This poor woman has everything backward in her head. It makes it very difficult for me to believe that she can create any kind of sane or believable world. Why? Because she doesn’t understand the laws of supply and demand, which means she doesn’t understand reality.
It is clear that she comes from an academic background, since she thinks that shelves are allotted by order of “importance.”
This is a problem for me as a reader often because I run into a lot of writers like her. It’s less important in things like romance, though even there it can get weird, like when some authors assume that the best thing possible in the Regency would be being a duke AND a doctor. (Head>desk, repeat.) This is because they misunderstand the relative wealth and importance of earning a living in the professions.
But there are a ton of books in mystery that hit the wall. Those that require understanding of how the world worked. So the economics these writers write are what you expect from exquisitely maleducated people. They learned sociology and various grievance studies. So you know, factories are bad places where people are forced to work in terrible conditions — for the 21st century. None of these darlings has the slightest idea what actual conditions were like at farms in the Regency, say — and do not even get health care or counseling, and are probably totally deprived of free ice cream.
I have now walled mysteries, some romances and a few fantasies, because they assume people who build and run factories are “evil exploiters” and villains. (As opposed to you know not building anything and letting the peasants starve.)
I’ve walled even more of them when the villain becomes “reformed” and just gives his whole fortune away to people who probably drink it away within a week and, presumably, dies in a gutter shortly thereafter.
In science fiction and fantasy this is even more painful. You’ll have entire worlds getting paid for things, without it making any sense, since there is no galactic agreement on money, no universally agreed upon standard, nothing that makes whatever they hand you worth anything. We have entire worlds paid for things that make no sense to transport inter-world with the money existent at that time. You have “exploited” groups, that you can’t figure out why anyone would exploit or what sense it makes.
Then there is the soc jus in these worlds, which often consists of upending historic injustices by creating worse injustices and, oh, yeah, incidentally making it impossible for the economics to function and starving everyone in the world. If you’re going to do that call it Planet Venezuela already, okay?
And don’t get me started on the economics of worlds with magic, where monetizing magic is somehow either wrong or no one ever thought of doing it (because everyone in that world is born mentally impaired.)
Sarah Hoyt, “A Fundamental Misunderstanding of Supply and Demand”, According to Hoyt, 2019-11-06.
January 19, 2020
QotD: Bad fiction writers often know little or no economic theory
Filed under: Books, Economics, Education, Quotations — Tags: Absurd, Microeconomics, SF, SocialJustice, Writing — Nicholas @ 01:00
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