19.18: How to Build Fictional Economies
Sometimes we know the action and themes of your story, but you don’t know how to build an economy that supports those. Well today, we explain just how to do that! What are some questions you can ask yourself about the worth of certain goods and services in the world you’re building? What would a post-scarcity world look like and ask of your characters and how would it shape their wants? We loved recording this episode, it brought up so many interesting questions for us, and we hope it does the same for you!
Thing of the Week:
Bury Your Gays by Chuck Tingle
Homework:
Come up with three catch phrases that someone who grew up in your economy would know. For example the difference between “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch” vs. “See it, fix it.”
A Reminder!
That starting next week (May 12th!), we’ll be focusing on Worldbuilding and reading A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine. If you’re going to buy this book, we have this bookshop link available for you to do so! (If not, go support your local library!) https://bookshop.org/lists/close-readings-season-19
Credits: Your hosts for this episode were Max Gladstone, Amal El-Mohtar, Mary Robinette Kowal, and DongWon Song. It was produced by Emma Reynolds, recorded by Marshall Carr, Jr., and mastered by Alex Jackson.
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Transcript
Key points: Economics is the study of the rules that make a world work. What are the scarcities, what are the resources available? The law of unintended consequences. Radioactive kaiju manatees stomping across Florida. What is your incentive mechanism? Trade economies, reputational economies, gift economies. The tragedy of the commons. Arguing about who gets the check. Pay it forward. TANSTAAFL.
[Season 19, Episode 18]
[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.
[Mary Robinette] Hey, listeners. We want your input on season 20. Which, I have to be honest, does not sound like a real number. What elements of the craft do you want us to talk about? What episode or core concept do you use or reference or recommend the most? Or, what are you just having trouble with? After 20 seasons, we’ve talked about a lot of things. What element of writing do you wish we’d revisit for a deeper dive on the podcast? Email your ideas to podcast@writingexcuses.com
[Season 19, Episode 18]
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] How to Build Fictional Economies.
[Erin] 15 minutes long. Because you’re in a hurry.
[Howard] And we’re out of money.
[Mary Robinette] I’m Mary Robinette.
[DongWon] I’m DongWon.
[Erin] I’m Erin.
[Howard] And I’m Howard.
[Mary Robinette] We’re going to be talking about fictional economies. So, 3 of us, myself, Erin, and DongWon recently had an opportunity to participate in something that we called the Space Economy Camp for Writers. Which was designed to give writers greater literacy in economic theory for when they’re doing their worldbuilding. There were a bunch of other things the camp had as a goal, but one of the things that I became aware of, even though I was one of the people helping create this camp, was that I fundamentally did not understand what the word economy meant.
[Laughter]
[DongWon] I had an advantage going into this event because as an undergraduate, I’d studied economics. I double majored in English literature and economics. I was a pretty poor Econ student. If I’m going to be honest, the statistics wasn’t a strong suit. But as a literary agent, people are always like, “Oh, that makes sense. You studied economics and English. Those seem to marry very perfectly. But the reality is that my Econ degree did nothing for me on learning how to do business. Econ isn’t really about that. My understanding of economics, and my interest in economics has persisted past undergrad, is that it is very much about understanding what are the rules that make a world work. Right? Economics is the study of why is the world the way it is. So it is fundamentally really core to worldbuilding. It’s not the entirety of how you do your worldbuilding, but it will play into major parts of it. What do the people in your world value? What do they need? What do they trade for? What do they not have enough of? So, I like to think a lot about what are the systems that are in place when examining a fictional world, and what makes them work? What are the scarcities? What are the resources available? Why is it weird when Sam Gamgee talks about potatoes for like 10 minutes when we’re not sure the new world exists? Right? All these different things that can come into play of, like, where are people getting sugar from to make the cakes you’re writing about. Sometimes these can be really finicky silly questions, and sometimes these can be questions that will unlock huge parts of your storytelling and give you tools to put pressure on your characters or give them things to aim for.
[Howard] It’s also worth paying attention to what has been described by many people, but I was introduced to it by the Freakonomics authors, as the law of unintended consequences.
[DongWon] Yes.
[Howard] A great example of that is the moment you start paying the testing team to log… To identify and log bugs, you will develop an underground economy between testers and coders whereby the coders right bugs and the testers find them and give a kickback.
