Building a plausible utopia p0: Why a utopia?
There is a tendency in science fiction to be pessimistic. And, on balance, that tendency is not necessarily wrong. After all, for all of human history, we have not managed to build a utopia. And indeed, in some sense creating a dystopian, or at least deeply flawed, society mirrors the real world in many ways, and may be more believable to readers.
But, for me, writing is an act of creation. And creating a thing that is difficult, and strange, and complicated is much more compelling to me than creating a thing which aims to mimic the conditions of today. It is no accident that the aliens live in a hellish dystopian warscape while the humans live in a state of governmental competence that has been described as “way harder to believe than the wormhole network”.
As well, this is one challenge which in my opinion is not addressed in quite the way that I would prefer in science fiction. In my “real” life, I work as professional economist, usually in antitrust and often with government authorities on policy. Fiction and even the news unfortunately does not often characterize anything quite correctly (think of any time you’ve seen your own area of expertise in the news!). As I read, I find very often what I would term: “good enough, but not quite right”. Truly great stories abound of course, but even the hardest scifi often falls short when it comes to those areas closest to my economist brain. (And I’m sure some engineers or military personnel or astronomers might feel the same about my work!)
But this gives me an opportunity to make a utopia that was personally satisfying to me. For me, the most important part was plausibility. I need to believe that this could work. To summarize the series of questions I found most interesting to think about:
What is the practical limit of bureaucratic efficiency, and how might we approach it?
Given a level of technology, and given that I get to just make up government structures from ground-up, what is the practical limit to the efficiency of the people at the top? How do I push it there? What is the incentive/enforcement structure? For example, might an efficient government be able to pass policy in days? Hours? What is the lower limit for the functionality we can imagine?
What does the government look like if and when it is able to achieve a higher level of efficiency through technology and organization?
How do the people in my government act, given the structure I imagine? What are their powers? What do they do? How are they viewed and how do they view others? For example, can I create a system of incentives that ensures that even a normal person would attempt to act virtuously?
What are the economic and societal implications of the government we so create? How is day to day life different? How are expectations and morals different? How is culture changed?
With a combination of technology and governance, life is fundamentally changed. How do those changes ripple outwards, both in concrete terms but also in cultural terms? For example, in the same way a child might as “but why don’t they just … ?”, a citizen might be fundamentally unable to understand to concept of widespread starvation.
