.

"One problem with the Keynesians is that the government lies about real inflation"

Citation very much needed. Especially that we now have the Billion Prices Project, an independent project to measure inflation... giving about the same numbers as the US government.

Argentina's probably been lying about inflation, but there are specific signs of that.

"Keynes is also the one who advocated burying gold and then digging it up. Provides twice the employment of just mining it."

I think you're badly misremembering what he said.

He did say that, in the sort of liquidity trap depression he diagnosed, burying barrels of cash for people to dig up would be an effective stimulus of sorts, getting money into a money starved economy. He also said, right after that, that of course paying people to do useful things like build houses or infrastructure would be far better. In real life, we've often gotten effective stimulus from military spending, which is arguably even more wasteful than burying barrels of cash, but still works to pull out of a liquidity trap.

tkinias said...

jollyreaper:

However much surplus GDP the post-scarcity society has beyond meeting the needs for clothing, shelter, and food for the population, it's divided among everyone. You like space exploration, historic costume dramas and archaeology? That's how you allocate your votes. One citizen makes a sufficient case for a Pluto probe, he gets a Pluto probe. You like the pitch a director makes for a brand new costume drama, you cast your vote and maybe he'll get enough to pay for it.

I think this winds up looking a lot like money—something akin to Alaska’s Permanent Fund payouts to residents. The thing is, most alternative exchange systems wind up just being another form of money.

tkinias said...

Damien Sullivan:

What's India, chopped liver?
Costa Rica has $11,000 PPP, which is 2/3 of Chile, and of course these countries have gotten richer over time.


Will look up the article so I can be more precise. The emphasis was on nondemocratic states successfully democratizing, so India may have been neglected as it has never stopped being a democracy since independence. Costa Rica may also have been neglected as it’s had a functioning democracy for many decades IIRC.

Anonymous said...

Damien,

Citation very much needed. Especially that we now have the Billion Prices Project, an independent project to measure inflation... giving about the same numbers as the US government.

--------

Interesting I hadn't heard about that one. Ill look it up.

And interesting source of Government reporting shenanigans is http://www.shadowstats.com/

Which usually compares how the government currently measures things to other ways they measured it in the past .. The more recent metrics nearly always trending towards a more rosy picture.

There is an inflation graph on the first page. But I think its their unemployment stuff that is the most interesting.

You would want an accurate unemployment model for the stimulus too I suppose.

--------

The gold story was probably me remembering a paraphrase mentioned by another author. Probably something from MMT, I find that stuff interesting.

(SA Phil)

Anonymous said...

Another interesting wrinkle about inflation...

If you really had near zero inflation prices would go down .. not remain the same.

Due to gains in productivity, reducing real costs.

I am not sure that bit makes it into the models.

(SA Phil)

tkinias said...

@Damien Sullivan:

OK, I found it. It’s Foreign Affairs (not Foreign Policy), and it’s Inglehart and Welzel, “How Development Leads to Democracy,” Mar/Apr 2009, reprinted in the Jan/Feb 2012 90th anniversary issue. Here’s the quote:

Thus, among the scores of countries that democratized around 1990, most were middle-income countries: almost all the high-income countries already were democracies, and few low-income countries made the transition. Moreover, among the countries that democratized between 1970 and 1990, democracy has survived in every country that made the transition when it was at the level of Argentina today or higher; among the countries that made the transition when they were below this level, democracy had an average life expectancy of only eight years.

India and Costa Rica had already been democratic for some time in 1970...

Anonymous said...

=Milo=



So... what changed in 1970 that made democratic reforms after that point work worse than those before?

Thucydides said...

A lot of what makes poor nations fail (or fail to achieve takeoff) is basically cultural. As many people noted, there are pockets of wealth even in poor nations, but these pockets generally are not "inclusive", nor are the members of these pockets particularly interested in the welfare of the people outside the pocket.

Arguments about resources and resource scarcity are nonsensical in my view; nations may have rich resource bases but fail to exploit them, or exploit them for the benefit of the Nomenklatura, or decide to let others exploit the base. Sone nations like Japan are very wealthy without any real resource base. For a historical example without current political baggage, comparing Mycenaean Greece with the Classical civilization that followed we see the same people, speaking the same language and even worshiping most of the same gods on the same land, yet the different cultural organization of the classical Polis made it much more wealthy than the semi feudal "Palace culture" of the Mycenaeans.

