David Goldstein:

I have never read a work of fiction that has included such an accessible description of some very complicated economic concepts.

Kim Stanley Robinson:

Ministry for the Future is just the last of a long series of projects where economics take center stage because it’s crucial.

Nick Hanauer:

Economics is the operating system of the world.

Kim Stanley Robinson:

Yes.

Nick Hanauer:

If it’s a crappy operating system, you get a crappy result.

Speaker 4:

From the home offices of Civic Ventures in downtown Seattle. This is Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer, the best place to get the truth about who gets what and why.

Nick Hanauer:

I’m Nick Hanauer, founder of Civic Ventures.

David Goldstein:

I’m David Goldstein, Senior Fellow at Civic Ventures. One of the things I hadn’t accounted for, Nick, when I first started working with you back in 2014, was how many goddamn books I’d have to read.

Nick Hanauer:

I know. I know.

David Goldstein:

Oh, my God. It started with your two little books.

Nick Hanauer:

I know. I left that out of the job description.

David Goldstein:

Yeah. True Patriot and Gardens of Democracy. But, you did tell me I had to read Piketty’s book, and that’s actually when I first signed up for my Audible account, because it was too thick.

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah.

David Goldstein:

I had to listen to it to get through the whole damn thing. Of course, one of the things that’s meant is that I’ve read so many books about economics, and evolutionary psychology, and anthropology, and entropy, and network theory, game theory, you name it, all the different fields that have fed into our evolving understanding of the economy. It has left me with zero time to read fiction. During the eight years I’ve worked with you, Nick, I have not read a single novel until just a couple months ago.

Nick Hanauer:

Right. I have not read, I don’t think, hardly a single novel since you’ve come to work for me either, for the same very reasons, until we both read The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson.

David Goldstein:

So, let me just summarize. It was pitched to me as, “Oh, oh, you got to read this book. It’s about climate change.” The book starts in 2053, not that far into the future. It starts, I won’t go into detail, an absolutely horrific depiction of a climate catastrophe that is not far off from some of what we’re already seeing today with these severe heat waves that have been appearing around the globe. Then it moves on into the global response to it, and the ongoing climate disaster throughout the world.

It’s very believable in terms of the setting, because the depiction in 2053 really is not far off from what scientists predict if we continue to do nothing, if we don’t slash our greenhouse gas emissions. Then it goes into how we respond, and a lot of the response turns out to be economic, which helps explain not just why we ended up reading this book, Nick, but why we were so eager to talk to its author, Kim Stanley Robinson, because I have never read a work of fiction that has included such an accessible description of some very complicated economic concepts.

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah. I was really struck, in reading the novel, by how robust both his understanding and his description of economics is. It’ll be interesting to talk to him, because I’m sure it couldn’t have been easy to sell the idea that he was going to write a book effectively about economics to a publisher. But indeed, he has, and it’s riveting and, I think in many ways, does a better job of explaining economics than we do sometimes. It’s really persuasive and powerful, which is why we wanted to bring him on the podcast and talk to him about his thought process, and bring the book to the attention of our listeners.

Kim Stanley Robinson:

I am Kim Stanley Robinson. I am an American Science Fiction Writer, and the Author of The Ministry for the Future.

David Goldstein:

Well, we’re very excited to have you come on. I was just chatting with Nick about this. I want you to know, Stan, that your book was the best novel I’ve read since coming to work for Nick about eight years ago. Because, since then, this is actually the first piece of non-fiction I’ve read because he hasn’t left me time for anything else.

Nick Hanauer:

Exactly. We grind pretty hard on the economics non-fiction here.

Kim Stanley Robinson:

All right. Well, you’ve read more than I have, but there is probably a couple of books that we must have read in common recently. At least for me, they were impressive.

David Goldstein:

Right.

Nick Hanauer:

Tell us.

Kim Stanley Robinson:

I read The Price of Peace by Zachary Carter, about Keynes.

David Goldstein:

Yep. Great book.

Kim Stanley Robinson:

Great book. Then it’s either called The Currency of Politics or The Politics of Currency, maybe the latter, by a Stefan Eich or Eich.

David Goldstein:

Ah, that would be new to us.

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah, I haven’t heard that.

Kim Stanley Robinson:

Oh, that’s a good book.

David Goldstein:

Okay.

Kim Stanley Robinson:

I think he’s a student, or was, maybe he was a postdoc student of Adam Tooze.

David Goldstein:

Ah, okay.

Nick Hanauer:

Oh, okay.

Kim Stanley Robinson:

Adam Tooze recommended-

Nick Hanauer:

Yep. He’s a smart guy.

Kim Stanley Robinson:

Yeah. He recommended this book on his Substack, so I got it and read it. It’s basically a history of money. It starts with maybe Aristotle, and then goes to the 18th century, with some stops up to the present.

