Why the Culture Books Were Bad SF
4th March 2018
Eric S. Raymond blows the whistle.
There’s a lot of buzz about Iain Banks’s Culture universe lately, what with Elon Musk naming his drone ships in Banksian style and a TV series in the works.
I enjoyed the Culture books too, but they were a guilty pleasure for me because in a fundamental way they are bad SF.
They’re bad SF because the Culture’s economics is impossible. That ship hits a rock called “Hayek’s Calculation Problem” and sinks – even superintelligent Minds can’t make central planning work, because without price signals and elicited preferences you can’t know where to allocate resources. What you get is accelerating malinvestment to collapse.
And that’s the problem with Socialism and Communism and all the other statist -isms. There is no central allocation system that can beat the decentralized (‘crowd-sourced’, if you will) market price system for efficiently allocating resources. A naturally self-organizing system (‘kosmos’ in Hayekian terms) will in short order organize itself into the most efficient structure. It does so by its very nature.