WRT economists being able to "solve" anything; economics is a descriptive science, but since we are dealing with a system with so many interdependent and interacting parts (most working in non linear relationships with each other) that it is impossible to describe and understand all the relationships. This is why Austrian economists are fervent believers in the "Local Knowledge Problem" http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/hykKnw1.html

Even in principle, it will be impossible to relate all the factors and interactions of a complex economy (a supremely massively parallel hypercomputer might be able to use all its processing power to just keep up in real time), so expecting economists to be able to do anything other than providing broad "policy prescriptions" is expecting too much. The failed $800 billion stimulus package in the US or the continuing economic struggles in the EU zone should be sufficient warning of this.

And I will weigh in with Tony that money is non cultural (although the form of money might be), simply by observing that some non human animals also use "money" (brilliant pebbles and shiny objects) to "buy" the affections of attractive mates.

jollyreaper said...

@tkinias

I like your idea about quasi crapsack rocketpunk. If I understand properly, the premise is that the Cold War space race continued under its own momentum and pushed space development to where it was “supposed” to be by now—and then it turned out to be a house of cards (or a “space bubble”).

Exactly. But given how many people are up there, things are still carried on by the inertia.

The question at this point is now that people are up there and they have a separate life, can they find a means of earning a living?

In the setting I’m working on there’s some element of that. It’s not at all crapsack, but the economic motivation for space development is not at all clear. It’s largely state-sponsored and a matter of national ego; it’s a net drain on the economies of the great powers. There’s a lot of money to be made, though, and the economic sectors who benefit use national-glory narratives to sell the projects.


That's the scenario the Human Reach uses. Space colonies are a really, really long-term investment but are considered prestige projects and necessary for national defense. A really bad asteroid strike that killed millions was the catalyst for this. Just like 9-11 was used to scare us into wasting $3 trillion on unnecessary wars, the practical demonstration of just how fragile human existence on this single planet is helped to spur all the space development. And why did the powers that be want to do that? Heavily invested in aerospace, making crap-tons of money. And all of the orbital infrastructure is tied towards settling new worlds.

The other assumption he made is that oxy-nitro atmospheres on earth-like worlds can occur more than once. Most worlds haven't advanced much beyond the oxygen crisis and only one has fossil evidence of advanced vertebrate life. Not every planet is fit for habitation but the ones that are just need a transplanted terran ecology.

Is it a 100% likely scenario? No, but it's required to tell the story he wants and he does a good job supporting it.

It’s not necessary for space to be a net economic benefit to society as a whole for it to be beneficial to some subsector, and if the subsector which benefits wields sufficient political power, then space development will happen.

The military-industrial complex is serving this purpose right now.

The obvious corollary is Victorian/Third Republic imperialism. Most colonies, as I understand it, were a net drain on the resources of the imperial power, but they enormously enriched some influential groups and provided steady employment for others.


Yeah. Some people are making money by selling picks and shovels to the gold rush, some people are making money because they jumped the few claims that panned out, a very few miners struck gold and defended their claim to become wealthy, etc.

I think any realistic setting needs to show the gaps between the official story for why something is happening, the real reason why it's happening, how things don't go according to plan, and the consequences. Doublethink is important, like the cop who sees himself as upholding the law and a good man even as he accepts payoffs. "Hey, the guy paying me isn't the real scumbag. It's those other guys, the ones whose heads I crack. And I'm not paid enough, I have a family to support. And the sexual favors I accept from hookers to let them work the corner, somehow the very act we're both consenting to makes her a slut-whore while I, the person enjoying it, somehow contrives to feel morally superior."

Anonymous said...

tkinias,

And I will weigh in with Tony that money is non cultural (although the form of money might be), simply by observing that some non human animals also use "money" (brilliant pebbles and shiny objects) to "buy" the affections of attractive mates.

----

I wouldnt call that money use -- more like a bauble being used in barter. The mates don't then use those shiny pebbles to buy something else.

Still cultural adaptations are necessarily limited to humans. We just happen to be the smartest animals on the planet.

I feel many of the distinctions between humans and all other animals are often exagerated.