Nick Hanauer:

That’s great. Well, your book, The Ministry of the Future has to be the most economics-heavy novel anyone has written in a very long time.

Kim Stanley Robinson:

Ever since my New York 2140, you might say.

David Goldstein:

Well, now I’m going to have to read that one.

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah.

David Goldstein:

Well, this raises a question. This book was recommended to me by a number of people. Ostensibly, I thought it was about climate change. But really, it’s a book about economics. I’m wondering, was that your intention when you started the book, or did the economics come out in the writing?

Kim Stanley Robinson:

Oh, I knew it was going to be there from the start. As I mentioned, I wrote New York 2140 in probably 2016. It’s a description of New York after sea level rises something like 50 vertical feet, so Lower Manhattan is underwater and is a supervenience, and it’s all about the financialization essentially. It’s not quite a metaphor for our current meltdowns, but it has a lot about the present, as well as the ostensible year of 2140.

So I had been working on it then, and I’d been working on the economics of climate change this whole 21st century. My Washington DC trilogy, set in DC in the near future during climate change, had a economic strand in it, but it wasn’t strong enough. It was more of, what would the federal government do, or the National Science Foundation? But, it became more and more obvious that, although we have various technical solutions to climate change, we don’t have a good way to pay for installing those technological changes, nor do we have a good way of assessing the actual economics of what we’re doing on Earth.

In other words, the gross world product, gross domestic product, whatever you want to call it, the highest rate of return profit itself, these are all crappy, cheesy, short rate, cheating rating systems that the world was run by. So, I needed to keep hammering away at it. Ministry for the Future is just the last of a long series of projects where economics take center stage because it’s crucial.

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah. Economics is the operating system of the world, and if it’s a crappy operating system, you get a crappy result.

Kim Stanley Robinson:

Yes. Yeah. Late global neoliberal capitalism. I’m glad that you put it that way, because many people would say that it’s politics that runs the world.

Nick Hanauer:

No.

Kim Stanley Robinson:

But, they’re not getting that, actually, politics is the establishing of an economic system.

Nick Hanauer:

Of an economic system, right.

Kim Stanley Robinson:

That political economy is the real focus of study, and yet there are no departments for it. There isn’t really much. It’s either one or the other and, once you divide the two, you aren’t really talking about the real right situation.

David Goldstein:

Well, it wasn’t always that way. But, that’s what it’s been for the past a hundred years or so.

Kim Stanley Robinson:

Yes. I agree.

Nick Hanauer:

Well, certainly lasts 60 or 70 years. The attempt by Neoclassical economics to divorce itself from political and moral concerns is part of the problem. You end up with this set of people with immense power who literally believe that there’s a right thing to do economically, which may or may not intersect with the right thing to do for people, and the planet, and so on and so forth. It’s just so nuts.

Kim Stanley Robinson:

Well, it was a power play. You talked about it, people in with immense amounts of power. It was a power play saying that, if you just focus on this and then you don’t look the other way, you can put blinders on yourself and pretend that you’re doing well by doing well for the rich and powerful.

Nick Hanauer:

Yes, exactly. Your book is certainly a lot more insightful about how the world works, and where we should take it than most economics textbooks. Where did your insights come from? How did you come to this? What was your journey?

Kim Stanley Robinson:

Good question. It’s been such a long journey that I’ll have to try to de-strand it or clarify it, even to myself, much less than you.

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah. Yeah.

Kim Stanley Robinson:

I’m a literature major and English major, but my PhD advisor was Fredric Jameson, who is the world’s most famous Marxist literary critic. He gave me, along with a lot of other people, a reading list, an education that is a leftist education. So I come to it from that perspective of being a leftist American, and sympathetic to eco-socialist or eco-Marxist understandings of the world, framings, paradigms, ideologies.

In terms of economics proper, when I began to get serious about it, I was asked to join a group down at UC Santa Cruz called Rethinking Capitalism. Robert Meister ran this group. Randy Martin, who has unfortunately died since, wrote The Financialization of Daily Life. Then Dick Bryan was a Economics Professor down at University of Sydney until his retirement. They are leaders in giving me things to read and explaining things to me in person, or over Skype, back in the day.

Slowly but surely, my reading list, people like Joseph Vogl, The Ascendancy of Finance, or Maurizio Lazzarato, Governing by Debt, these are two books that you guys should read and discuss if you haven’t already. They are powerful histories of how we got to our current impasse. After writing Ministry for the Future, my education as such has continued. In fact, it’s probably been intensified by the people that have wanted to talk to me since then. Adam Tooze’s Substack has been great, like getting a college education for $50 a year.