[DongWon] The economics term for that is an externality. Right? You have a negative externality or positive externality. So, a nuclear power plant has… Releases warm water as a waste product. Right? It’s not polluting in any sense, but it is just several degrees warmer than everything around it. So the positive externality is that manatees really love that warm water and they will congregate there. It becomes a safe place, a breeding ground, and a feeding ground for manatees. That’s a positive externality. A negative externality is when that nuclear power plant melts down and then poisons the area around it for hundreds of years to come.
[Howard] Radioactive kaiju manatees…
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Stomping across Florida.
[DongWon] In my opinion, a positive externality.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] Anything that involves stomping across Florida [garbled]
[DongWon] Exactly.
[Howard] Manatees learning to stomp…
[Mary Robinette] But the thing that I see a lot of writers doing with the economy of their world is just thinking about what are my coins called. Not paying attention to any of the systems that are around that or the values that the people are… That are driving that. One of the terms that came up during the camp that I was very excited about was what is your incentive mechanism? Like, why does a person do the thing that they’re doing? Like, why do you show up and go to work? Why do you sit down and write? What’s your incentive mechanism? What’s the thing that makes you go, “Aha!” Those can be internal, it makes you feel good, it can be external, someone gives you money. Like, what is the… What are the incentive mechanisms in your world? Why do people do magic if magic is painful and magic… And it’s also secret? Like, magic is going to aid you when you can’t tell anyone that you’re going to do it, why do you do it? I don’t know.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] It’s so funny. I feel like sometimes we put our own… Like, magic just seems so cool that you just assume in a world with magic, people would use it even if they lose a finger every time.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] Also, no one can ever know, and all it does is warm the water one degree.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] But you’re like, “Wow, that still seems like fun. It’s magic!”
[Laughter]
[Erin] Maybe that… You’re doing it for the reader, like, that’s the reason. But then you want to figure out… It’s richer if you can figure out a reason within your world that this is happening, as opposed to just because, like, it’s fun and cool and different.
[DongWon] Yeah. Exactly. So think broadly about what an economy can be. Right? If you’re talking about gold coins or doubloons or whatever it is, you’re talking about monetary… Like, a trade economy. But there are also reputational economies. Right? So the reason you might want to go save the village is because people will consider you a hero afterwards. There is an economy of that. Not everybody can be considered a hero, and getting that reputation will cost you something and will have value for that character going forward. There’s also gift economies. Right? There’s other ways to think about how people exchange goods and services that don’t have to be rooted in a capitalistic monetary system. Right? So if you’re imagining new worlds, if you’re imagining magic systems, if you’re imagining future societies, there’s a lot of ways we can approach this that are simply rooted in our sort of extractive exchange of goods that we have now.
[Erin] I think something we don’t realize is that the paths that we’re used to are very well-worn in our heads.
[DongWon] Yes.
[Erin] Like, the stories that we tell about the way people are in the way people use money are… We’re used to them, and so they’re ours. I was thinking about one of the most fascinating things we learned at this camp was about the tragedy of the commons.
[DongWon] Yes.
[Erin] Which was a commons… And correct me if I’m wrong, is basically some sort of resource that an entire community sort of needs to take care of. Like access to water, if you’re fish… If you’re all fishing. There was a theory that okay, if that happens, somebody will exploit it. There was an entire theory of economics that, like, went off on that. But there’s actually no evidence of it in the real world. In truth, people don’t necessarily exploit a common. But, like, once it was decided that that’s kind of what people would do, because that’s what a capitalist hell scape is about, then we actually developed that hell scape in order to prevent the exploitation that we assumed would be happening.
[DongWon] Right.
