The Scholomance is a school for wizard children, set in the eponymous world created by fantasy author Naomi Novik. In this world, magical predators called maleficaria feed on mana, a substance that allows wizards to do magic. Both children and adult wizards have it, but the adults are more dangerous than most of the maleficaria themselves, so the latter need to feed on children. This is a major threat to wizardkind: in the wild, nineteen out of twenty wizard children are eaten before maturity. The solution to this is the Scholomance: a semi-sentient, heavily warded magical building where children are better protected while they learn to defend themselves against the maleficaria. However, this solution is far from perfect: some predators still get in, and kill three out of four students before graduation.
Novik’s Scholomance Trilogy is a hugely enjoyable read. Cory Doctorow wrote a raving review of it; he’s not wrong, and I am glad he put me onto it. Even more so because, as I went through the three novels, I discovered the literary equivalent of a secret door to… a political economy based on a particular value theory called the labour theory of value (LVT). And look, maybe I am seeing ghosts here (no pun intended). I am like into analyses of science fiction novels, so maybe I am a guy with a hammer and all I see is nails. But still… humour me here, and see if it makes sense
Let’s start with mana. Wizards can do magic, but only if they have mana to spend. A powerful wizard is like a powerful car; its power is only theoretical until you put fuel into the equation. How do you get mana? A wizard can produce mana directly by engaging in a tiring or tedious activity, like doing pushups or crochet. He or she can also receive it from another wizard who gives it willingly: in fact, this is how wizards purchase from each other things that they value. Finally, a wizard can get mana from his or her own storage: besides their own bodies, wizards have access to magical artifacts that hold mana and can be drawn from as needed.
To an economist this means that mana is currency in the Scholomance world. It serves as mean of exchange, numeraire, storage of value; it is fungible. It also means that magic is derived from human labour: every act of magic requires mana, hence somebody’s effort or drudgery. In LVT terms, the socially necessary labour or absolute value (not to be confused with the exchange value) of an act of magic is equal to the amount of labour gone into producing the necessary mana. The analogy is quite strict, to the point that, as a wizard gets fitter and doing pushups becomes easier, he or she needs to do more of them to produce the same quantity of mana. (Novik: “The physical labor isn’t what counts. What turns it into mana is how much effort it costs me.”).
So far, so good. Here’s the curveball: it turns out there is another way to do magic after all. It’s called malia, and consists in pulling mana from your surroundings. Novik:
Everyone—almost everyone—uses a bit of malia here and there, stuff they don’t even think of as wicked. Magic a slice of bread into cake without gathering the mana for it first, that sort of thing, which everyone thinks is just harmless cheating. Well, the power’s got to come from somewhere, and if you haven’t gathered it yourself, then it’s probably coming from something living, because it’s easier to get power out of something that’s already alive and moving around. So you get your cake and meanwhile a colony of ants in your back garden stiffen and die and disintegrate.
So, in the Scholomance world there are two paths to doing magic: mana and malia. If you use the LVT analogy to translate this sentence in terms of our world, it reads like this: there are two paths to value production: labour and extraction. “The power’s got to come from somewhere” is Novik’s equivalent of “there is no free lunch”. If you have power and have not created it with the sweat of your brow, you have appropriated it from something or someone else.
This is a rather elegant formulation, because it puts under the same analytical umbrella two phenomena that most economists would consider distinct: negative externalities and exploitation. Negative externalities appear when an economic actor manages to shift some of the costs associated to their production onto the environment, for example through pollution. A company might be doing well, like, say, Dupont at the end of the 1990s, its profit tidy and its markets bullish – meanwhile, though, they are discharging poisonous chemicals into rivers, and people are dying of kidney and testicular cancer. Malia. Or take the example of high-octane fashion brand Armani, who was caught by Italian police subcontracting its 1,800 EUR bags, by way of a contractor, to sweatshops were workers were paid 2-3 EUR an hour to works 10 hours a day so that the sweatshops in question could sell the bags to Armani’s contractors for 93 EUR. Malia.
