textiplication.com

Updated: quote attributed to John is actually from Anders Sandberg

It’s too damn hard.

http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/004568.html

A couple of libertarian economists at the von Mises Institute criticize Accelerando’s discussion of Economics 2.0 for, it appears,  not having completely succeeded in supplanting their own doctrine in the course of a side-discussion in the opening section of a novel that has way too much on its plate anyway.   

My first reaction was much the same as Anders Sandberg’s, in the passage that John quotes - that great hard SF today requires polymathic mastery of so many disciplines that very few can really succeed at it. 

“…Maybe a true hard sf author in 2020 will have to master not just physics, biology, computer science, economics, sociology, psychology - and write well, of course. We better invent brain enhancements quickly if we are to get anybody with that kind of expertise….”

Then I read the actual attack from the von Mises folks.

I suppose it was an easy article to publish.  As a plea for attention, academics will sometimes attempt to dissect pop culture, and Stross probably is pop culture to academic libertarian economists.   Usually it’s done in good fun, though, with a recognition of the intrinsic irony of the attack: Don Quixote jousts with pictures of windmills, the actual windmills having proven too tough.  Not in this case, though:

Ever the second-hander intellectual mountebank, Stross manages to mangle a bevy of technical and economic gobbledygook and shoehorn it into an exponentially spiraling plotline.

Whoa, ho ho!  My first response is something like this:

Q: How many academic libertarian economists does it take to screw in a light bulb?

A: That’s not funny!

Stross does paint some kind of target on himself, having addressed libertarian economics so directly (if briefly) in Accelerando’s, but the bitter anger in this piece from the von Mises Institute is quite exceptional.  I would think they’d be pleased as punch that anyone was even paying attention to libertarian economics in a science fiction novel, much as any phlogiston chemist might similarly be.

You [noticed] me! You really did! You [noticed] me!

- Sally Field (paraphrased)

The response by Anders Sandberg is considerably more balanced, observing that Accelerando’s at least raises interesting questions for economists to research.   Anders also questions the Mises’ folks dogmatic criticism of Economics 2.0:

But even a free market economy might get sufficient bumps by the rapid growth of the posthuman intelligences inside it. Plateaus and breakthroughs in developing whatever software the entities desire/are would introduce noise, and it seems to me that it is not clear at all that a rapidly smarter population (with possibly exponentially growing differences in smartness) would be evenly rotating. Misallocations and adjustments can still occur if they are impossible for intelligences of level X to foresee but obvious for level X+1 (or X+100) intelligences.