June 30, 2026

Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, June 2026

Attention conservation notice: I have no taste, and no qualifications to opine on socialist theory.

"William B. Fuckley", Glasslands
Mind candy: a thriller in the southwestern desert, and the Republic of California, some decades after the American collapse. The author does a good job of suggesting a plausible-sounding future, without tedious exposition (which is too often what is meant by "world-building"). This is clearly an amateur effort (there was a whole repeated paragraph), but as such it's very impressive and I am happy to have paid money for it. §
Kim Stanley Robinson, Forty Signs of Rain
Mind candy, at once near-future science fiction, scientist fiction, and climate fiction. I loved this, but partly this was the pleasant shock of recognition: much of the action revolves around the National Science Foundation and, physically, its old headquarters in Arlington, which Robinson captures extremely well (even the atmosphere of review panels). Two of the main characters are a federal scientist and her policy-wonk husband living in Bethesda, and having grown up there with such parents, he nails that too. (The only other work of art which has given me such a feeling of finally getting some cultural representation for my people is The Americans.) Of course, all of this has been deliberately wrecked by barbarians, so these details now carry an air of melancholy they didn't have when written. As for the idea of NSF scientists deliberately leading a charge to do something useful about climate change, words fail me. §
This is the first of a trilogy; I will be devouring the rest.
Moira J. Moore, Resenting the Hero
Mind candy. Comparing this to The Fifth Season, it is striking how different two fantasy novels about worlds over-supplied with natural disasters, and the people with the psychic gifts to stop those disasters with their minds, can be in tone and execution. This is immensely fluffier, but it has no pretensions to be anything except candy, and succeeds as such. §
(My off-line reading log says I read some later books in this series in 2010 while flying long-distance, but I retain no memory of that and [because] I didn't blog about them.)
Mike Beggs, Ben Burgis, and Bhaskar Sunkara, The Blueprint: How Socialism Can Work in the Real World
This is the best --- the most accessible and the most forceful --- case for market socialism since Alec Nove in the 1980s. I will not rehearse my own arguments for either socialism, or for market socialism over planning. (This book argues both points, in some detail. While not making a big deal of it, they are quite clear that Marxist political economy is no help at all at designing a functioning socialist economy.) Instead, I will take it for granted both that some form of socialism is desirable, and that market socialism is the only one which has any chance of working well.
The main move here is to replace private ownership of the means of production with representative democracy within each firm. People and firms still buy and sell at whatever prices they can negotiate, firms can go bankrupt, etc., but firms are owned by their workers, so workers get both a fixed wage and a fluctuating profit share. (Though they do not emphasize it, the authors are aware that this way of re-distributing surplus value allocating profit means workers would have less diversification in their income than they would under something like Roemer's stock-market socialism.) Some workers have more decision-making authority within the firm; all workers get to vote on who those people are. Employee-managed firms have, empirically and theoretically, a reluctance to hire new workers, but the authors have thought carefully about how to ameliorate this.
There is a system of competing publicly-owned banks, instead of a stock market and the rest of the current finance system, plus the central bank handling monetary policy and the payments system. There are some suggestions here about replacing simple loans from the public banks with more risk-sharing arrangements. I don't think this amounts to taking an equity position by another name, but I'd want someone better at finance than I to go over that. In any event, some (much?) of the profits of the public banks get passed back to the state budget. I think the authors would probably regard allocating part of the income stream of the public banks to a citizen's dividend as a friendly amendment (cf.).
There are some places where I have my hesitations. Three of these have to do with the boundaries of the firms, with the banks, and with working for civil society organizations.