Some wizards go all in, only finance their magic with malia, and end up being responsible for a lot of suffering and death. Some do not want any part of this malia business, and go “strict mana”. Most are somewhere in between; they produce mana of their own, but also “cheat a little”. In the Scholomance world there are two problems with cheating a little. The first is that cheating adds up to create a negative balance on the other side of the ledger, compensating the positive balance of the additional magic that the cheater can do. Novik:
Whenever somebody needs a little more mana than they’ve got, they steal it from somewhere, seems like no big deal – but you end up with a negative flow [sic] of mana. When that negative flow gets big enough, a maleficaria will generate around it. It’s not a secret, but people do it anyway […] All the psychopatic wizards in the world put together aren’t the real problem. The problem is that everyone cheats. And the we get more maleficaria, and our kids die, and still everyone cheats, because the two things are too far apart. You can live your whole life without cheating once […] and still your kid’s just as likely to get eaten, and meanwhile someone else cheats every day and their kid sails through.
That, ladies and gents, is a textbook prisoner’s dilemma, with maleficaria in the role of negative externalities. And now to the second problem with cheating a little: by being so obviously beneficial, it makes it easier to cheat a lot more. In the Scholomance world, the highest-reputed wizards have figured out way to create magical fortresses called enclaves, that will keep maleficaria out, making their lives a lot safer and more comfortable, and give them the opportunity to acquire a lot of cheap labour by less fortunate wizards, dangling in front of them the possibility of a place in the safety of the enclave.
In the Scholomance world, safety is the main scarce resource around which the wizarding economy turns – the quantity on the left side of its production function, as it were. From an economic perspective, therefore, book three of the trilogy comes with the main plot twist: the scarcity of safety is, at least in part, manufactured.
Here’s how this happens. The protagonist, a powerful witch, discovers that making one of these fortresses requires hideous human sacrifices, and releases deadly maleficaria into the world. So, enclaves as a magical technology make the world safer for the privileged few, but less safe for everyone else. She then digs up a set of spells (a magical technology) to build enclaves without human sacrifices. “The power has to come from somewhere”, so the resources that do not come from those sacrifices must come from honestly earned mana; and the process cannot build shiny, gigantic fortresses, but only smaller ones, that would reduce the space available for each wizard.
Still, no human sacrifices and no extra terrifying wizard-eating monsters released into the wild sounds like a great value proposition. And yet, the witch has no takers at all: no wizarding community would replace their grisly foundations with something cleaner and more durable, though more modest. The idea of renouncing to their advantages is, for enclaves-dwelling wizards, simply unthinkable. As Novik is not shy to point out, the system works poorly for wizardkind as a whole, but it works brilliantly for the more privileged wizards in the enclaves, who have safety and substantial leverage on everybody else. Producing monsters is perversely useful for enclavers, because it makes wizards on the outside even more desperate to sacrifice their lives and abilities to serving the enclaves in the hope of being allowed in: in other words, it enables exploitation. Enclavers are basically in the protection business: they create a threat for other wizards, then extract services from them for partially protecting them against those threats. Creating externalities and exploiting independent wizards is how enclavers procure the mana that powers their dominance.
Something similar happens in our own real-world economy. Countries that got wealthy on the back of colonial extraction and fossil-fuels burning are not only refusing to provide proper loss and damage compensation to the countries that suffered for the very real “maleficaria” brought into existence by those behaviors. They are taking advantage of the dire conditions created by climate change in vulnerable countries to extract even more resources, like critical raw materials, in return for desperately needed capital. Like in the Scholomance world, our safety needs are, at least in part, manufactured: recent research suggests that we could meet everyone’s energy needs while remaining within planetary boundaries. But we don’t, because, like those wizards in the enclaves, we do not want to share.
I don’t know if Novik is familiar with the economic notions of sufficiency and degrowth. I suspect she does. If not, she has reinvented them, alongside the social and moral dilemmas that stand in the way of their widespread adoption. That is at the same time depressing and great: depressing, as she mercilessly rubs in our face the cruelty and injustice of the economic systems both we and the wizards live in, and great because the Scholomance trilogy makes for a great metaphor to explain capitalism to young adults. And, yes, to economists such as myself.
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