u/AthenOwl

I've been doing some thinking about the way Basic works, because I'm considering running an RPG campaign using the Expanse RPG system (side note: any feedback on the system?). I will have to explain basic assistance to some new people. I read a lootttt of Atomic Rockets, which is a great website for hard sci fi research and realistic, logical worldbuilding.

When I watched the TV show for the first time, my first thought was that the Earth had to be severely overpopulated and also have 50% of the population being essentially useless parasites, because if there was a more realistic population (current predictions are peaks of 10-11 billion), and full employment, then the Earth would just be far and away more powerful than Mars and the Belt. Having a declining Earth and ascending Mars is a very common trope in Sci Fi, even Call of Duty did it. Doesn't make much sense but whatever it's cool and I like it.

But Basic really does not make sense. Even if the UN gave those on basic a miniscule salary of like $50 a month, a real economy could start to get going amongst those on basic and increase the employment rate. Having billions of people on basically palliative care and waiting to die for a lifespan of 120 years just flies against modern economics.

Also: how is the population of earth still so high at 30 billion if the entire planet is on mandatory contraceptives, baby taxes are prohibitively high and the birth lottery seems like it's one in a million? Is the population of 30 billion in 2300 declining from 40 billion in 2200 or something? Unregistered births could plausibly be in the hundreds of millions, at absolute worst.

I also struggle to believe that the UN wouldn't do more to increase the employment rate. Even if they did something like flat out just ban certain automation techniques it would probably be better for the overall economy because it allows for upwards mobility and increased purchasing power. Earth megacorps could potentially see some long term gains from this. This is even something Karl Marx and Milton Keynes wrote about, directly. Marx spoke about how the proletariat's decline in purchasing power due to exploitation from the bourgeois would ultimately hurt the bourgeois in the long term, and Keynes advocated that people get paid to dig holes in the ground and then fill them back up to increase aggregate demand when economic crisis occur. This is something UN politicians and policy advisors would know about. Obviously they do eventually decide to colonise the ring worlds for this exact reason, but there is at least a century of this situation still in play.

Most economists, but not all, disagree that automation can create long term unemployment due to Jevon's paradox. When efficiency in production increases, such as using less resources including labor to produce the same output, what tends to happen is that total consumption of that output increases and more resources are used for production , not less. Making fabric used to be extremely labor intensive, with most lower class women in the 17th century spending a full year to produce 1-2 sets of clothes for each member of the household. Now we have factories where a single worker can produce enough clothing for thousands of people. However, we have more people employed in textiles, not less, due to people wearing far more clothes than they used to.

Basically, when James SA Corey was worldbuilding Earth in the expanse, are there real serious Watsonian explanations for why basic exists, why Earth is in such a dire state, and why unemployment is so high, or is the Doyleist explanation, that Earth without basic would be vastly more powerful than Mars or the Belt, preventing the conflict in the shows and books from being taken seriously, the only real answer?