[Space] and [UT] for New Space Opera

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

I think at least in the context of RPGs, it's probably more productive to use the term 'post-Poverty', and every time someone says 'post-scarcity', ask them whether they actually intend to use the meaning of post-Poverty instead. Because in most settings I've seen so far, something is scarce.

Quite. The same's true in most SF even beyond the bounds of gaming. Very few writers or audiences want to deal with the staggering implications of there being no scarcity, any more than gamers do.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by whswhs

I find it a little odd to have someone telling a trained professional economist that they don't like the economist's definition of "scarcity" and prefer to stick with their own definition. It's kind of like telling a physicist, "I don't like your definition of energy," or an accountant, "I don't accept your concept of subtraction." I mean, it's a technical term of economic theory, and a quite basic one—the postulate of scarcity is the postulate that economizing is necessary in the first place.

I would say "I have a faith in physics that IO do not in ecomonmi9cs" except hat the definition of "faith" that makes the most sense to me is "a belief in things that can not be proven".

That doesn't apply to modern physics. It doesn't generally require faith. It produces obviously and objectively useful predictions of the real world and does so in overwhelming quantities.

Economics does not do this. It is quite obviously not as well developed or evolved as physics or however you want to phrase it.

There were once trained scientists who were trained in phlogiston chemistry or many other theories that were eventually superseded and those theories were in their time broadly accepted among academics.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

I would say "I have a faith in physics that IO do not in ecomonmi9cs" except hat the definition of "faith" that makes the most sense to me is "a belief in things that can not be proven".

That doesn't apply to modern physics. It doesn't generally require faith. It produces obviously and objectively useful predictions of the real world and does so in overwhelming quantities.

Economics does not do this. It is quite obviously not as well developed or evolved as physics or however you want to phrase it.

There were once trained scientists who were trained in phlogiston chemistry or many other theories that were eventually superseded and those theories were in their time broadly accepted among academics.

I've spent quite a lot of time reading about the history of economics, and reading about various issues in economic theory. I'm certainly prepared to say that current academic economics is a dubious mixture; the entire conceptual structure of Keynesian macroeconomics looks to me to be a fairly good analog of phlogistonic chemistry. Microeconomics, on the other hand, is much closer to being sound, and scarcity is part of micro.

But I'd go further than that, and say that scarcity is both (a) an obvious fact, readily observed and (b) inescapable, given the nature of physical reality and biological evolution. It's effectively the equivalent in human action of Liebig's Law of the Minimum.

But aside from all of that, if you don't believe in economics as a science, it's peculiarly perverse to insist on using its technical terms. The critics of phlogistonic chemistry did not come up with an explanation for why "phlogiston" really means something else and incorporate that other thing into their conceptual structure, so that now we have "phlogiston" used, say, to mean the kind of things that magnetohydrodymanics is about. Instead they came up with an entirely different terminology for what was actually happening.

Bill Stoddard

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by whswhs

But aside from all of that, if you don't believe in economics as a science, it's peculiarly perverse to insist on using its technical terms.

It's entirely possible for e to belei9ve in economics as "the scientific study of the exchange of goods and services" or some similar definition without endorsing any particular current theory.

The second thing is that I was not even aware that "scarcity" had a "technical" definition. I had been using what I thought was a term compounded from, common English and still remained part of common English .

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

It's entirely possible for e to belei9ve in economics as "the scientific study of the exchange of goods and services" or some similar definition without endorsing any particular current theory.

Sure, but the comparison of economic concepts to "phlogiston" didn't suggest that you had that view of it. It sounded as if you thought economics was at best a prescientific groping toward what might become an actual science in some future century.

The second thing is that I was not even aware that "scarcity" had a "technical" definition. I had been using what I thought was a term compounded from, common English and still remained part of common English .

Well, now you've heard not only from me, an interested amateur, but from Agemegos, an actual economist, that it does have a technical meaning. . . .

On one hand, my position is that in the technical meaning of "scarcity," the societies were are told about in sf (and in ideological writings by such people as Murray Bookchin) are not actually "post-scarcity," and that I don't think a post-scarcity society is compatible with the nature of living organisms and of the physical universe.