[Erin] So if you end up creating your own problems, because you’re used to the path that you’ve been on…
[DongWon] Yeah. This was interesting to me, too. I hadn’t heard about the pushback against the tragedy of the commons, because that’s driven economic policy in our world for the last 50, 60 years. In my own personal belief, to our detriment. Right now, there’s a huge fight going on about the digital commons and what is a public good, and what should be held back for private industry, and all these different things. It is shaping our world in really [bountiful?] ways. So it’s really interesting to stop and think about… We make certain assumptions, and then we build our economy based on those assumptions. So when you’re building your fictional worlds, what are your assumptions about who the people are in it like? Right? What is picking a certain style of economy imply that people are like? If everything is very cutthroat and everybody has to be paid to do any kind of service or task, whether that’s mercenary work or whatever that is, then you’re making very strong implications about what kind of people live there versus something like Lord of the Rings, where people are just going to get together to save the world because it benefits them, because they want to. Right? There’s a very different kind of economy implied by Lord of the Rings than by a Joe Abercrombie book.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Howard] Ask yourself what is scarce and what is necessary. There’s a term, post-scarcity economy, which refers to, in essence, when everybody has… Can have their needs met at no cost, what does the economy look like? Well, it’s got the phrase post-scarcity in it, but there are some things that will necessarily still be limited or scarce. Like, say, real estate. If we can all get fed, if we can all get educated, if we… But we can’t all own a piece of land, what sort of economy develops? What happens when water is free and food is free, but we have to charge for air? Air is scarce, and we all need it.
[DongWon] It’s one of my critiques of Star Trek, for example. Right? Star Trek introduced the idea of a post-scarcity economy, but then because of the strictures of producing a television show that has to be written on a certain schedule for a broad audience, the writers end up constantly reintroducing scarcity into this world and reintroducing a kind of… A certain kind of economics. Right? Whether it’s like, “Oh, we’re going to bring the Ferengi in,” and suddenly money is important again. Right? They keep reinventing currency, they keep reinventing certain kinds of conflicts. Like, because when you imagine a post-scarcity world, it requires a more radical act of thinking than a TV show is… Maybe not capable of, but it’s hard to sustain over as long as Star Trek has existed.
[Mary Robinette] One of the things that came up… So, in this camp, we wound up splitting into different groups, and one of the things that came up when I was talking with an economist was a real world example of post-scarcity which was when the Empire arrived in Borneo. That the folks who were there were like, “Yeah. No, we have everything we need. Thanks, we’re good. We’re great.” They’re like, “But we need you to build these things.” Like, is it interesting? If it’s not interesting, I’m not gonna do it. There’s other things I want to do. That was where they started to apply all of these external pressures of oppression in order to get them to do things. Because folks were like, “Yeah.” There was no incentive mechanism for them to do it.
[DongWon] [garbled] trade, too. Right? To introduce a false scarcity by getting people very addicted to this thing, to assert Western control over governments that were kind of like we don’t really need you. What are you doing here?
[Erin] That’s so interesting. I know we’re going to the break, but I would love, like in a worldbuilding way, to think what if they had actually come up instead with, like, some amazing incentive, like, is it interesting? No, we’re going to make it really interesting and here’s how or why. I think that is something that’s really fun, is to think about… I think a lot of times, even in my own work, you think about people bringing oppression as opposed to, like, bringing awe. Like, maybe that’s the thing that they’re bringing that’s lacking… The new thing, something that’s going to energize people in an interesting way, and that creates a completely different kind of world.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. All right. We’re going to take a quick break, and when we come back, we’re going to talk about some more economics that you can explore in your world building.
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[DongWon] This coming July, we have the new horror novel from best-selling author, Chuck Tingle. It’s called Bury Your Gays and it tells the story of a Hollywood TV writer who is strong-armed by TV executives to kill off the gay characters quote unquote for the algorithm. When he refuses, he realizes he’s put a target on his back. What’s more, monsters from his previous movies begin to haunt him and pursue him through the Hollywood Hills. It’s a trenchant, clever, and gripping novel, and Chuck Tingle is back, and I couldn’t be more excited.
[Howard] Episode 3 of Fall of the House of Usher has a monologue in it, where a character goes off on “when life gives you lemons.” He says, “No, you don’t make lemonade. You don’t make lemonade.” He then takes off on this beautifully capitalistic tirade on how you turn you having nothing but lemons into a billion-dollar monopolistic global management of culture and lemons and everything. It’s beautiful. When I listen to it, when I watch it, I can’t help but think, is there something besides lemons that I could also do this with?
[Chuckles]
[Howard] This is… You’ve just given me a roadmap for developing a capitalist system that is very believable and utterly fantastic at the same time.
