In my view, the birth itself of the Sci-Fi Economics lab is meaningful. Thank you to have conceived the Lab and engaged to make it happen.
This note is about the event. I know that this is only part of the Lab, but it was the one that I could follow the most. Some brilliant insights came from the event, but I think we should avoid the shallow mentioning of concepts that the Lab should help to scrutinize in-depth, instead.
Example. In a Sci-Fi Economics Lab event, I would expect that the concept of “commons” – dropped in the talk as an easy, non-problematic, issue – is critically examined through the perspectives offered by SF and fantastic fiction, economy, ecology, etc.
Maybe defining and circumscribing the concepts to be discussed is an idea worth to be considered in future events. Some mainstream and already explored examples (non-proposals): what Houyhnhnms society in “Gulliver’s Travels” and the Morlocks-Eloi scenario in H.G. Wells’ “The Time Machine” can tell us about “Inequality”?
The impressive work done in the Edgeryders’ wiki on the selection of books and authors gives a lot of potential starting points, worth to be brought under the spotlight of the main event.
I expect to hear from economists that believe in imagination as a tool for improving research in disciplines dominated by the “no-alternative" narratives, and “non-economists” who acknowledge the unavoidable questions of economics. In my view, at the event, the latter perspective was mostly neglected.
I see the Lab as a tool to making the economy, science, fiction and ecology consolidated frames collide and contaminate in new ways. This is why I appreciated the final remarks on irony. Irony is the attitude of being involved and detached, ‘in the frame’ and out of it at the same time. Irony implies humility and curiosity. This, in my view, is the way forward.
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