Finance in fiction & economic ornithology
plus some story ideas I wish someone would write
Finance/economics-related speculative fiction I’ve read and enjoyed:
The Dagger and the Coin series by Daniel Abraham - magic and war, but also the protagonist is an orphan who was adopted by a bank
The Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson (previously) - colonialism and complicity, but also lots of economic shenanigans
Stone's Fall by Iain Pears - a mystery novel, really, but a great one
New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson - there are still traders working in a possible future where NYC survives despite dramatic flooding and the rise of the midtown intertidal zone
The Unincorporated Man by Dani and Eytan Kollin - a cryogenically frozen businessman is thawed into a future where everyone is incorporated at birth and spends their lives trying to get a majority of their own shares
Trading in Danger by Elizabeth Moon - novice captain is given her first ship to transport to the scrapyard, but wants to figure out how to turn a profit to prove herself instead
Market Forces by Richard Morgan - international conflict investment bankers climb the corporate ladder via road rage driving duels
The Merchant Princes series by Charles Stross - journalist discovers she’s descended from a merchant family in a fantasy world, goes there, improves their business
Neptune's Brood by Charles Stross - bitcoin! in! space! but also cybernetic mermaids or something, the whole thing is fun but pretty fishy (and mostly not in an aquatic way)
The Dragon's Banker by Scott Warren - how do you help a dragon retain his wealth while simultaneously rolling out fiat currency?
Plus some still on my to-read list:
Spice and Wolf by Isuna Hasekura and Jū Ayakura - supposedly more of a small merchant's perspective as opposed to institutionalized finance (my initial impression is that the writing isn’t very good, though)
Venomous Lumpsucker by Ned Beauman - supposedly about the consequences of enacting cap and trade for extinction of species
Red Team Blues by Cory Doctorow - protagonist is a forensic accountant
Autonomous by Annalee Newitz - I loved her The Future of Another Timeline, and this one apparently has a pharmaceutical pirate, so I’m optimistic
Orconomics by J. Zachary Pike - kinda what it says on the tin, I think?
Making Money by Terry Pratchett - about the man in charge of Ankh-Morpork's Royal Mint and the bank next door
And despite the above counter-examples (and please tell me about any I’m missing!), Contemporary Literary Novels Are Haunted by the Absence of Money.
points out that “one of the pleasures of reading 19th-century novels is that authors write openly about money”, and that modern novels tend to elide the subject entirely even when it seems extremely relevant.(It’s mind-boggling to read about the inflation-adjusted incomes of Jane Austen’s characters, which I came across in The Economics of Jane Austen's World.)
If we’re talking about economics, you oughta know that Economic Ornithology is a thing. Well, it was. Briefly. The USDA established the Section of Economic Ornithology in 1885, but “by the 1940s, economic ornithology had become discredited and obsolete.”
But during that blip where it existed, economic ornithology was “the study of birds from the standpoint of dollars and cents”, where the monetary value of a bird was based on the value of the agriculture it protected by way of the insects (and weeds) it devoured.
That’s right, we translated birds to $$$ based on how many bugs they ate (of the sorts of bugs we figured would otherwise be eating our food)
“In 1903, the Saturday Evening Post, for example, published a request that ‘every person in the United States who kills a bird is requested by the United States Government, not in a mandatory way, but as a matter of courtesy, to send the stomach and its contents to Washington.’” -
, Economic Ornithology
This of course wasn’t a terribly accurate way to estimate a creature’s economic influence, because it’s hard to interpret the stomach contents of a bird without much greater context than is ever really available in the wild. After all,
“There is no satisfactory means of differentiating in stomach material between a mass of flesh and hair torn from the body of a helpless animal and that rent from a fresh carcass.”
- E.R. Kalmback, Field Observation in Economic Ornithology
Plus we were bad Bayesians about it - we looked at what percentage of a bird’s food came from insects, but not what the baseline was for insectoid impact on our crops or how that was impacted by avian predation.
Not to mention, once we decide to value living creatures based on their benefit or harm to humanity, that valuation can be used as justification for whatever one wants:
“Well do I recall experiences in 1919 when, after the enactment of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act making illegal the destruction of night herons, an inventive genius of the State Legislature of Louisiana, with fond longings for his favorite fried grosbec, contended that these birds were highly destructive to the frogging industry of the State and hence legitimate objects of control.”
- E.R. Kalmback, Field Observation in Economic Ornithology
(Though in that case, “stomachs were examined later and in more than 100 studied, no trace of a frog was found, crawfish comprising practically the entire food” - and so, the herons were protected. Y’know, after we killed 100+ of them to check their stomachs for frogs.)
There’s an incredible 99% Invisible podcast episode about how the Parsi death ritual of leaving corpses on top of stone towers for vultures to eat was disrupted by the vultures getting largely killed off by a common over-the-counter painkiller.
“because of its recently expired patent, it ended up being the cheapest and most popular livestock drug on the market. Hinduism’s reverence for cows means that in India, most cattle are left to die naturally in the fields, where vultures would reliably finish the job. Farmers would give Diclofenac to cows. And when those cows died with Diclofenac in their system, vultures would eat them and get poisoned by the drug. Because India has the largest cattle population in the world, this was happening at an enormous scale. Soon, the vulture deaths became a national crisis.”
Losing the vultures’ scavenging services turned out to be a pretty big problem, beyond just the religious concern:
“Districts affected by the disappearance of vultures saw an increase in human all-cause death rates of at least 4.2%, averaged over 2000 to 2005.”
- The Social Costs of Keystone Species Collapse: Evidence From The Decline of Vultures in India
Whoops.
Finance/economics fiction I wish existed (please write these for me!):
Quincy in reality provides market data over microwave - but I want a story where a vendor provides marketdata over avian carriers, which really goes into a detailed analysis of why sometimes that’s the optimal approach.
Reverse isekai where some sort of scullery maid or whatever is reincarnated into our world as the Chairman of the Fed
A historical mystery novel where the protagonist is a clever statistician who works for the USDA Bureau of Biological Survey and notices some unusual contents when dissecting civilian-donated bird stomachs, which of course turn out to be key to solving the crime