The APEEmath vol 3: Antony Davies Visits NCC 1701-D

Spivonomist's Log Stardate -308719. We are in orbit of APEE 2014. Professor Antony Davies presents some of his work on the economics of science fiction worlds, culminating with this photo, which instantly joined the ranks of the Greatest Things Ever Seen At An Academic Conference. Enjoy.

The Campbell's Condensed version of his thesis is something like this: in the Star Trek universe, material scarcity has been overcome, but this does not and cannot overcome the key scarcity problems we analyze using the tools of economics. Choice still exists, as time and attention are scarce. The Enterprise can only seek out and explore one new world or one new civilization at a time.

Extend this idea to other genres, and we're still faced with unavoidable scarcities of time and attention. One of the vampire tropes is that despite being immortal, they end up bored of their dreary, repetitive existence. Thanks to immortality, the frantic pressure felt in a fleeting, brief life is gone, replaced by ennui and tiresome internal politics. Or something. Davies (obliquely, in his presentation) argues against this trope, noting that an infinitely long life does not grant a non-omnipresent entity access to more than one experience at a time. It does grant them copious wealth thanks to compound interest, but that's another matter entirely.

The only creatures in the Star Trek universe who've successfully overcome the economic problem are The Q, and this tends to be played as writer-indulgent pathos-cum-comedy. More frequently, the extensive use of applied phlebotinum means that the writers get to explore themes of racism, environmental degradation, international[planetary] relations, and in the guise of the Ferengi, greed, as if material trade-offs can be ignored or hand-waved away.

Of course, omitting trade-offs entirely is deeply unsatisfying for an audience. There is no dramatic tension without the principal characters having to make hard choices. Hence, the Prime Directive is often more a weak suggestion than the foremost organizing principle of Starfleet. A drama without conflict isn't that dramatic. Come to think of it, that's probably why Darmok is so resonant, particularly with its explicit acknowledgement of the source material (the Epic of Gilgamesh is the source for both this episode and for the thematically identical Dennis Quaid vehicle Enemy Mine).

It was interesting to see how the different series (read: different writers) played with notions of exchange from S1 of ToS (1966) to the close of Enterprise in 2005 (I don't count the Abrams reboots in the same universe, mostly because they're straight action films rather than dolled-up social commentary, though that's its own meta-commentary, I reckon, eh?). ToS had interplanetary trade (Cyrano Jones, the trader responsible for the Trouble with Tribbles), though not always presented in the most flattering light. It really wasn't until the later seasons of TNG, a few offhand remarks in ST IV, and the portrayal of the Ferengi in DS9 that the writing staff unleashed what might be considered a truly venomous critique of selfish capitalism. Of course, please bear in mind that what ended up on the screen might be more aptly considered a jab at the studio (recall the 2007-08 writers' strike; these things seldom happen for no reason). Not to defend the series too strongly, but it was Voyager that really made an effort to introduce meaningful material scarcity back into the show. Of course, they might have handled it a little better (inter alia, ahem Jennifer Lien), but the theme fit pretty well with the mid-90s, when it was all parachute pants, optimism, and a bit of leftover giddiness from the End of Communism™.

The point of my rambling here is that fiction is a useful vehicle for seeing how the folks in their specific place and time (in this case, contemporary suburban Los Angeles, usually) interpret commerce in their musings. However, do please remember to bear in mind that these authors may often have axes to grind that have less to do with society at large and more to do with the contents of their cultural bubble. If you're skeptical of this claim, I urge you to apply your own cultural analysis to foreign television.

To choose is to incur cost. So say we all.

The APEEmath vol 2: the (Wo)man of System, Vachris on Austen's Emma

Dig, O brethren. And always open with Smith.

