I’m a big fan of science fiction and fantasy. One of the frequently used worldbuilding methods is the introduction of a parallel reality. From the wardrobe leading to Narnia (C.S. Lewis) to the mind altering drug opening the doors to the in-between in Dark Matter (Blake Crouch) or the thinning of boundaries leading to accidental falls into other timelines in Doors to Eden (Adrian Tchaikovsky), weaving together our familiar reality and its alternative(s) provides not only a fecund setting for a good story, but an intriguing opportunity to critically reflect our familiar world.
The thing, however, is, that when I’m reading fiction, I know that the parallel worlds do not really exist. I also know that despite their appeal, unfortunately the types of magic or alternative natural laws governing the parallel worlds do not function in this realm of ours. I will not, for example, ground my actions on the faith that highly evolved Neanderthals from the parallel reality of an alternative timeline will enter ours and save us from the ecological mess we’ve made of our planet (Doors to Eden).
So, in fiction the parallel realities are at worst harmless and at best great sources of metaphorical insights. The problem is that we currently live in a society where the majority of business and political decision-makers – and most of the lay people as well – actually believe in the existence of an alternative reality. That reality is called economics.
The origin story of the economic reality
The era in between Copernicus suggesting in 1543 that maybe the Earth pivots around the sun, and Newton publishing his book on the mathematical principles of nature in 1678, is known as the Enlightenment. It gave rise to natural sciences and taught people that there are such mechanisms in nature that when we understand them, we can rely on them to function similarly each time – when we drop something from a tower, it falls at same speed each time. We could start unearthing those mechanisms and through understanding them, begin controlling our physical reality without awaiting any divine interventions.
Economics, then known as political economy, started to emerge around a century later. From the onset, its guiding idea was to identify such natural law like mechanisms from the social sphere as would govern economic activities in a similar manner as for example gravity governs the dropping of a ball from the tower. In 1871, Jevons captured this pursuit as follows:
“But as all the physical sciences have their basis more or less obviously in the general principles of mechanics, so all branches and divisions of economic science must be pervaded by certain general principles. It is to the investigation of such principles – to the tracing out of the mechanics of self-interest and utility, that this essay has been devoted. The establishment of such a theory is a necessary preliminary of any definite drafting of the superstructure of the aggregate science.”
The problem, however, is that people don’t quite function as the objects scrutinized in natural sciences. This hurdle was overcome by the decision to focus only on a couple of human traits, our rationality and selfishness, and leave the equally germane but theoretically more cumbersome features, such as our stupidity and kindness, out of the equation.
Let me give you an example.
If you kick a ball, provided that you know the energy your muscles convey, the weight, mass and shape of the ball, and the prevailing wind conditions, you can pretty accurately model the path the ball will fly. As long as the factors remain the same, the ball will follow the same path. This is the realm in which the physical sciences operate.
Now, if you kick a human, modelling becomes a bit more difficult. Depending on the situation, or mood and disposition of the recipient of your kick, you might either end up with a black eye from a return punch, see someone running away crying, or maybe even get a hug and a kindly question of why are you feeling so bad that you need to kick someone, is there something mommy can do to make you feel better?
In the imaginary economic reality however, what would happen would be for the recipient of your kick to rapidly calculate which alternative response would be financially most lucrative for them, and for there to exist an omnipresent mechanism that would reward or punish that decision by pecuniary means. This economic reality is the one that the forefathers of political economy decided was accurate enough for the novel field to be of use. Subsequent developments not only created a flock of followers who believe this fable but also contributed to the emergence of a society actively designing and implementing such mechanisms.
There are thousands, even millions of scholarly texts discussing the validity of not only the underlying assumptions of economics, but the question of to what extent do the economic models describe real world and to what extent do they actually shape it, molding the reality to fit the models, not the other way round. For the sake of space (this blog will already be a long one…) I won’t go deeper into the criticisms here, but if you’re interested, this and this may provide fruitful beginning points.
The worldbuilding of the economic realm
In scifi and fantasy the authors are acclaimed (or not) by their worldbuilding capabilities. It is not enough to come up with a good story, but they need to be able to create a whole world with its accompanying natural laws, magic systems in fantasy and technological systems in scifi. It’s not enough for someone to twist a wand for something to happen – in good fantasy the reader knows the mechanisms behind that magic, where it comes from, what kinds of laws it obeys, how it is harnessed. Nor is it enough for the hero to be able to travel to stars, but the reader needs to be convinced of the feasibility of the particular FTL (faster-than-light) drives or other technological advances enabling that. (If you want brilliant worldbuilding, check out for example Brandon Sanderson’s worlds – they’re not only ingenious but internally coherent and logical.)
The forefathers of political economy were excellent worldbuilders. They had to both create boundaries, bracket out the mess and noise of the real world, and to envision the locomotive magic system that makes the world turn, and its accompanying mechanisms. They were inspired in this by the nascent natural sciences: for example, taking the second law of thermodynamics explicating how when hot and cold water meet, they seek equilibrium and mix into something lukewarm, the forefathers envisioned the law of supply and demand, making up the “law” of equilibrium seeking tendencies of economic actions. (If you happen to have fallen victim to the belief in that law, you need only consider the fact that companies are spending 1,78 trillion dollars in marketing during 2025. That is 1 780 000 000 000 000 000 dollars, which, for some reason, no-one has ever tried to use to persuade hot water to not mix with cold water).