And, it goes on that. The New Left Review. The London Review of Books. John Lanchester, Michael Lewis, these are great writers for me in trying to learn. They’ve been part of my orientation and part of my education. You know what it’s like, a million articles. Actually, I should remember to mention Dalton Chen, who had a paper online that talked about the carbon coin that led directly to the thing that’s in ministry for the future. So, you see how it goes. It’s a ramshackle, it’s a auto didactic, it’s a self-education without any formal training to speak of.

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah, interesting. As you look around the world, are there things that give you hope?

Kim Stanley Robinson:

Oh yeah, my Lord. The thing is, I wrote Ministry for the Future in about 6 or 10 months in 2019, I was well-prepped. I knew I had a good method in the anthology of genres, and the eyewitness accounts I was throwing at it. I wrote it fast. But 2019 was pre-COVID. It was pre-Biden. It was pre-AlUla, and the whole turn since 2020, including COVID slapping us in the face and teaching us that the biosphere is real, and can kick your butt, and change everything, and wreck civilization.

Well, these lessons have been applied to the climate change problem. I was at COP26, courtesy of the UN and the UK government, and had 38 events in 12 days. It was really quite an education for me. I didn’t make any particular contribution, but I sure saw and learned a lot. I should have known it before I wrote Ministry, but that just isn’t how it happened. So, things like the International Monetary Fund, they’ve got these special drawing rights.

Well, what the hell is that? That is another form of quantitative easing that’s being snuck over the transom, or under the doorsill, massive infusions of money to countries, to governments in distress. Often, it’s climate distress. So now, at COP27, they’ve set up this empty bank balance of loss and damage funding. It’s great that they have it, but everybody is, of course, dubious about the necessary billions, where they’re going to come from.

So I’m thinking, “Well, the IMF, special drawing rights, maybe they could throw in some money. I should also mention Thomas Piketty. I didn’t mention him before. He’s been an immense part of my education. He’s encouraging all by himself, his work, his thought, the way that left liberal economists are getting more radical. Again, I didn’t mention modern monetary theory, which you all must be-

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah, for sure.

Kim Stanley Robinson:

Interested in.

David Goldstein:

Our most popular podcast are the ones with Stephanie Kelton.

Kim Stanley Robinson:

Ah, there you go. So, this strand of thought is new, encouraging. I guess what I’m feeling is that, people are becoming aware that, A, climate change can wreck everything. B, neoliberal capitalism is totally unprepared to cope with it, and will just ride the Titanic down to the bottom, trying to make marginal profits by selling shit off in fire sale fashion, and they won’t change their ways. So now, the actual economists doing theory at the level of political economy, they are, you might say, spurred to action by the present crisis. So, some interesting results are coming out.

Some of these people are bleeding into the Biden administration, and at the World Bank. I’ve had talks with people at the Fed. I’ve had talks with people in the Pentagon. There were many indicators that the crisis and the overwhelming, what Tooze calls the polycrisis, the danger that it represents is enough for a all-hands-on-deck type response. Now, of course, it’s grindingly slow, and there’s lots of resistance, and so on and so forth. But, the reasons for hope are everywhere.

Nick Hanauer:

Certainly the passage of the IRA has been a signal moment.

Kim Stanley Robinson:

That was huge.

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah. It was really, really big. I believe you may be connected to one of our friends, and my writing partner, Eric Beinhocker, who runs-

Kim Stanley Robinson:

Ah, yes.

Nick Hanauer:

The Institute for New Economic Thinking at Oxford. He was just telling me that he was asked by, it may have been, the President of the European Union to comment on some things recently. They’re all in a panic in Europe about what to do in response to the IRA. He was like, “Well, you should pass one too.” There’s a very obvious response to this, which is to compete with it, which is precisely what we want to happen, right?

Kim Stanley Robinson:

Yeah. There’s some virtuous cycle. If you acknowledge that we are not going to completely invent post-capitalism instantaneously to cope with the crisis, that we’re going to have to use the tools at hand, then for sure the EU, the US, and China in a race for green dominance is a good race to have.

Nick Hanauer:

It’s a good race. Yeah.

Kim Stanley Robinson:

Yeah.

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah, absolutely.

David Goldstein:

So I’m curious, Stan, in the book, if I’m summarizing this correctly, significant progress isn’t really made until the central banks get on board. If you could just explain why, in your thinking, the central banks are so important to addressing this issue, and whether you think, in the real world, it’s actually possible to get action from the central banks.

Kim Stanley Robinson:

I think it is possible. But, I also think that your question points out a peculiarity of my novel, which is that, being a novel, I needed a plot and characters. So, I needed to pick some aspect of the climate change problem, and I actually picked several, but some crucial central thing where you had a hero or heroine who could do things that helped in a major way. It also occurred to me that the central banks are crucial because they create fiat money, and the big powerful central banks could make a difference by doing quantitative easing, as they did in 2008 and when the pandemic hit, making it green quantitative easing.