TMS VI.II.41:

The man whose public spirit is prompted altogether by humanity and benevolence, will respect the established powers and privileges even of individuals, and still more those of the great orders and societies, into which the state is divided. Though he should consider some of them as in some measure abusive, he will content himself with moderating, what he often cannot annihilate without great violence. When he cannot conquer the rooted prejudices of the people by reason and persuasion, he will not attempt to subdue them by force; but will religiously observe what, by Cicero, is justly called the divine maxim of Plato, never to use violence to his country no more than to his parents. He will accommodate, as well as he can, his public arrangements to the confirmed habits and prejudices of the people; and will remedy as well as he can, the inconveniencies which may flow from the want of those regulations which the people are averse to submit to. When he cannot establish the right, he will not disdain to ameliorate the wrong; but like Solon, when he cannot establish the best system of laws, he will endeavour to establish the best that the people can bear.

Ah, statecraft. Aristotle's highest calling (esp NE Bk I where he also speaks highly of Solon). Smith cautiously advances what we might recognize as a precautionary principle of governance: "never to use violence to his country no more than to his parents." To accommodate (read: tolerate) the habits and prejudices of a constituency would strike the ear of a classical thinker as the virtue of temperance as she is applied to statesmanship. Right on. Nothing our readers here at EE haven't already heard a thousand times before. But your median Smith reader will probably be more familiar with the following passage, and your median armchair libertarian will probably be more familiar with it as filtered through Hayek (not that there's anything wrong with that).

TMS VI.II.42:

The man of system, on the contrary, is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests, or to the strong prejudices which may oppose it. He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might chuse to impress upon it. If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful. If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder.

 Mind you, mind you, mind you, these paragraphs appear right in order, one smack dab after the other. So it was with some pain that I wrestled with APEE 2014 Session M2.5, in which a paper by Michelle Vachris argued that Jane Austen's character Emma Woodhouse was an avatar for Smith's Man of System.

So I says to myself, I says: "Man of System? Get outta here. Emma might be a meddler, she might have the conceit of social engineer, but it's all small-scale stuff and nonsense. Why, she's even held to account for her excesses of planning in the text of the novel. Weren't Smith and Hayek (and, yes, even Aristotle on a careful reading) warning against the intemperance of unaccountable political chicanery?"

Those of you who know me in person may be astonished to discover that I held my tongue. I really had to mull my objections. To me, the "great society" phrase there in the second graf is essential to interpreting Smith. Emma was clearly not arranging the chess-pieces of a great society, but rather fiddling with the tender sentiments of her close social network. Her actions may have been intemperate and unconsidered, even worthy of censure, but if you want to level a Public Choice critique at her, what's missing is feedback.

Politicians are vaguely accountable to an ersatz constituent cobbled from opinion polls and loud-voiced, well-organized members who lobby for this policy or that. Emma, contrariwise, is directly accountable to the other characters, face-to-face, so to speak. She is obliged to defend herself to the very objects she wishes to manipulate. And in this sense, I overcame my objections. For it is here that I found my strongest affection for Vachris's interpretation. The Man of System as an aspirational ideal is contained in the person of Emma. Indeed, in the course of the novel, she is roundly upbraided for her meddlesomeness. And how delightful would it be to sit the numb nudgers, prideful paternalists, and solipsistic social shepherds in the academy down and deliver to them a rich tongue-lashing for the conceit they have arrogated themselves in their own ideal plans of government. As escapist fantasy, this should appeal to many of my friends and colleagues.

But there's a larger question squirreled away in there: how euvoluntary is matchmaking? It seems to have some quasi-coercive elements (on occasion, depending on the culture, quite directly coercive), but is it possible that there is such a thing as economically efficient matchmaking institutions? What coordination failures might exist in an unregulated marriage market? What are the costs, benefits, and transfers of, say, the Shidduch? Fodder for a future post. For now, consider it a bug in your ear, something to think about. Over a nice cup of tea.

Edit: I got the author wrong. This was Lynne K, not M. Vachris. Apologies to any offended parties. Applesaucy.