(SA Phil)

Anonymous said...

Still cultural adaptations are necessarily limited to humans. We just happen to be the smartest animals on the planet.

----

Should read *NOT necessarily.

Sorry.

(SA Phil)

Tony said...

jollyreaper:

"For the record, this is exactly the sort of thing that really makes people see red. This is what I'm talking about with condescension. It removes the possibility of having a productive exchange of ideas because there's no room for give and take, just lecturing to people.

Your last comment to me implied that if I think I'm being condescended to by people, maybe it's because I have very stupid ideas. Why is it everyone else can have fun with purple vs green debates but things get contentious wih you? It's not what you're saying but the way you say it.

I'm going to recuse myself from any further comments. There's nothing to be gained from it. I'd meant to do so already but what you said compelled me to speak."


Come, let us reason together...

What would you have me do? Write long tracts? Would that not be "lecturing"? Would people not, at the end of it, question my premises anyway? What would I do then? Send them off to the interwebs to confirm what I say is not my idea alone, no?

WRT an exchange of ideas, if you want an exchange, you have to impress the other party that what you have is valuable. I want you to understand that what comes next is not about you, in any way, shape, or form. It's about your ideas. This is not the first place I've heard them. For most it's not even the tenth. For some, it's not even the hundredth. They are totally devalued from my perspective through overuse, misuse, and abuse. If you want to exchange valuable ideas with me, please, please, please offer something original. I ask you, humbly and sincerely, is that too much to expect?

Tony said...

Let's see...

Money has no value in itself. That's where we start going off the rails when we talk about it. Money is a tool that has utility as a store of value. To a certain degree, it is an agreed utility. But that's a contract that people make. Yes, that contract is sometimes enforced by fiat, but fiat in itself relies on it's own contract -- that the fiat authority is trusted to make the right decisions and not invalidate the utility of money through its actions.

Trying to cast money as a religion or an arbitrary cultural construct misses the point. It's just a tool of exchange. anybody that thinks it has intrinsic value is wrong, and either self-deluded or ignorant. And just because people are wrong about money, and make mistakes with it, that doesn't mean it's something it's not. If I believe that a thermonuclear device is a god, that doesn't mean that it is.

Anonymous said...

=Milo=



Thucydides:

"And I will weigh in with Tony that money is non cultural (although the form of money might be), simply by observing that some non human animals also use "money""

Some non human animals have cultures.



SA Phil:

"I feel many of the distinctions between humans and all other animals are often exagerated."

Eeyup.

When I compare our behavior against that of other animals, I tend to find our behavior is just "the same but more". Other animals exhibit the same basic types of behaviors we do, but they aren't as good at it.

Anonymous said...

Tony,

anybody that thinks it has intrinsic value is wrong, and either self-deluded or ignorant.

-------
Many would say the same thing about religion.

Hence my point.

The biggest part of your objections from my point of view is you disagree with my terminology, and were making a big effort to argue why it is wrong.

Instead, perhaps, dont worry so much about the terms I used and you may see I was actually saying some of the same things you were. Although admittadely in a much different way. This tangent started out with me agreeing with you actually.

I think a lot of people are misguided by money. And the effect of that actually degrades economic performance.

(SA Phil)

Damien Sullivan said...

"the different cultural organization of the classical Polis made it much more wealthy than the semi feudal "Palace culture" of the Mycenaeans."

Technology might have had a wee bit to play in that. You're comparing Bronze to Iron age, literally.

'expecting economists to be able to do anything other than providing broad "policy prescriptions" is expecting too much'

Those broad policies can still do a lot. Raise the interest rate, the economy slows down. Lower it, the economy speeds up. This has been tested massively, despite Austrian denial of empirical reality and methods.

"failed $800 billion stimulus package in the US"

Its failure was *predicted* by Keynesian economists -- it was 1/3 the size they said it should be. Voila, it probably braked our descent, but it didn't pull us out -- just as predicted. (It was also offset by shrinking state/local spending.) Don't blame economists for the failure of politicians.

"continuing economic struggles in the EU zone"

Struggles predicted by the same economists, who are likewise being ignored in favor of an austerian dogma.

'some non human animals also use "money" (brilliant pebbles and shiny objects) to "buy" the affections of attractive mates.'