Now the network for greening the financial system, which is a study group of all the big central banks, has got a white paper about this very issue, how to green money at its very source, so that when you make up money in the first place, especially in quantitative easing fashion, instead of giving it to the banks to their usual, selfish, stupid lending, which is worth talking about on its own, but to keep to my track here, that the central banks would release it on a carbon reduction basis, that they would green money. Again, this white paper existed before I wrote Ministry. I didn’t know about it. I focused heavily on the carbon coin, which I think now is a symbolic way of talking about a whole suite of actions.

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah. Would you explain to our listeners, who have not read your book, what the carbon coin is?

Kim Stanley Robinson:

Sure. This comes out of Delton Chen’s paper, a hypothesis risk assessment is in the title, I forget the title, it’s long and technical. But the idea would be this, that the central banks would, if you could prove, and at this point you’d need a rating agency, that you had drawn carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, you would get paid for it, on a one carbon coin per ton of carbon type basis, and the central banks would back that coin, give it a floor such that they would be paying you more than it cost you to draw that carbon down.

So, this would just be the cenral banks in a, I guess what I would call this now, a carbon coin, one aspect of green quantitative easing, would be to make it specific to drawing carbon down. Now, quickly, a secondary question comes up, which I hope your podcast will be discussing with the relevant experts. What if you keep carbon in the ground that you already own? I’m thinking of the petro states. The petro states are looking down the barrel of an economic gun. They’ve promised, at the Paris Agreement, they’re not going to sell and burn their carbon. They are in for trillions.

Some of these countries, 60 to 80% of their government income is selling and burning those very fossil fuels that they promised not to sell and burn. So, this is underdiscussed, let me put it that way, because it’s an ugly problem. It isn’t obvious how to pay these people. Here, I think that the COP27’s loss and damage thing, one of the losses would be, “Well, we’re not going to make our billions of dollars from selling our coal, our oil, our natural gas. We’ll keep it in the ground. You need to help us by building clean energy production in our country, as well as compensation for what we’re losing here now.”

Since this is an economy show, I can say that payments would have to be discounted. They’d have to take a haircut. It would have to be amortized and paid out over a hundred years on a schedule, like it would’ve been sold in the first place. Probably, it would have to be entailed by requirements to be green with it, and not go into kleptocracy mode. So, these countries would be giving up some sovereignty. On the other hand, they would need it. Every country has given up some sovereignty by signing the Paris Agreement. So, we’re all member states in the Paris Agreement, and a member state is not the same as a nation state.

The EU is the perfect example of the differences. Member statehood is a different psychological and a different economic and financial arrangement, an emotional arrangement. This is why the anti-immigration movement, the whole tribalism, the nativism, these are people insisting on a fiction of nation statehood, which is a hoaked up tribalism of the 19th century, when everybody is actually a member state, and it’s a one planet situation. So, that’s the ideological battle going on there.

Financially, economically, how do you generate the literally trillions of dollars necessary to compensate these countries that, if they go bankrupt, will lose their police, their teachers, their airports, and indeed become a failed state like a Somalia or a Syria? We can’t have that happen to Venezuela, and Nigeria, and all of the Arab states, and Russia, for instance, who have resorted to a criminal invasion in order to solve their version of this problem. So, it’s your job, economics podcasts, to discuss this underdiscussed wicked problem.

David Goldstein:

Right. It’s the stranded asset problem.

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah.

Kim Stanley Robinson:

Yes.

Nick Hanauer:

By the way, it’s not just the carbon in the ground. It’s the infrastructure that we have built, hundreds of billions of trillions of dollars of infrastructure, to convert that carbon into energy.

Kim Stanley Robinson:

Yes.

Nick Hanauer:

Also-

Kim Stanley Robinson:

One thought about that, that I’ve been taught about since Ministry came out, this was at Glasgow, is that there are parts of the nuclear power cheerleading crowd, the industry itself saying, “Look, give us your old coal plants and we will throw in a refrigerator-sized thorium burning nuclear plant, like the Navy has in their submarines, and we’ll use that same plant, that same grid, and keep it going, but not be releasing carbon to the atmosphere.” Well, it certainly struck me as a plausible argument. There was a guy high up in the Department of Energy in the Biden administration who was at these meetings in Glasgow, nodding and going, “Yeah, good idea.”

David Goldstein:

Yeah. I’ve heard about people talking about small thorium reactors for, I’m almost 60, most of my adult life. Yet, we never seem to move towards them.

Kim Stanley Robinson:

Well, this would be like fusion power. It’s always 10 years away no matter where you are in time. But I have the feeling that, and this is just impressionistic, and I remain an English major and anomalous, but my impression is that, whether it’s thorium or uranium, that small safe nuclear is something. What if you told the Navy to take over the nation’s nuclear program and do it as a not-for-profit?

