Kicking off the Resilient Livelihoods Pre-Summit conversation....Starting with materials from the Edgeryders Archive!

Campfire Covid-19 Resilient Livelihoods
2

#10 + #11 SciFi Economics Lab

"Best of " content

  • THE machine is quasi in stand still, time to rip out some pieces and design some new? A call to practice new forms economy - #15 by manutopik
  • Ergodicity economics for the win!
  • The Sci-Fi Economics Lab in 2020: an update - #3 by alberto
  • Long-term thinking in economics: reflecting on the experience of the Messina advanced cluster
  • How participatory regional policies could contribute to the emergence of post-carbon economic models - #10 by fjanss
  • Can Science Fiction Save the World? In depth article based on interview of Alberto as economist and Sci fi fan. Excerpts/good quotes:
    • “Now, this their profit that is part of GDP and as a consequence, governments were also always trying to maximize growth in GDP. Now they’re also trying to maximize the growth in profit of financial firms. This is a substantial difference. And this was just a political decision.”
    • why are we having this event in Brussels? Because this is the capital of Europe, and the It’s a place where we can multiply the impact of a shift in thinking, you see. So it is not a coincidence that the keynote, the keynote lecture of science fiction economics lab, is going to be chaired by Kirsten Dunlop. She’s the CEO of EIT CLimate-KIC which is the European Union’s largest agency that funds climate innovation. So what what we are seeing here is that if we can generate this kind of fresh thinking, we can Throw it over the wall to the people that use it, which is, which is the public, the public authorities, the public powers. And on the other hand, if we can show to economists and to science fiction authors interest of the powers that be, then we can incentivize them to do more work in this area. So hopefully we can use Brussels as a kind of lens that focuses this, this process and makes a few more people see.
    • “ if actually we optimize for resilience rather than for a available availability, always no questions asked, which is more consumer a stick idea, then you would have a much more efficient system even present economics desk because the, the kilowatt would cost less because you don’t need to transfer it anymore. you produce energy locally with your own solar panels.”
    • “However, it turns out that the economics in my lifetime kind of pivoted from from being a place where you could inform landscape collective choices to to a discipline that basically enforces and improve serve if possible, a single model So when I started the my undergraduate courses, it was still the way it is. So you still at to a competing economic models, the Soviet one and the western one. And you actually had entire departments but we are studying socialistic on economics, not just economies but economics. And I saw the kind of a tail end of that there’s very different way to think about things.”
    • “ this world building thing that the science fiction authors have you you take the world that you see and then you say well what would happen if whatever robots could think what would happen if there were a bunch of miners mining the asteroids for precious metals? So what would happen if we could travel through time this kind of stuff?”
    • “scientists like turning the world’s fabric in their heads, and trying to pull a thread in that fabric, and see what happens. In the internet era, you can really this as it as it develops because many of these authors have blogs and and the debates on the blogs are pretty impressive.”
    • “I like very much Charles Stross. He runs a very impressive blog in which he asks questions like how many human population that we need in order to sustain a technologically advanced civilization and this is very useful why you want us interested in that is that he’s thinking of the space colonization experience shows slower than light now we don’t have start thanks warp drive. So you’re going to have to send the starship to win some some near star and then that is going to have to keep the colony going on it. So means, so how many people do you send?”
    • “how many human population that we need in order to sustain a technologically advanced civilization”
    • “So you’re going to have to send the starship to win some near star and then that is going to have to keep the colony going on it. So means, so how many people do you send?”
    • “I find that this kind of thinking is really refreshing and is really empowering because it is it ends up being a way to understand the words that can inform your own choices and your own actions. To turn the world around in your head and to pull the threads of society’s fabric and see which one leads to where.”
    • “they created fictional economies that were not real, but plausible. Enough it was they were doing exactly what economics itself is no longer doing.”
    • “I could really associate economic concepts from the theory that we haven’t discussed the real world to the future economy described by the offer.”
    • what if we could get economists that are versed in hard the Edge economic thinking, to look at those fictional economies that these people are describing, and maybe vet them and maybe you can analyze them and describe them and write papers that will support them?
    • “let’s build in the the range of alternatives that society as to choose from. Maybe we want to keep the present system, it makes a lot of sense not to do crazy stuff, but we shouldn’t keep the economic system because we can’t think of a better one”
    • “If you want to make a career in academia you have to publish on the major journals if you have to publish on major journals, nowadays, economics doesn’t really allow you to stray too far.”
    • “you cannot shift the academic debate because everything that every new paper that comes out has to be the present academic debate. So everything that is not that is ignored.”
    • “get together some economists and some science fiction authors and see if this collaboration could create some kind of new economic thinking.
    • “ The climate crisis is not there because people are evil or because people are stupid and don’t really see what’s up. happening. The climate crisis is here because it is profitable.”
    • “We do things that are transactable, and so can generate value, by our current definition of value. Right? Yes. So what we don’t do is we don’t invest in public goods because public goods by definition don’t have a market.”

MEDIA COVERAGE of the SciFi Econ Lab event in November last year

PROMOTION CONTENT

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