A single trade is barter at best, not money. The female bird does not take the pebbles and 'buy' something else with them. In reality, the male's showing off his reproductive fitness, like growing peacock feathers.

Anonymous said...

Tony,

WRT an exchange of ideas, if you want an exchange, you have to impress the other party that what you have is valuable. I want you to understand that what comes next is not about you, in any way, shape, or form. It's about your ideas. This is not the first place I've heard them. For most it's not even the tenth. For some, it's not even the hundredth. They are totally devalued from my perspective through overuse, misuse, and abuse. If you want to exchange valuable ideas with me, please, please, please offer something original. I ask you, humbly and sincerely, is that too much to expect?

----------

Wow, that seems pretty insulting.

Do you feel your ideas are so much fresher and more original then?

How is Jollyreaper or any of us supposed to know what ideas you have heard before?

Maybe you could publish a list and we can get our ideas precleared for originality in advance.

(SA Phil)

Tony said...

SA Phil:

"I think a lot of people are misguided by money. And the effect of that actually degrades economic performance."

Certainly. But that doesn't make money an arbitrary cultural invention or a religion. All it is, all it ever was is a tool used to make exchange easier and to some degree more efficient.

And terminology is important, precisely because allusion relies on a common base of experience and/or education. If you want to explicitly say that religion could serve as a good metaphor for how many people view the money and economy, I would wholeheartedly agree with you. When you say it is a religion or an arbitrary cultural construct, that's just not the case, for all of the reasons I've given.

"Wow, that seems pretty insulting.

Do you feel your ideas are so much fresher and more original then?

How is Jollyreaper or any of us supposed to know what ideas you have heard before?

Maybe you could publish a list and we can get our ideas precleared for originality in advance."


It's not intended to be insulting. it's intended to provide context.

Simply put, I don't subscribe to the convenient fiction that we're all equal here on the web. The inconvenient truth is that we're all who we really are. Some of us have been places and experienced things, had more in-depth (I won't say "better") educations in certain subjects, than others.

All I'm trying to say is that I wish people would slow down and reason out wahte they're saying, and put it in their own words, rather than toss off some cliche they heard or read somewhere.

Anonymous said...

Tony,

Simply put, I don't subscribe to the convenient fiction that we're all equal here on the web.

-------

You should be careful to not allow that belief to bleed through to an assertion that somehow your opinions are more important than others'

(SA Phil)

Anonymous said...

Tony,

And terminology is important, precisely because allusion relies on a common base of experience and/or education. If you want to explicitly say that religion could serve as a good metaphor for how many people view the money and economy, I would wholeheartedly agree with you. When you say it is a religion or an arbitrary cultural construct, that's just not the case, for all of the reasons I've given.

===========

But I am saying something in between.

In many ways it functions like a religion. Especially because of the level of human involvement But I am not saying it is a religeon.

(SA Phil)

Tony said...

SA Phil:

"You should be careful to not allow that belief to bleed through to an assertion that somehow your opinions are more important than others'"

Point taken. But when I get assertive, it's not because I think my opinions are more important, it's because I'm convinced by both my education and experience that they are more accurate.

Why do I get on JR for cliches? Precisely because they are cliches. They presume that the reader, implicitly and without reservation, accepts all of the thinking that goes into them. To me, using them is at least as rude as being too assertive. One can say everything embodied in a cliche, and in not too many more words, but present it as one's own opinion, in one's own words.

Tony said...

SA Phil:

"But I am saying something in between.

In many ways it functions like a religion. Especially because of the level of human involvement But I am not saying it is a religeon."


Since ISTR that you're not religious yourself, that seems like a distinction without a difference. "Like" and "is" are pretty much the same thing when you consider the model to be nothing more than a fantasy to begin with.

And, once again, how a tool is treated in the minds of people that don't understand it doesn't make it an untool, or even less of a tool. It just means that people who are mistaken about it's utility and effect can't use it efficiently, if at all. IOW, one has to separate the existence and inherrent utility of mechanism from attitudes about it.

Anonymous said...

Tony,

Since ISTR that you're not religious yourself, that seems like a distinction without a difference.

========

Why would whether or not I am religious change the distinction?