[Mary Robinette] The thing about that is that what they did was they applied their values and the model that they understood to the problem. It’s that if the only thing you have is a hammer, every problem becomes a nail. Again, when we’re talking about economies in your world building, the only economy that I know is the one that I grew up in, which is this capitalism thing. I had to… I knew that there were other things out there, but it started to get exciting for me to think about, okay, well what happens if we’re going into space, and it’s a gift-based economy? What would that look like? How would people interact with that? We… China came up with this… Came up in conversation when we were talking about gift economies, that at a certain point if you’re trading with someone, and you’re a gift economy, it’s like, “Oh. Great. We’re going to give you this.” People who are not coming from a gift economy are very confused and don’t know what to do with it.
[DongWon] One… Just to clarify a little bit, by what we mean by gift economy…
[Mary Robinette] Yes.
[DongWon] One thing that distinguishes a gift economy is that goods and services are given with no direct expectation of return. There is a more ambient expectation that your needs will be met down the line when that arises, maybe not by the person who directly gave you the first thing. Right? So if everyone is participating in a gift society, gift economy, then needs and desires are taken care of collectively without anybody having to map out who is owed X, Y, or Z. Right? Which is a very foreign concept to people who live in a deeply capitalistic sort of mindset…
[Mary Robinette] The moment that I was like, “Oh, I understand this more,” was when the economist I was speaking to said, “Okay, but if they give you something, they’ve just won.”
[DongWon] Yep.
[Mary Robinette] And then I was like, “Oh. This is the moment when you’re at dinner and you’re all arguing about, no, I’ll get the check.”
[DongWon] Exactly.
[Mary Robinette] I’ll get the check. That we’ve all experienced gift economies, especially those of us who live in the South as politeness battles. Where it’s like, “No, no. I will be the one who does the nicest thing.”
[Erin] Or, it’s just… Your incentive is community growth, so…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] I always think about… I didn’t know that’s what it was called, but one of the things I found really interesting at the camp is, I was like, “Well, what about barter?” One thing that I learned is that actually barter usually comes into play when you have 2 groups that don’t… Either don’t trust or don’t know each other, because they can’t give each other gifts because they don’t understand what to give or what the other person needs, so they figure out, like, one chicken equals 3 potatoes, and 3 potatoes equals a trip to the moon. That’s a weird economy, but…
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] Potatoes are very high in that case. Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] I mean, I know they’re very valuable on Mars.
[DongWon] [garbled]
[Erin] What I… My mom talked about when she used to visit from Mississippi where my mom’s family is from, people would just be like this person has a peach tree, so they’d just give people extra peaches. These people fix fences for folks. My great-grandmother would read documents for people, and sort of be like, “This is something you should sign. This is something you shouldn’t sign.” All of these things were just about, like, the community needs to look out for itself, so it is good for everyone if we all have a good amount of peaches.
[DongWon] Right.
[Erin] Have fixed fences, and know not to give the government our land by mistake.
[Laughter]
[Erin] Like, nobody loses in that situation, but you just have to think, like…
[DongWon] Right.
[Erin] What should I do for other people?
[DongWon] When you think about economies, really think about 2 things. What are you assuming that people are like? And what do… What does your community value? Right? So in a gift economy, people value community health and well-being above individual needs. Right? So if you believe that actually everyone good to be better off if everybody gets peaches, rather than I need to extract the most value from these peaches, even if 10% of them rot. Right? Those are 2 different sets of values. There’s also 2 different assumptions, talking about barter versus gift. In a barter economy, you assume that people will try to screw each other over in a direct way. In a gift economy, you assume that everybody fundamentally cares about other people and is going to do their best, or at least enough people are going to do their best, that it will compensate for those who are trying to be more exploitive.
[Howard] We’ve talked about this when we talk about building a community of writers. When we talk about you going out and meeting other writers for critique groups and whatever, and how we don’t want that to be transactional. There is no sense… If you come up to me at a convention and ask for a bit of writing advice, I will give it to you completely non-transactionally. I do not expect anything in return. It is possible that I won’t give it to you because I’m busy or off to a meeting or brain-dead or whatever, but it is not transactional. That idea, that exchanges can take place that aren’t really transactions… They’re not even really exchanges. It’s a gift.
[Mary Robinette] Well, this idea of… People in science fiction and fantasy say, over and over again, is pay it forward. There are these phrases that we use that underline what our values are. In Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, we get their “there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch,” that, like, gets painted on their flag. [Tanisfal?]
[Howard] Tanstaafl.
