Max Gladstone's Craft Sequence economy and economic futurism in the real world.

This isn't a post about fantasy writing, really at all, it's a post about economics and futurism and I'm going to use a series of fantasy novels to talk about those things. It's of interest to writers if you want to think about what Max is doing, which for my money is about the most fun thing to do in the field right now.

In Max's Craft Sequence books, people have created/discovered a magical power they call Craft, and it has in some ways subsumed the world's economy. People trade in a currency referred to as Souls. But souls aren't really a currency in the way that we think of one. They are themselves the material that powers the craftwork, so really it's more of a standardized barter system, as if we all carried around flasks of gasoline and paid for things with it.

The interesting thing here is that, while people still pass souls around amongst each other and pay for labor with them, labor does not seem to create souls. They come, in some mystical fashion, from Craftspeople exposing themselves to starlight. Where in our society labor creates the productive value that underpins the abstraction of our currencies, in Gladstone's world the two have nothing to do with each other. Labor still happens - at the moment. And someone can trade their labor for souls, because paying for labor is cheaper than doing the work directly with souls - at the moment.

But as the soul economy grows, as Craftspeople get better at their Craft, and as more soul enters the system from the stars, the efficiency of the soul economy will grow while the efficiency of the labor economy won't. Things will gradually become cheaper to do with Craft than to do with labor. And eventually labor will fade away.

And this is where we stop thinking about souls and start thinking about Sols - that is, solar power. It also comes from the stars, at least one of them, but now we're thinking about reality. Solar power recently passed fossil fuels for low-cost power generation, and it holds the potential to continue its growth and development until it reaches a point fossil fuels never really threatened - where it becomes competitive with labor.

I feel like I have to go back to the very beginning of economics to make this make any sense. The basic purpose of any economic system is to manage resources to maintain and advance the productivity within the system. All human economic systems to this point have been ultimately based on a single resource: human labor. Modern systems use capital, through the abstraction of currency, to store labor for use at more useful times and in larger amounts, allowing us to build and make more complex and involved things, and further advance the productivity of the system.

However, things get interesting when we get a plausible alternative to labor as the underpinning of a system. As solar power gets cheaper, as robotics and AI get more advanced, we're approaching a time when it will be possible to set up a solar-power-based system which can maintain and advance its own productivity, essentially creating an alternative economy entirely outside of human labor. (Or perhaps using only human decision-making ability.)

Solar energy units could be traded inside this economy much as Gladstone's souls are. But they would suffer the same problem - without capital and currency, without supplying the productivity growth of its own system, the labor market would stagnate while the growing non-labor system would overtake it.

Perhaps this leads to the Singularity, or to the post-scarcity economy. An economy based on labor storage certainly has a large litany of flaws, and this could be better. Then again, I'm sure it also has its own flaws. We may be approaching this point more quickly than we think, and we haven't done much thinking about it. So I think it's important to notice when someone is thinking about it in art, the way Max Gladstone is.

(Originally published on my Patreon last year where essentially no one noticed it. I still like it so I thought I'd repost it here, where maybe people are a little more interested in speculative economies.)