Why cant a cultural adpatation be a tool? Is language not a tool?

(SA Phil)

Anonymous said...

=Milo=



I'm not even sure what we're arguing about anymore.

Anonymous said...

Tony,

Point taken. But when I get assertive, it's not because I think my opinions are more important, it's because I'm convinced by both my education and experience that they are more accurate.

-----------

Among other things, I have seen you argue physics with a physicist.

I wonder what the bar is before you become convinced in the way you describe. And if sometimes it might be a bit low.

(SA Phil)

Tony said...

SA Phil:

"Why would whether or not I am religious change the distinction?"

Because something that is "like" a fantasy is essentially the same thing as a fantasy, in that the most important property of a fantasy is that it is fiction. That makes anything like it a fiction too.

"Why cant a cultural adpatation be a tool? Is language not a tool?"

First of all, language isn't a cultural adaptation. It's a learned behavior that every human (who isn't handicapped in some way) has an inherrent facility for. Differnet cultures may have different languages, but they all have some form of spoken language.

WRT cultural adaptation and money, we're going to have to part ways if you can't accept that money, as a tool belonging to a technology, is simply not a cultural adaptation. IMO, no tool is. Culture may inform the tool's form to some extent, and it's relative value within a culture, but a tool is still just a tool. If it has a job, it exists, in any culture.

Tony said...

SA Phil:

"Among other things, I have seen you argue physics with a physicist."

I'm not entirely ignorant of physics, you know. As I recall, the argument was over what the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics means. Physicists themselves argue over it. It's not exactly as settled a question as e = mc^2.

"I wonder what the bar is before you become convinced in the way you describe. And if sometimes it might be a bit low."

There's always that possibility. I'm certainly not the smartest person I know. I'm not even educated to the breadth of subjects I could comprehend, even ones I've studied long and hard. That's why I keep saying that if somebody has a better argument, I'd be happy to hear it.

Anonymous said...

Tony,

First of all, language isn't a cultural adaptation. It's a learned behavior that every human (who isn't handicapped in some way) has an inherrent facility for.

-------
This is how I interpret what you have said throughout the entire tangent ==>

SA Phil, your term is unacceptable because reason A supposedly makes your term unacceptable because I said so.

It is entirely implausible that I might not have the same undestanding of said term, nor it is even possible such things might be open for interpration.

The world is starkly black and white, grey is merely a percentage of dither.

I am convinced this is a true fact, not because I am a cultural antropologist, nor a social scientist, but because my other non-expert learning have made me convinced it is so.

=============

I am sorry -- I simply disagree. But it is just my opinion.

(SA Phil)

Anonymous said...

Tony,

I'm not entirely ignorant of physics, you know.

------

I didnt mean to suggest that you were. However - I didnt take away from that exchange you even had an open mind that the physicist might be right.

(SA Phil)

Tony said...

SA Phil:

"This is how I interpret what you have said throughout the entire tangent ==>

SA Phil, your term is unacceptable because reason A supposedly makes your term unacceptable because I said so.

It is entirely implausible that I might not have the same undestanding of said term, nor it is even possible such things might be open for interpration.

The world is starkly black and white, grey is merely a percentage of dither.

I am convinced this is a true fact, not because I am a cultural antropologist, nor a social scientist, but because my other non-expert learning have made me convinced it is so."


Going all the way back to high school technical drawing class, communication begins with agreement on terms. What I keep saying is that a tool is not a cultural adaptation, nor is the technology in which the tools works. You don't seem to agree with taht interpretation, but we don't discuss a commonly agreeable set of terms. You just keep bypassing the terminology and continue to make points as if we had agreement on terminology, when in fact we don't.

So, taking things a step at a time, define cultural adapation, and explain whay a technology an its tools qualify.

Tony said...

SA Phil

"I didnt mean to suggest that you were. However - I didnt take away from that exchange you even had an open mind that the physicist might be right."

I'm sure -- and I even said -- that he was right within the framework he preferred. What Luke was doing was trying to tell us that the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics was exaclty the same thing as the one he preferred -- which it isn't.

Anonymous said...

In the interest of not wearing out my welcome any more -- I'll bow out on this exchange now. I will read the responses. Hopefully I dont get beat up too badly. heh.