  1. With workplace democracy, just which activities are carried on within a firm, and which by market transactions between firms, may become much more contentious than they are now. (I have long had a thing about this.) The authors are aware of this, but I think they might be under-rating it. Let me make up an example: there will, presumably, be chemical engineering design firms in the socialist commonwealth. (We may presume the actual chemical plants will be heavily regulated for their environmental impacts, if not mandatorily practicing green chemistry, that appropriate pollution charges will be applied, etc.) Those firms will need janitorial, book-keeping, etc., services which are not themselves chemical engineering. It is not at all clear whether the janitors, book-keepers, and the rest should be voting members of the firm, or whether instead the engineering firm should hire the services of janitorial, book-keeping, etc., firms, which will themselves be workers' collectives. On the one hand, provided everyone has safe, dignified working conditions, a democratic say in how their job is done, and enough pay to live a decent life, there doesn't seem to be much of an ethical issue about whether the janitors are part of the chemical firm or of their own firm. On the other hand, even in a socialist commonwealth, there are likely to be differences in profit rates between chemical engineering and janitorial services! (The human and material costs to entering the janitorial-services market are probably much lower than those of entering the chemical-engineering market, hence more competition and thinner margins in the former than the latter.) Of course in our world such boundary questions are set by a mixture of convenience to stock-holders, regulatory arbitrage, and transaction costs, which may be very bad for many people, but the socialist commonwealth will need some way to fix these boundaries, too.
  2. The public banks play a very big role in this scheme. They finance the formation and expansion of worker-owned enterprises. In fact, they are suppose to catalyze the formation of new enterprises. The authors realize all this means that the work of the bankers will need to be rewarded, but they are (understandably) not very specific about how, exactly, to do that. It's only too easy to imagine the work being done poorly ("they pretend to pay us, and we pretend to invest"), or the bankers in fact becoming a very rich and influential class, or indeed both at once.
  3. Turning to civil society: it's an important part of the scheme that all enterprises be worker-run collectives. (They allow for a small number of freelancers/sole-proprietors.) But there is a bit of a tension here with having a vibrant civil society. A bunch of citizens can get together as a society for the prevention of cruelty to animals (or androids, same difference), and volunteer their own time and resources: not a problem. But when the SPCA gets big enough that its administrative needs strain volunteerism, then what? It would seem that it can't just hire some clerical help, because those would be employees and not worker-owners. The best I can come up with is that the staff of the SPCA would have to form a collective firm with one client, viz., the SPCA. (Of course that firm might grow and come to serve multiple civil-society groups, which gets us back to some of the stuff about the boundaries of organizations.)
I want to make it clear that I do not regard any of these issues as fatal flaws.
The authors are extremely experienced at writing for popular audiences, and this shows (*). They have clearly read, and wrestled with, a lot of the academic literature, but this is not at all an academic book, and is a lot stronger for it. (Roemer or Stiglitz, let alone Kornai, this is not.) They do a good job of positively arguing for their vision, and of anticipating and countering objections. The one set of potential objections they are categorically silent on is "Well, how do we get there?", i.e., how we might transition from actually-existing capitalism to their form of market socialism. But I think it is enough that they have described, thoughtfully and accessibly, an attractive future which we might want to get to. §
Disclaimers: One of the authors sent me an advance copy; I was very impressed and ended up writing a blurb. (We'll see if it gets used.)
*: Burgis and Sunkara, in particular, are skilled participants in the online attention economy, whose voluminous ephemeral writings are marked by the usual adaptive vices of that world. All this is, mercifully, not present is this book. ^

Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur; Scientifiction and Fantastica; The Progressive Forces; The Dismal Science

Posted at June 30, 2026 23:59 | permanent link

June 18, 2026

Data Over Space and Time

Collecting posts related to this course (36-3467/36-667).

Posted at June 18, 2026 22:42 | permanent link

June 03, 2026

Family Amusements

I realize my book-blogging has, like all my blogging of any kind, fallen off drastically. Fortunately, my younger brother has decided to take up book-blogging, so I will, in the meanwhile, refer you to the more suave and sociable Shalizi brother. He is also, as our mother once put it to us, "a real scientist", i.e., an experimental biologist like her, and not a mere theoretician. This shows, to the reader's great advantage.

Kith and Kin

Posted at June 03, 2026 10:15 | permanent link

Three-Toed Sloth