On the other hand, my position is that the popular usage of "post-scarcity" appears to refer to imagined future societies whose economic functioning and institutions is not clearly defined in any sense. It's all handwavium and "insert technobabble." It's fairy godmother economics with the magic wand replaced with "advanced technology" or "artificial intelligence" or the like. And as such, it's not very interesting to me; I would prefer economic hard sf.

I suppose that makes it suitable for space opera, actually. But I would need to see an actual definition of its intended function in dramatic terms.

When I was running a campaign of Muslim supers during the first crusade, I brought in an NPC whose superpower was wealth. Allah had blessed him with the ability to produce as much gold as he needed for nearly anything—of course that's a power within Allah's gift, and all wealth in fact is from Allah! I didn't try to do economic analysis of the resulting inflation; it was a supers campaign, after all. . . .

Bill Stoddard

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by whswhs

But I'd go further than that, and say that scarcity is both (a) an obvious fact, readily observed

Scarcity is not an hypothesis of economics that is posited to explain phenomena, like phlogiston or energy in chemistry. It is the subject matter of economics, like substances in chemistry. As chemistry is the study of substances — what they are, how they react, and (in its applied branches) how they can be made and used — economics is the study of how scarce things and services are allocated among rival uses and distributed among rival consumers. This is so fundamental that one of the technical synonyms for "scarce commodity" is "economic commodity".

Two hundred years ago "scarcity" mean "temporary food shortage" or "famine" — Adam Smith used it and that way in 1776, and "dearth" to mean "above-average prices for food" — but that usage has been obsolete for 150 years. Nowadays, even in non-technical general discussions, it is much more idiomatic to say "My! Cucumbers are scarce! I couldn't get one even for ready money" than "too many people suffer scarcity; we must institute a democratic-socialist welfare state".

The problem with the supposed lay use of "post-scarcity" is that it is never really being used in lay discussions. It is always used in discussions of economics and speculative economics, and it causes what can generously be termed confusion, but what often seems like defensively obscurantist equivocation. People posit for some SFnal setting or reform program that it will feature "post-scarcity". When some person versed in economics points out that having abolished, say, money or competition or wages or profits it lacks a mechanism to allocate scare commodities among rival uses, the positors defend that it is "post-scarcity", implying that such allocation does not need to be done. The critic points out that a few obvious things are still scarce. The positor says that "post-scarcity" just means that nobody is poor. The critic then asks "well, how does your suggested system allocate scarce commodities among rival uses?" There follows a heated dispute about the advisability of writing recipes for a kitchen that hasn't been built and demolishing your working kitchen before you're clear that the proposed replacement with include facilities for cooking edible meals.

To use "post-scarcity" meaning "no-one ends up absolutely poor" (a sense that includes, e.g., Sweden during the last fifty years) might be merely semantically confusing. To assert that such post-scarcity either follows naturally from the Clarkean replicator or naturally turns humans into ST:NG characters reveals a more profound confusion.

[Agemegos]

Anyway: what about Bio-Tech? I read a rather horrible Iain Banks "Culture" story last night — not one that I would categorised as "space opera" on its own, but the setting is also one for new space opera, neh? — and the protagonist had artificial endocrine glands that would secrete powerful painkillers and other unspecified things.

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by Agemegos

Anyway: what about Bio-Tech? I read a rather horrible Iain Banks "Culture" story last night — not one that I would categorised as "space opera" on its own, but the setting is also one for new space opera, neh? — and the protagonist had artificial endocrine glands that would secrete powerful painkillers and other unspecified things.

Player of Games, I'm guessing.

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

Player of Games, I'm guessing.

"A Gift from the Culture".

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by Agemegos

"A Gift from the Culture".

Culture humans have a set of glands that allow pain suppression, various mood-altering substances and other things. I'd represent it in GURPS as a Modular Ability that can do a fairly large set of Advantages, Disadvantages, Perks and Quirks.