I actually think you provide a lot of useful things to this blog Tony.

But I think Jollyreaper does as well. And I don't find his scenarios grating at all.

Ill apologize to Rick for being a bit too combative in the exchange today.

(SA Phil)

Tony said...

I'll go along with that, on all counts. And make my apology as well, explicitly. wasting time grinding gears that won't mesh. Sorry.

Rick said...

precisely because they are cliches. They presume that the reader, implicitly and without reservation, accepts all of the thinking that goes into them. To me, using them is at least as rude as being too assertive.

I suspect that everyone falls into cliches, including both of us. And assertiveness is very problematic in this medium, as broad experience has shown.

The Internet is notorious for flame wars - often over trivial disagreements. And discussion here often touches on contentious subjects - a feature, not a bug, but only so long as people show restraint.

A little diplomacy can go a long ways to avoid needless blow-ups.

Anonymous said...

At the risk of throwing gasoline on a fire: money is a tool; it is a physical symbol of a measure of value,(like the Ohm is a measure of electrical resistance) and all material things or real services can be refernced to it; the cultural part comes in when assigning those values.

As far as economics goes, most people believe it is a complex mechinism or akin to a mathimatical algorythem; from what I've observed, it is more like an organism, and one that is constantly growing and evolving.

The big difference between Antarctica and Mars is that it takes thousands of times the amount of effort to get to Mars than to Antarctica; once you are on Mars (or Titan, or Europa or Callisto), it is easier to stay than to go back to Earth;people at those research and/or mining bases there would have much more reason to stay and raise families than to go for a couple of years, spend a couple of years there, then take another couple of years to return to Earth; I would make more sense to many people to just go and make the base their permanent home.

Anyway, those are my opinions.

Ferrell

Thucydides said...

Sorry Damien, but I'm not buying into Keynesian dogma either.

Setting aside the idea about how "big" the stimulus should be (and now that the Administration has increased the debt by close to $7 trillion by the end of this term and unemployment (U3) is still over 10% it is difficult to argue that spending on this scale has had a positive effect), I can go back to my high school economics, which was just at the time President Reagan took office (and high school had more rigorous courses).

We learned such things as the Phillips curve and IS:LM , and Keynesian dogma that claimed that you could trade inflation for unemployment. The reality outside the classroom window was much different; the stagflation which plagued the US and Canadian economies at the end of the 1970's simply was impossible under Keynesian macroeconomic theory. Since the huge US recovery was also impossible under the standard Keynesian macro models, it seems classical economists might have been on to something after all.

Now F. A. Hayek looked at the other end of things, demonstrating how lax credit leads to misallocation of resources and sets up the conditions for a bust. This seems to describe the situation at the end of the Roaring 20's and the Housing Bubble prior to 2008. Once again, this isn't all the answer (far too many interdependent variables), so should be given some careful consideration.

For an entertaining lesson in macro, here is the Keynes vs Hayek argument in song: http://econstories.tv/2010/06/22/fear-the-boom-and-bust/

jollyreaper said...

And here's Keynes vs. Hayek round 2.

Awesome stuff.

Tony said...

It's all just dueling theories IMO. Supply-side works, but has costs. tax and spens works, but has costs. Laissez faire works, but has costs. It all depends on what you want to optimize for.

Damien Sullivan said...

I wasn't around, so I don't know what people were saying at the time. However in retrospect it seems clear the 1970s were outside the Keynesian context, which is about depressions caused by the paradox of thrift and liquidity trap and such. The 1970s faced unexpectedly high energy prices, which is not a problem central banks can deal with.

Your high school economics class is perhaps not the best touchstone.

"Since the huge US recovery was also impossible under the standard Keynesian macro models"

I've never even heard that. But while Reagan's tax cut was passed for supply side voodoo economics reasons, the lavish deficit spending he did would make sense in Keynesian terms too.

As for spending not working: the drop in aggregate demand was comparable to the Great Depression. Unemployment being 10% instead of 25% seems like a positive effect.

And the US is doing better than the EU, which has been less Keynesian overall this time around. Within Europe Germany has been spending more, and doing better, though of course it has other advantages too. Every country that has implemented austerian dogma has made its situation worse, just as Keynes would predict.