The APEEmath vol 1: Giberson and Kiesling Unbundle the Grid

The Association of Private Enterprise Education concluded its annual meeting this past Tuesday. I attended a generous abundance of fine panels, rubbed elbows with a generous abundance of fine scholars, and enjoyed a generous abundance of excruciating back pain. My back has largely recovered, so I find my mental satchel full of puzzles, questions, conundrums, pleas for clarification, and challenges to much of what I witnessed in (relative) peace and quiet. So for the next few days, I'll be sifting through the aftermath of APEE 2014. The APEEmath, if you will forgive me some bad dad humor.

And since it is often advised to start at the beginning, let's start with Session M1. The session I attended featured Michael Giberson and Lynne Kiesling, our friends at Knowledge Problem. Combined, their presentations told a story that I think we've all felt shimmering in the air since the 70s: decentralized energy production is a matter of when, not if. However, it is far less sure that energy distribution faces a similar threat, or if it does, it's certainly not clear that the grid will share the same time schedule as the power plants.

Please indulge me a brief digression here. My firsthand experience is in Naval nuclear propulsion. There are three and a half distinct divisions in the nuclear side of a submarine's engineering department (the Sailors charged with monitoring and maintenance of primary plant chemistry are, strictly speaking, part of Machinery Division, but they boast specialized skills and training that set them apart from the ordinary knuckle-draggers; they are the half division, but the ones I know personally also count among some of the finest men it has been my honor to have ever met, so don't let this imply that I think any less of them). We, the gaunt twidgets, the reactor operators, pasty from lack of sunlight, fine-and-brittle-boned from the many months spent hunched over Byzantine mazes of electronic components, yapping discontentedly in our odd tongue of resistance, capacitance, induction, and reduction—our eyes filled with cascading arcs of ionizing radiation detection, our ears stuffed with the harsh syllables of a routine critical checkoff, our sinuses subverted by the penetrating aroma of the loved-and-hated chemical that unceremoniously replaces the roiling breath and fart of 160 of our fellow shipmates into something vaguely resembling a breathable atmosphere, it is we who wrangle, harness, command the broken soul wrought from the enraged heart of uranium-23X, bending its fury to the diligent task of whispering life and vigor into the cold, coiled copper snaking arterial ardor up and down the stubborn corpse of the underwater pig, grunting and snuffling beneath the dismissive swell of an indifferent father ocean. The Electrical Division is responsible for shipboard load distribution and maintenance of generators, batteries, and the interface of the AC and DC portions of the network. Why do I mention this? Well, in the mind of a Sailor serving in an engineering department (again, many apologies to A-gang for not including you in my reindeer games), there is a perfectly natural cleavage between the generation and distribution functions in the quest to turn fuel and fire into warmth and comfort.

So here's the thing: rooftop solar is becoming not only more technologically efficient, but more economically efficient. This implies that legacy utility plants are rapidly advancing towards obsolescence. They are soon to be the twinkling phylacteries in which dwell the souls of the dear departed wizards of Thomas Edison's coven. But the grid? The grid is a thing alive, pulsing with the lifeblood of shared electricity. When its vitality can be sustained by bough and twig alone, the Big Capital power plants (with all the attendant costs) will end up clinging, vestigial, to the undercarriage of a sprightly distribution network. They are and shall be an unseemly legacy cost that threaten to burden a critically important component of ye moderne œconomy.

So why not split the utilities along their production and distribution seams? Might we get a jump on the inevitable transitional gains trap by half a league onward? Sure, there might be some negotiation costs for the intermediate bits, but determining who gets the line item for a decoupling station seems a lot more tractable (from the point of view of the end customer) than worrying about how to resolve the inevitable problem of how to keep rooftop solar providers from getting sucked under the waves when the pod of power rorquals go belly up and burst under the unforgiving gaze of the sun.

Power generation is not euvoluntary. Neither is power distribution. Keeping them bundled multiplies the risk without providing much extra reward. It's time to cut the cord, people.