A minor response about a critique of economic ideas in _Accelerando_

If you haven't read http://mises.org/story/2402,
this will be completely out of left field. It's posted here for my own reference, mostly.


You quote Stross' novel:
"[..] minds raised on Marxist dialectic and Austrian School
economics [...]"

and say:
"While some self-professed Marxists have allegedly embraced
Austrianism — and vice versa — one wonders exactly how to
synthesize the Marxist Labor Theory of Value with its polar
opposite subjective theory as enshrined by the Austrian School."

While it's not obvious merely from the quote what Macx meant
by the thought of which part is expressed above, my own
assumption on reading it was that this referred to those
who not only believe that the free market works well, but that
it's inevitable that free markets will win out in the end --
the kind of thinking that produces books like _The End of
History_ and wars of "liberation" with no plan other than
the idea that if tyranny is removed, liberal democracy will
immediately and inevitably result.

Later, you say:
"It is these algorithms that Manfred earlier sold to an
Italian politician, as a means to objectively calculate
prices in a command economy. The mechanics of such equations
are never fully fleshed out, leaving the reader to wonder
exactly how a third party can, in some manner, come to such
a measure of the multitudinous subjective values and
preferences that individuals intrinsically have towards goods
and services."

It's hard to know exactly how tongue-in-cheek you're being
here. Do you also expect people who write about FTL drives
to explain how they work in a manner convincing to physicists?
It's certainly possible to suspect such a thing can exist (or
just pretend for the space of a novel that it can) without
knowing how to build it. In fact, knowing how to build it
would certainly suggest that one has better things to write
than novels. :)

Quoting you again:
'At one point in the story Macx's French mistress broadcasts
news that Macx is in town:
"Oh, and he's promised to invent three new paradigm shifts
before breakfast every day, starting with a way to bring about
the creation of Really Existing Communism by building a state
central planning apparatus that interfaces perfectly with
external market systems and somehow manages to algorithmically
outperform the Monte Carlo free-for-all of market economics,
solving the calculation problem. Just because he can, because
hacking economics is fun, and he wants to hear the screams from
the Chicago School."
In this passage Stross now makes the error of "solving" Mises's
calculation problem with the band-aid solution of copying consumer
goods prices from a market system and transplanting them into the
command economy.'

What? How so? He asserts (or, the girlfriend character "gigglingly"
asserts) that he's designing a system that can interface *with*
market economies, and, separately, solves the calculation problem.
He doesn't say that the system is "copying consumer goods prices
from a market system".

Frankly, it's hard to see why you would say he *did* say that, since
it's so obviously not in the text.

Quoting you:
"Contrary to the mainstream, the Austrian Business Cycle Theory
posits that cycles are exogenous to the market, a creature wholly
belonging to the governments manipulation of the money supply [...]"

That's an interesting claim, and one I haven't really read about
before (my lack; not suggesting it's new or anything!). Is there
a short and pithy explanation for how the normal business cycles
operated in the 19th century US, when the US currency was tied
directly to gold?

Quoting you:
"First, because we are supposedly dealing with a post-scarcity world"

Uh, no. This part of the novel is set only a few years from now,
and in a mostly capitalist world like the one we're in. The post-
scarcity part of the book doesn't come in until *literally* half
the book later, as measured by my scroll bar.

Quoting you:
"It is clear, though, that the world that Stross has created cannot
be a post-scarcity world, if one still has to exchange in order to
acquire the use of goods and services."

Well, certainly it's not intended to be post-scarcity at this point!


BTW, I read and found interesting the paper in footnote 11, but
it seems clear that Robert P. Murphy's argument only holds for
a universe of marketable products which is infinite in both time
and space. It's not at all clear that this applies in any real
way to actual minds using products built with actual atoms, all
of which are quite finite and countable. Assuming the speed of
light limit holds, any particular amount of time also defines an
upper limit on the amount of space and material which need be
considered, leaving us with arguments about Bekenstein bounds and
Kolmogorov complexity, which any economics-related argument must
fall within.