As already mentioned, the first thing bracketed out from the magic realm was the human complexity – humans were rendered into strawmen whose actions could be predicted as per the “laws” of rationality and selfishness. The second thing that was left out was the biophysical reality within which the economy operates.
There is no nature, only resource flows entering and exiting the economic realm. There are no trees in the economic realm – instead there is the numerical financial value of a particular resource that can be inserted into an economic function. Additionally, there are no environmental impacts of economic actions; instead, there are negative externalities which materialize in the economic reality only if the said negative externality loops back in the form of costs or dwindling resource potentials.
The magic system of the economic world
The magic system of economic reality is explained by vast amounts of theorizing, which are geared towards one thing: how can the amount of money, numbers within the economic reality, be increased? This happens through two mechanisms: by increasing the amount of resources coming into the system to transform more and more of them into money, numbers, and by manipulating the numbers already existing in the economic realm to grow even bigger. The first process describes the so called “real economy” and the latter “financial economy”.
The logic of this magic system is known as economic growth. The prior mandates of gods were replaced by the overarching maxim of capital accumulation – the hero in this realm needs slay no dragons in pursuit of a divine reward, but to manipulate monetary flows cleverly to keep growing the pile.
The underlying idea is this: as money is a storage of value, with enough money everything of value, including human wellbeing, health, happiness, prestige or power can be achieved. The forefathers of economics were no monsters, but quite often philosophers who genuinely tried to figure out a system that would be good for the humanity. For them the decoupling of the economic realm from the real world was a means to an end, colored by a sincere belief that with enough money, all humanity’s problems could be solved, all human desires granted.
The alchemical process
The story is that somehow at the boundary between the economic realm and the real world, things mutate and transform as if passing through an alchemical process. Entering the realm, a tree mutates into monetary numbers, and exiting the realm, the intangible numbers transform into something a human desires – food, chair, power, luxury goods. Thus, within the boundaries of this magical realm it makes sense to try to add up the numbers, because as they then are passed into the real world, they can be transformed into more desirable thingies.
The fictional nature of this belief is illustrated nicely if we take a detour to the birth of markets.
The ancient Roman imperium had a problem. Their soldiers were also farmers, so after the campaigns, the army broke out as everyone returned to their farms to continue farming. The imperium however needed a more permanent military, so they came up with a solution: they started paying the soldiers salary. The idea was that the soldiers could buy their provisions instead of needing to return to their farms in between the campaigns.
However, this turned out to be problematic. Why would any farmer, who had toiled the year round to raise cattle and crops, exchange any grain or meat for some random lumps of metal? You couldn’t eat the coins, nor would any of your neighbors be stupid enough to take them in exchange for, say, a pig. Money was worthless.
Until the imperium came up with a solution. Up to that point the emperors had demanded taxes in the form of whatever the farmers produced, be it cattle, grain, slaves, vegetables or maybe woven textiles. After the failed introduction of salaries, someone somewhere got a brilliant idea: why don’t we make the farmers pay their taxes with money? As the soldier’s salary was the only source of money in the countryside, the farmers had to sell their wares to soldiers for the inedible money so that they could in turn pay the taxes in that format. Thus were markets born.
What the designers of the magic system of our current economics forgot, was the knowledge the ancient Roman farmers took for granted: money is useless – unless there a) exists something you can use that you can transform the money into, and b) there is a demand for money, i.e. someone willing to give something of genuine value in exchange for money, someone who believes that money will be useful for them later on.
The incompatibility of environmental and economic realities
To put it very simply, our current environmental problems stem either from the process of transforming the tangible elements of our biosphere into intangible money, or from the process of transforming the intangible money into mobile phones, plastic wrapped hamburgers or asphalted landscapes. The first is the process of production and selling, and the latter the process of consumption and buying.
We have now transformed a lot of the elements in our biosphere into money and are very good at manipulating it in its imaginary reality (the monetary value of real economy is 100 trillion dollars, whereas the monetary value of financial economy, pure abstraction, is 1000 trillion dollars). The problem is that as we continue transforming the real world entities into money, we are running out of the real world entities necessary at both boundaries.
Not only are we running out of such things we “need” for production (like oil, forests, fish) but we’re also at the same time running out of such things the money can be transformed back into if we want to actually get some utility for the human animal for it. Sowing coins to field does not wheat yield. Like the Roman farmers knew, we cannot eat money.
In short, unless someone comes up with the truly magically alchemical process of transforming the 1100 trillion dollars of existing money into tolerable temperatures, potable water or nutritious soil, no money in the world can fix the environmental mess we’re in. Because money just does not exist in the same realm in which we eat, breath and live. The best we can do is to stop transforming the living planet into dead money – an act we seem unwilling to engage in because of our blind faith in the fictional reality of our current version of economics.
Because money just does not exist in the same realm in which we eat, breath and live.
Yes, as long as we live in collectives, we will have an economic system of one or other kind. However, the one we now believe in is unfortunately incompatible with the fact of having only the one planet with its boundaries. It’s a work of fiction, which by itself would not be a problem – most social systems are grounded on fables – but it’s a work of fiction which makes its believers act destructively.
So, the next time you read from the newspaper how we all must consume more in order to help our society pursue economic growth, move on to the next page illustrating the floods, forest fires and failed crops. Because it is those pages that describe the real world we live in. For more useful fiction, skip the economics section and visit a library instead.
