Yep, read it as soon as it was out. And you are right, I am going to add it to the wiki of Economic Sci-Fi work.
I think on this one Cory was more interested in the politics than in the economics proper: my main takeaway is his depiction of the MAGA crowd as a permanent drain on the climate change mitigation/adaptation effort.
In terms of economics, the world of The Lost Cause is like our own, with two differences:
- A robust Green New Deal – by which I mean the American (Sanders, AOC) version of a bundle of investments in decarbonization and social justice, mostly in the form of Rooseveltian good jobs and free health care. I do not mean the watered-down, tech-centric EU version.
- A part of this – which, by the way, I don’t recall being present in Doctorow’s previous work – is a job guarantee. This is then flagship policy of Modern Monetary Theory, so it tells us that Cory has been reading Stephanie Kelton, Randy Wray etc. This has obvious implications for the handling of public finance and inflation in the world of TLC.
Another really interesting feature of TLC, which is an economic feature only in a broad sense, is the role of the Blue Helmets. This term is normally shorthand for the United Nations Peacekeeping Forces, but in TLC Blue Helmets have been repurposed for large climate change mitigation/adaptation projects, while maintaining their military structure (you see this in the use of words like “deploy”). I guess this means that Doctorow believes he can not come up with a believable account of a global Green New Deal without imagining a much more muscular role of our formal global governance structures (the UNO). For a discussion of the economic interpretation of “believable worlds” see here.