It’s really the cost cutting, the cutting of corners, and the safety infractions of trying to make a profit of out of all this stuff. The Navy hasn’t had a nuclear accident ever, so that’s 70 years of people living five feet away from a nuclear reactor and walking away healthy. It seems to me, the technical expertise is there.

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah. Tell us, do you have a next project in mind? Are you going to do more economic storytelling?

David Goldstein:

Yeah. I just want to put in a vote for doing more economic storytelling, because I was really impressed the way your characters clearly explained some rather complex economic concepts.

Kim Stanley Robinson:

Well, thank you for that. I feel like I’ve learned by reading writers like Michael Lewis and John Lanchester. I can do it, but I’m not the only one who can do it though. But, there aren’t that many novelists who can do it or are interested enough. Editors blanche when you say, “I want to write economic science fiction.” They literally [inaudible 00:27:43].

Nick Hanauer:

They’re like, “Yeah-“

Kim Stanley Robinson:

“You’ve got to be kidding.” In fact, I can tell a good story. My editor Tim Holman at Orbit Books, whom I love, I said to Tim over lunch years ago, “I want to write about global finance.” He just said, “That’s a terrible idea, Stan.” By the end of that lunch, he was saying, “Well, look, if you want to do it, why don’t you set it in New York?” I had already written 2312, which has solar system finance, if you want to go to that level. In that novel, I had a brief passthrough of a Manhattan that was underwater, up to about the third story, and it was still functioning fine.

He said, “Why don’t you set your story there in New York? It’s the capital of finance anyway. You’ve got a local habitation and a name. You can have some fun with the physical landscape, as well as the financial, and we’re all underwater right now financially.” By the time lunch was over, he had solved my problem for me, in an impressive way, so I own him for that. A lot of people come to my work by way of Ministry for the Future. I can send them back one novel, and New York 2140 is in finance and economic terms. It is a backward step in my own understanding, but it’s not that far backwards, and it’s definitely about financialization.

I have a day trader in a skyscraper in New York, and he’s doing the kind of thing that Wall Street still does, looking for profit by finding the marginal places where you can do trading, and just make money whether the market goes up or down. So, a hedge fund guy. He creates an index that is the Case-Shiller Index for housing prices around the world, except it’s for intertidal properties, so property that’s on dryland when it’s low tide and is fully flooded when it’s high tide. The intertidal property pricing index is a joke, but I’m hoping that it’s both a funny joke and an illustrative joke.

In a way, I’m not answering your question because going forward, I am flummoxed and overwhelmed. In theory, yes, of course. I should write more climate change fiction with an economic bent in it, or aspect to it, to try to illustrate the way the two combine. In practice, I don’t have a clue. I don’t have a plot of the characters. So, I’m on the lookout. I’m also feeling like Ministry for the Future is still having an impact worldwide.

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah, Yeah, absolutely.

Kim Stanley Robinson:

When you publish a novel, it’s like dropping a rock in a pond. There’s a splash, there’s a ripple that goes out. The ripple disappears, the rock’s at the bottom of the pond, and everybody forgets about it. That has generally not been quite true for my novels. The Mars Trilogy is selling better than it did when it came out in the early 90s. Ministry for the Future still seems to be creating intense discussions, and action committees, groups at universities starting up their own playacting or cosplay ministries for the future.

If there was a real Ministry for the Future, and of course there is, it’s called the UN and all the other things going on, then what would it do, and how would it formulate itself? That’s gone right to the UN itself. So, while that’s happening, I don’t think it’s smart. For one thing, I can’t do it anyway because I have no ideas. For another thing, it might not be smart to get in the way of Ministry for the Future, and say, “Oh, look. I’ve got a new book.”

Nick Hanauer:

No, that makes good sense. Stan, I doubt you are following closely what we’re up to. But what we’re up to is, attempting to tear down the entire edifice of neoclassical economics and neoliberalism, and replace it with a modern understanding of economic cause and effect.

Kim Stanley Robinson:

Yes.

Nick Hanauer:

Basically, we are trying to rebuild the operating system of the world. The thing that was magical about what you did was, you took really complicated abstract, effectively technical and economic abstractions, and turned them into a narrative that people could connect to, and emotionally relate to, and understand. Your novelistic attack of neoliberalism was super effective. Indeed, it even influenced our own work in some ways that I thought were pretty surprising.

So, we encourage you to keep going. But, that being said, pour it on with Ministry of the Future and get the 10 part TV series done. To be effective, you have to continue to focus on important things. But, I do think that there is this really important role that you have played, and can play in the future, in turning these abstractions into stories that people can wrap their heads around, and change their behavior as a consequence of, which is super cool.