"all just dueling theories"

Like evolution's just a theory?

Supply side economics was supposed to produce so much growth that the tax cuts would reduce the deficit. It *failed*.

Tony said...

Damien Sullivan:

"Like evolution's just a theory?"

Evolution doesn't have competing theories that adequately explain the evidence. IMO no current economic theory adequately explains the breadth and depth of the economy. Neither does any theory make adequate predictions.

I personally think it's because theories treat the economy as a laboratory, with a very simple and consistent set of variables. But the real world economy is not constrained in such fashion. So theories fail. Then people make excuses why they fail without realizing that even if they identify the failure mode correctly the failure could not have been avoided, for reasons that the theory doesn't take into account.

"Supply side economics was supposed to produce so much growth that the tax cuts would reduce the deficit. It *failed*."

Like you said, you weren't around. The theory, as advertised, was that leaving people with more disposable income, they'd spend it and stimulate business, prospering everybody. The supposition that it would lead to reduced deficits, even if it was talked about -- and I can't recall whether it was or wasn't -- was orphaned by increased deficit spending.

Now, the deficit spending, like defense spending, was not succeptible to economic analysis. It happened for political reasons largely independent of any economic considerations.

See, using the above, I could kidnap your own excuse that the theory was never implemented as designed. And to the degree that that is true, Keynesian economics are just as much "voodoo" as any other theory, because the real world never allows implementation as designed.

Anonymous said...

Going one step beyond Keynes is MMT..

Which is very interesting. I'd suggest reading this ebook

http://moslereconomics.com/wp-content/powerpoints/7DIF.pdf

Basically according to this theory the government only issues debt in a fiat currency because it is expected to.

There is actually no reason it couldn't just create the money out of thin air.

I suspect there would be big problems getting people to buy into the theory and without the "faith" (insert whatever word) to prop up the money's value it could go south.

Anyway it is worth reading I think.

Although like every theory - it has to be missing something IMO.

(SA Phil)

Tony said...

SA Phil:

"Going one step beyond Keynes is MMT..

Basically according to this theory the government only issues debt in a fiat currency because it is expected to.

There is actually no reason it couldn't just create the money out of thin air.

I suspect there would be big problems getting people to buy into the theory and without the "faith" (insert whatever word) to prop up the money's value it could go south.

Although like every theory - it has to be missing something IMO."


As I pointed out the last time this was brought up, when you introduce more money into the economy without growing the economy appreciably, the money devalues. Quickly. This Mosler guy is essentially advocating the Weimar deflation as a positive government policy.

Tony said...

My last post meant to say "inflation", not "deflation".

Anonymous said...

Actually not really.

He proposes using taxes as what amounts to a money sink

Print money / issue taxes / closely monitor inflation.

Inflation goes up .. print less money and/or raise taxes.

Unless issuing debt is somehow deflationary -- that part isnt much different then Keynes. But MMT is okay with issuing debt it just says it is unecessary.

The growth is supposed to come in by having as much money as is needed to maximize employment/ Consumer spending.

You would really have to read it to critisize the ideas rather than critisize my retelling of the ideas- since I cant really relay the whole thing.

(SA Phil)

Anonymous said...

He is actually advocating using the War time and Post World War 2 US inflation as a possitive goverment policy.

Say 1941-1970

(SA Phil)

Tony said...

SA Phil:

"You would really have to read it to critisize the ideas rather than critisize my retelling of the ideas- since I cant really relay the whole thing."

Ohhh, Phil...you mean you want me to do my own research? Say it ain't so.

In any case, unless the real size of the economy (in terms of available goods and services) changes, changing the amount of money in the system doesn't do anything but change the amount of value each increment can store.

But whatever the government does to size the money supply, it's all just expedients. The government uses whatever ones seem to work.

The problem comes with the assertion that if the government needs money, it doesn't need to issue debt or tax, it can just print and spend. Okay, start printing, but how do you get the money back out of the economy, so that it doesn't cause inflation? Taxation and debt, right? And once you have the money on hand, what do you do with it? You can't dev/null it, even as entries in an electronic ledger, it has an existence. Or if you do destroy it, what you're doing is in effect the same thing as taxation and issuing debt, with the added steps of creation and destruction. Why not just move it between accounts?

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