[Mary Robinette] Tanstaafl. Right. There are these things, these phrases, these aphorisms that underline what our values are that are an interesting piece of worldbuilding that you can do, but that kind of… Even if you’re having trouble wrapping your head around the actual economy, coming back to that can also be a grounding thing.
[Erin] I also think that just looking at things that you’re doing, like when you said, “Oh. I’ll give you a piece of writing advice.” The worldbuilding part of my brain is like, what if that was the thing? Like, what if that’s the thing, like, instead of the reputation economy, it’s the advice economy. When you run out of good advice to give people, you’re broke. What if it’s gossip? Like, there’s so many things that we could be…
[DongWon] I work in publishing. I do both those.
[Laughter]
[DongWon] [garbled]
[Erin] But I think there are a lot of interesting things. So I think a lot of times we think… Because we think of economics as being about always exchanging money directly, we miss all the other exchanges that could be the basis for interesting different worlds.
[DongWon] Exactly.
[Mary Robinette] There are also things like different… Like our Patreon, for instance, goes back to the patron model, which used to be, back in the old days, someone’s like, “You know what, I just want art to exist in the world.” So you would just pay artists to do art. But part of what you were also doing at the time was, you were also being, like, “Look how fancy I am. I can… Look at these artists…”
[Howard] Some of this art’s going on the ceiling of my house.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, it’s… I am the patron of da Vinci, I’m the patron of Michelangelo. That means, in a reputation economy, you are rich.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] You are like 1%. Right? So I think, even in things that we think of as altruism, even in things that we think of as these gifts or whatever, people have reasons for doing those things. Economics is thinking about why people are making these choices on a systemwide level. Right? I love that you’re connecting it to culture. Right? So, like, Heinlein’s there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch or I was thinking about Octavia Butler. Right? Everything you touch, you change, everything you change, touches you. That is such a radically different view of what your values are. That represents people trying to live according to a different kind of economic system in a world that’s collapsing around them, that demands something very different from them than what they are trying to accomplish. Right? That is the fundamental tension of that book, is how do you survive with these ethics and values intact.
[Erin] I love that, because it makes me think about that’s the way to approach this, is to think about what are the values of our world?
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] Then, based on that, what do they place value in? How do they track that value?
[DongWon] I think everyone thinks that building an economy is about asking what do you… What is valuable? But instead, I think the question is, what do you value? These are 2 fundamentally different ideas that sounds very similar.
[Howard] When I leave the house, there’s this checklist. I need to have my keys. I need to have my glasses. I need to have my phone. I need to have my wallet. Inquiring into each of these individually, why do I need these? Why is it unthinkable for me to be caught naked in the wilds of Orem, Utah without one of these? Will inform an entire world of thought about the economy that led to them. I have to have a lock on my car and on my house, and my money is… I have to have it, and I can’t seal it anyway. Perform that same experiment on yourself. What is it that you have to have? Why?
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So, I’m going to give you some homework. This is homework that I had… An exercise that I had my students do at our… At the Space Economy thing. Which is to come up with 3 catchphrases that someone who grew up in your economy would know. So, for instance, the difference between there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch versus the fictional economy that we were building for a moon, which was see it, fix it. You can see those 2 totally different worlds and economies that would spin out of those. So, come up with 3 value statements, 3 aphorisms, someone that grew up in your world would say, and then see what economies spin out of those.
[Howard] This has been Writing Excuses. You’re out of excuses. Now go write.
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[Mary Robinette] Let’s talk about Rude Tales of Magic. In this improvised narrative role-playing podcast, join artists, writers, and comedians from Adult Swim, Cartoon Network, Comedy Central, Marvel Comics, and more as they fight and fumble their way across the madcap and exceedingly rude fantasy wasteland of Cordelia. Branson Reese and his jesters retinue, Christopher Hastings, Carlin Menardo, Tim Platt, Joe Laporte, and Ali Fisher, star is a group of unlikely survivors. Specifically, a talking crow, a Lich in a wig, a bubbly faun, a Sasquatch punk, and a [teefling?] hunk. This group must solve the mystery of Polaris University vanishment and return balance and higher education to their world. It’s going to be very hard and very, very rude. Subscribe to Rude Tales of Magic on Spotify, Apple podcasts, Pocket Casts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. New episodes drop every Wednesday.