David Goldstein:

We like to say that economics is a story that we tell about ourselves to justify who gets what and why. It’s really useful to us to have better storytellers out there-

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah, absolutely.

David Goldstein:

Telling this story.

Kim Stanley Robinson:

Yeah. Well, I appreciate that.

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah. Because it’s one thing for us to try to explain to people why neoliberalism is wrong, which we can do very successfully. But, stories are how most people interpret information, and it was just really great to see new ideas take shape in a novel, in a new way. I thought it was super cool.

David Goldstein:

Speaking of which, Stan, I read a lot of science fiction in my youth, obviously haven’t read a lot of fiction recently, let alone science fiction. But my recollection, from the science fiction I read, was that it had little or nothing to do with economics. Yet, really, the economy is just another technology. So, you would think that it’s something that science fiction authors would be well-suited to writing about and explaining. Are you unique in the field, or are there other writers who are mining the same ground?

Kim Stanley Robinson:

There are other writers mining the same ground. They will be sometimes called political science fiction, or utopian science fiction. That’s a very important strand. Everybody will make a call-out to Ursula K. Le Guin’s, Dispossessed.

David Goldstein:

Of course.

Kim Stanley Robinson:

Then to H.G. Wells, a crucial figure in 20th century political economic thought, because his utopian novels were stubbornly persistent. Not as popular as his early scientific romances, but they were there in the air. When they came together at Bretton Woods to reconstitute the world, that was an H.G. Wells-ian scientific meritocracy, Fabian socialist vision that got instituted at Bretton Woods and McCain’s. The crucial economic theorist of that was influenced by Wells.

So now, in the present day, it’s often British. Ken MacLeod in Scotland is intensely interested in these things. There are science fiction writers that are across the spectrum. You have right wingers writing military science fiction, you got libertarians writing this cyber punk-ish, mean streets, get your own type libertarian or start a new society where there are no rules at all, and various kinds of fantasy spaces, which I would say, they are necessary to explore all these things. I, and some others, MacLeod for sure, would represent the left wing of that effort.

A strange confluence of events having to do with my Mars trilogy being a precursor to this, let’s build a new post-capitalist world and give it its history, has me ahead of the game. Now I’m an elder statesman in that game. Actually, it’s hard. It’s hard to write about economics in plots and in novels. I’m happy to have done it. I think people were hungry for it, and I think it can be done, but you need to have a vision of the novel that isn’t the current literary fiction, and their naval gazing focus on the problems of the individual bourgeois subject, as if those were all psychological, and not structural and economic.

So, you’d have to go back to Balzac and George Eliot and, in science fiction, H.G. Wells and Olaf Stapledon, and Le Guin, a crucial figure. They all focused on these matters throughout. The novel stayed healthy in science fiction when it was unhealthy in the post-war literary fiction, “Oh my God, I’ve got a problem,” or, “I’ve got a divorce,” or, “I’ve got an adventure.” So one of the things that’s happening with Ministry for the Future is the power of the novel to discuss the totality, has been brought back into focus.

So, I’m happy. Not just personally but, as an English major, I’m happy for the idea that the novel still matters to people. You read Ministry and suddenly you’ve got, what Jameson calls, a cognitive map of the world. From there, you develop a political ideology. I’m hoping you’re talking to Piketty, and to progressive taxation as a powerful weapon. It’d be interesting to talk to Jeffrey Sachs and see what he has to say about the UN and the SDGs, et cetera.

It’s a clunky, weird process, this process that you’re engaged in and that you’re part of, to figure out a coherent and explainable, better economic system that can be instituted in the current legal regime. So, in other words, you don’t need revolution. You don’t need a miracle cure, you don’t need a silver bullet. You need policies that could actually be enacted by legislatures today.

Nick Hanauer:

But, at the risk of going down a deep dark hole, you need more than policies, Stan. You need a new way to understand economic cause and effect, which leads, logically, to policies that will actually make the world better.

Kim Stanley Robinson:

Great thought. Yes. Right.

Nick Hanauer:

Because a list of policies is not that helpful. In fact, between the three of us, we could list that list of policies.

Kim Stanley Robinson:

Yes.

Nick Hanauer:

The trick is, getting people to understand how the world works in a way that makes the policies that will benefit them seem logical rather than illogical. That’s where neoliberalism did its damage, right?

Kim Stanley Robinson:

Yes.

Nick Hanauer:

Neoliberalism was a way of understanding economic cause and effect that led you to believe that making rich people richer, for example, would be good for everybody.

Kim Stanley Robinson:

Yes.

Nick Hanauer:

That the less constrained corporations were, the better it would be for everybody. That rising inequality was feature, not a bug. The problem is that our policymakers went to college and were taught these things in their economics classrooms, and then enacted policy on that basis.

