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Jun 6, 2021Liked by Noah Smith

Three fantasy series that might count:

The Dagger & The Coin by Daniel Abraham (also one of the writers of The Expanse). One of the main characters is a banker and a fair amount of the plot revolves around banking.

The Baru Cormorant series by Seth Dickinson. Baru is an Imperial Accountant in a colonial power that conquers via trade and economic manipulation.

Orconomics by Zachary Pike. A pretty straightforward satire of modern investment banking in a Dungeons & Dragons type world. Fantasy quests are treated as investment vehicles by pension funds who bankroll the adventure in exchange for shares of the spoils.

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I didn't expect Foundation, and as much as I love it for its charms, I agree with your general take. The one author I wish you'd cover, though, is Kim Stanley Robinson. His most recent, The Ministry for the Future, plays out over the next several decades and deals with humanity's societal and economic transformation in response to devastating climate change. You seem to appreciate Doctorow's thinking (as do I) and he gave it a rave review.

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In the spirit of “The Disposessed”, “Vagabonds” by Hao Jingfang is pretty good.

It’s about life on a Martian colony which is run something like a Singapore-style pseudo-democracy. It’s not exactly totalitarian but society is very regimented and organized around scientific and artistic excellence. Something like if a university was a whole society. Interesting contrast to Anarres.

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As a Russian Lit major turned Econ PhD student, may I humbly submit Viktor Pelevin’s book “Generation П” (for non-Russian readers, published in English as “Homo Zapiens” (US ed.) and “Babylon” (UK ed.)- the latter is my preferred translation)? Not only is it a fascinating social critique of consumer capitalism set in post-Soviet Russia, but it also has some chilling premonitions of deep fakes, election manipulation and a post truth world (bearing in mind it was written in 1999). If you haven’t read it, I’d strongly recommend!

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Seeing the list of all these books made me sad, in the sense that I cannot afford to read them all. That is because when I was of 15 years of age in 1964, my grandfather's bookshop, 'Smart & Mookerdum' in Rangoon,Burma was misappropiated,stolen or nationalised by the very thugs and thieves who are killing innocent people including women and children in Myanmar/Burma today even. Those days as a young man, I was encouraged to read and I could just pick any book to read and bring it back to the bookshop in perfect condition. Electronics and Science Fiction were my genre. Presently I have a Kindle Ebook but the beautiful smell of books and printed matter can't be replaced as such.

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> 1. A Deepness in the Sky, by Vernor Vinge

I do like this book, but I think maybe modern readers would be mad about the part where the villains use nanomachines to give people autism.

> Lucifer's Hammer is a story about a comet hitting Earth, and the aftermath. It's notable for its quaint Reaganite conservative politics (it came out in 1977), and does make a couple of glaring economic mistakes

Larry Niven stories were always very STEM-nerdy (lacking women or having them be male gazey, story is about a guy trapped in a high school physics problem, etc), and seemed to just grow into a crank over time. In the 90s he wrote a book Fallen Angels where the villains are the Green Party who have banned science or something and ruined the world by trying to stop climate change.

I want to say Iain Banks and Culture might count, since he was the best at sincerely trying to write a post-scarcity world - but he mostly did that by carefully not explaining how it'd work. So maybe the economics are hiding in the missing parts.

> But the Game of Thrones books (actually called A Song of Ice and Fire, though few use that name anymore) are really the only fantasy novels I can think of that deal with economics in an interesting way

Japanese fantasy/light novels/anime are usually about some obsession of the author's, when they're not about being trapped in a video game - this means even when they're bad they're better than all the 90s Western fantasy I used to read, which were just 1000 pages of stuff happening to a guy plus there's some races copied from LOTR. Spice and Wolf, Maoyuu, Log Horizon are all excuses for the author to teach (basic) economics.

There's also Dr. Stone, which is written for kids but is amazing. It's a primitive world scifi about restarting the tech tree from scratch.

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An economic catastrophe—a refluence—can be triggered as easily by a speck as a rogue AI, something the Federation has learnt to its cost. Hence the regulators. But the regulators can’t factor in those rare individuals who have an intuitive grasp of the market, people who could single-handedly bring about another refluence, people like Nicholas…..

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Ministry for the future by Kim Stanley Robinson is a climate change, tackled by finance and economics, it's bleak but might actually be our best hope. New York 2140 and 2312 are follow ups. (Or this might be a prequel)

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Just found this, have read most of them, and agree.

Had to mention that Stand on Zanzibar is one of my all time favorites. I had a print copy that I read so often that I wore it out, and now I reread my ePub of it at least every other year.

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For free market enthusiasts, Poul Anderson is your guy. Pretty much all the stories featuring Van Rijn are about a problem that governments either ignore or try to fight without being very effective, but then this space merchant comes, thanks to his genius superior brain finds a way to make a profit solving the problem, and everybody lives happily ever after.

I know it sounds a lot like Ayn Rand, but it's actually readable and enjoyable.

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I’m surprised no one in the comments has mentioned Liu Cixin’s Three Body Problem trilogy. It’s a game theorist’s dream, and such an interesting outlook on cosmic geopolitics, the role of individuals vs institutions in shaping history, etc. Highly recommended!

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My partner was recently re-reading Dune, in anticipation of the (sadly delayed) new movie. I was struck by how much Dune, like Foundation, is written in this mid-century period when people still imagined some LaPlacean demon that could predict the future with great computation power, without realizing the extreme difficulties due to chaos/complexity/sensitive dependence on initial conditions that would become trendy a few decades later.

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Have you looked at the Archives of Varok series (https://archivesofvarok.com/) by Cary Neeper. Dr. Neeper (microbiology, not economics) takes a serious look at Green Economics, especially in the second book Web of Varok. [Full disclosure, Cary Neeper is my Aunt, but I've thoroughly enjoyed the books.]

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I think you are a bit too hard on Asimov and his fictitious psychohistory. It is not described as being super-deterministic, but rather as actually stocasthic in nature. Also "Foundation" trilogy (like all other Sci-fi) was very much a product of its time and place. The USA of the 1940-50' ies generally had a positive and positivistic view on the natural sciences, and indeed social sciences and economics, were regarded as "immature" disciplines, which just ought to emulate natural science, to "get it right". Asimov later seems to have abadoned this rather simplistic view. But Asimovs Foundation besides, I think that this list is lacking Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy. There is quite a lot of discussion of economics on those novels.

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Really, I was hoping to find The Unincorporated Man in this list. Great story and full on economics lesson in one. Great stuff on VR too

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LE Modesitt,s books on Ecological Worlds - and the economics of ecological societies - come to mind. Worth perusing - especially with the current focus on Carbon taxes, environmental credits, Green parties, etc. What does a future economy look like - once we have destroyed the current one - with profligate living.

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