Kim Stanley Robinson:

Yes. Also, in their MBA programs [inaudible 00:39:48].

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah, absolutely. Purpose of the corporation is to enrich shareholders.

Kim Stanley Robinson:

Right.

Nick Hanauer:

As we’ve said a million times on this podcast, they weren’t making a normative claim. They weren’t saying, “Fuck the poor.” What they were saying is, “If you run a corporation to enrich shareholders, it will be better for everybody.”

Kim Stanley Robinson:

Yes.

Nick Hanauer:

That was the evil part, right?

Kim Stanley Robinson:

Yes. Right.

Nick Hanauer:

An entire generation of humans bought that nonsense and acted consistent with that belief, and here we are.

Kim Stanley Robinson:

Yes.

Nick Hanauer:

That’s what you have to undo, and that’s our project. By the way, Eric and I are writing a book on economics that we hope will change this paradigm, and you will be one of the first to get an early copy.

Kim Stanley Robinson:

Great. I love it. I love it. I’m completely on board with it. I think you’re talking about ideology, the imaginary relationship to a real situation. But also, talking about political economy.

Nick Hanauer:

Yes.

Kim Stanley Robinson:

You’re right, neoliberalism, it’s now famous. The Mont Pelerin Society, Hayek and his crowd, Milton Friedman, creating a paradigm that people thought made sense, and they bought into it at the political level.

Nick Hanauer:

We are making progress. We’re definitely making progress. The momentous achievements of the Biden administration being the best example of that progress, right?

Kim Stanley Robinson:

Yes. Yes. Well, and also Australia and Columbia’s election, and Brazil’s election, the pink Latin America, that we are making progress. So, it isn’t like it’s 1990. I have been saying this stuff since 1990. But, as a science fiction writer, you are allowed to be wacky, and marginalized from the get-go, because science fiction is not exactly the home of actionable political theory.

Nick Hanauer:

Yes, exactly. Well, Stan, we have one final question, which is, why do you do this work?

Kim Stanley Robinson:

Well, I love novels. So, you can unpack it from there. I read a novel, I’m in somebody else’s head. I’m in a different time and place. It’s like magic. It’s easy travel to other planets, but also this planet. As an English major and just a lover of novels I, early on, decided I would like to write novels myself, and slowly taught myself the craft of it by doing it. That’s the only way you can learn writing novels, is by trial and error. It’s a hard long process.

So, at a certain point, science fiction was imposing itself on me as being the genre that was the best depiction of the way the late 20th century felt. In other words, literary fiction was a dead letter. It was late, late, late modernism. It was weak tea, it wasn’t trying to express the totality anymore. I became a science fiction writer, but that’s got its problems. My stories are set in the future. It’s obviously made up stuff. How could I give it the salutary of a good novel that’s about the past or about the here and now, even though I had said it in the future? How?

Well, I had to overcompensate in, what you might call, a kind of hyperrealism. So even though it was on Mars, set in the 22nd century, people groan at how meticulously I would describe the rocks, et cetera. But it was a hyperrealism so that you could feel, “Well, whatever else, at least this stuff is realism. It’s happening,” even though it was set on Mars in the 22nd century. So, as I decided to set my fiction in the future, or really something decided in me and I had to follow it, I was a forced to try to think out what makes anomal feel real.

There, you end up at economics. You end up trying to express the totality by understanding its economic system, and how much that influences everything else, which is a project you guys are already onto. So that’s why I do this. You could, and it would be tedious to do so, go back to my novels of the late 80s when I was a young man, and a Gold Coast and Pacific Edge starter process that then goes to the Mars trilogy, then goes to the DC Trilogy, then goes to these last, what I call, the Orbit 6. They get more and more obsessed by political economy as being utopian science fiction. If you want to present a better world, it’s going to have to have a better political economy than this world right now, right?

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah. So’s right.

Kim Stanley Robinson:

So, I’m a utopian science fiction writer because I would like to help to make a better world, and some novels have use value. Then I get dragged into all the rest of it as a necessary corollary to my main project.

Nick Hanauer:

Well, thank you so much for joining us. We’re huge fans. I just bought New York 2124? Is that what it’s called?

Kim Stanley Robinson:

Yeah, New York 2140. Well, God bless you for that.

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah, yeah.

Kim Stanley Robinson:

You will laugh. Given your backgrounds and interests, I think that New York 2140 is so much more fun than Ministry for the Future.

Nick Hanauer:

Okay. Yeah. I wouldn’t call Ministry for the Future fun.

Kim Stanley Robinson:

No.

David Goldstein:

It certainly doesn’t start that way.

Nick Hanauer:

No, no. [inaudible 00:45:13].

David Goldstein:

Hopefully, Stan, we can move into that post-capitalist world without the type of calamity you described in the book, at the start of the book.

Nick Hanauer:

Yes.

Kim Stanley Robinson:

Oh, yes. Yes. Well, I was taught this at Glasgow by Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, a Jordanian diplomat, and one of my important teachers there. He said to me, “Stan, you do not have to be in a plane crash to understand that being in a plane crash would be a bad thing.” So we tell these stories, and then we hope to avoid the plane crash.

Nick Hanauer:

That’s right. Well, thank you so much for joining us.

Kim Stanley Robinson:

It was my pleasure.

Nick Hanauer:

It was [inaudible 00:45:53] fantastic. Thank you.

Kim Stanley Robinson:

My pleasure.

Nick Hanauer:

Now that I’ve actually spoken to Kim Stanley Robinson, it’s clear to me why his novel is so good. [inaudible 00:46:10]. That guy is super smart. Oh my God.

David Goldstein:

And, thoughtful. Leave it to a science fiction writer to have the chops to explain what really is a technology, the economy. It’s just another social technology. To have the ability to explain technology, and advance technology in a way that is incredibly readable, which I think lot of economists, and economic writers, and journalists might take a lesson from.

Nick Hanauer:

But I was an incredibly impressed by the analytical nature of his approach, and how carefully he had thought through what the challenge was, and what he needed to do. Of course, it’s not surprising. People who are really good at things rarely just wing it. Whenever you talk to somebody who’s really, really good at something, you find out how carefully they have approached their subject. We talk to a lot of professional economists. We talk to very few novelists. I just couldn’t have been more impressed.

David Goldstein:

But if you took some offense, or were put off a bit by Stan talking about his Marxist education, and by the three of us talking about into a post-capitalist world, I just want to make clear what you and I, Nick, are talking about, and also what Stan is talking about in the book. When we say post-capitalist, we’re not saying socialism. We’re not saying Soviet-style socialism, communism, a command dichotomy. That’s not at all what we’re talking about.

In that book, and in our vision of the economic future, there’s still a place for markets, a very big place for markets. The dominant role in the economy is markets, but it is a different way of thinking about how markets work, and also what their responsibility/obligation is towards the larger society as a whole. It doesn’t view the economy as its own thing that you don’t want to interfere with. It’s integrated into the entire global society.

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah. I was also struck by his optimism, and I substantially agree. I do think that we’re making a lot of progress. Just parenthetically, one of the exciting things that’s just getting reported on, is that the ozone layer that we used to be so worried about continues to improve. In fact, the ozone layer new assessment, released by a bunch of UN-backed scientists, the ozone hole may go away as a consequence of concerted climate action. So, this is just great existence proof that you can actually solve these problems if you want to. We just have to change the way that we made refrigerators and some other things.

David Goldstein:

Ban the chlorofluorocarbons. Which, by the way, first we were told, “Oh, there’s no way these human made chlorofluorocarbons, there could be enough of them to destroy the ozone layer.” It’s a very familiar story. Then we were told, “Oh no, we can’t possibly afford to stop using the fluorocarbons. It turns out, we could. It turns out, it did.

When we stopped using them, it’s taken decades because it takes decades for these chemicals to decompose into their constituent molecules. But, over time, they have been dissipating in the atmosphere. Every year that ozone hole over the Antarctic is smaller and smaller. This is an example of something which could only be addressed at the global level. It was a collective action problem that required every nation on earth, and every major corporation to work together to address it, and to agree not to cheat. We did it.

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah.

David Goldstein:

It works.

Nick Hanauer:

And, we could do it again.

David Goldstein:

That’s right. If we could do it on ozone, we can certainly do it on carbon emissions, on climate change. Now, a lot of what’s happening is baked in already from the carbon we’ve already released. Pulling carbon out of the atmosphere is going to take a lot more time than putting it in. But, if we slash emissions now, over the next decade, then we can avoid the worst projections, perhaps some of those catastrophes that Stan talks about in his book. That’s the optimism here, that this existential crisis can be addressed, it can be addressed effectively and, most of all, that it can be addressed by better economics.

Nick Hanauer:

That’s right. Yeah. Well, fascinating guy, fascinating conversation.

David Goldstein:

Yeah.

Nick Hanauer:

I hope he writes a lot more books about these subjects. It’ll be very useful.

David Goldstein:

That’s right. We’ve got a link to it in the show notes, the Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson.

Speaker 4:

Pitchfork Economics is produced by Civic Ventures. If you like the show, make sure to subscribe, rate and review us wherever you get your podcasts. Find us on Twitter and Facebook at Civic Action and Nick Hanauer. Follow our writing on Medium at Civic Skunk Works, and peek behind the podcast scenes on Instagram @pitchforkeconomics. As always, from our team at Civic Ventures, thanks for listening. See you next week.