The Handmaid's Tale and the economics of apocalyptic fiction: Don Pittis

If she could rewrite her novel The Handmaid's Taletoday, what would Margaret Atwood change?

"Well, I'd give people cellphones," quips the author in an interview with Tom Poweron the CBC program q.

In speculative fiction, gettingfuture technology right is a familiar problem.

But having the economics ring true may be even harder. Usually read as a feminist commentary,Atwood's novel gains part of its power through the imagining of a credible economicfuture.

Even in the original book, written more than 30 years ago and updated into a television seriesthat is now getting rave reviews, Atwood captures an element of economic technology still relevant today.

Horror of recognition

Reading the book all those years ago, I remember the horror of recognition when the escaping characters try to get money from a bank machine and find access to their account has been denied.

The scene, slightly reworkedin the current TV series, strikes a very modern economic chord.

Almost everyone has experienced the moment when the clerk at the shop says, "Sorry your card isn't working," leaving you digging through purse orpocket and feeling like a criminal.

As Calgary seniorMalaney Ellingsonfound out last week, the coercive power of big government to influence your life is no invention of fiction. In her case, the tax department's move to digital tax filing meant she couldn't get her hands on paper forms to file her taxes, leaving her in danger of having her pension cut off.

In Atwood's imagined future, that power is used for more sinister purposes. In a world where so many elements of our lives, including all our finances, consist of data in computers, we can too easily imagine a totalitarian government, allied with big business, controlling every moment of our lives.

As the author points out, the events that happen in the original book were not mere invention.

'Twisted, bizarre, sadistic imagination'

"I didn't want people saying 'what a twisted, bizarre, sadistic imagination you have makingall this stuff up,' so I wanted to be able to say'none of it's made up.' People have done these things and what people have done once, they are quite capable of doing again,"Atwood told Power.

Perhaps that's why the real-life warning of the story remains relevant.

As the increasingly authoritarian leader of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, demonstrated last week, the electronic age has made cracking down much easier.

The messybook-burning stage has been bypassed.With a push of a few buttons, Turks have been denied access to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia of everything that has become a standard tool ofhuman knowledge. Could bank accounts be next?

Part of Atwood's wisdom is to remind us that economics is more than asimple formula of supply and demand, buying and selling. Those things exist, but they are embedded in a complex set of socialand political power relationshipsthat ultimately have farmore influenceover our lives than mere pricingmechanisms.

Future political economy

Not all fiction about the future does as good a job at imaginingthe complexities of political economy.

"Does anybody besides me wonder what the banking system looks like in the background ofStar Trek?" Bank of Canada governor Stephen Poloz once asked a gathering of New York financiers. If Captain Kirk and Lieutenant Uhura are worried about their mutual funds or the issue of pay equity, it is not part of the plot line.

When The EconomistreviewedAtwood's economics book, Payback:Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, back in 2008, the magazinedescribed her as "greenish" and "leftish."

But part of the author's brilliance in that book, and in her fiction, has beento avoid the blinkeredviews of conventionaleconomics.

Without debt and capitalism, "mankind would be living in caves and eating whatever it killed," says The Economist in its review. But when people are destitute orowned as slaves, when enemies of the statehave their wealth stripped away, or when woman are chattel and have no access to money of their own, the continued existence of capitalism is scant reassurance to those excluded.

In Payback,Atwood refers to GrameenBank, the South Asian micro-lenderthat helped transform the lives of poor women by giving them access to relatively tiny loans,therebyraising their status in the community.

In The Handmaid's Talewomen are returned to a state, not so distant in our own history, where womenhaveno access to money of their own, stripping away their economic and political power. They still serve, but their economic contribution goes unrecognized,akey observation of modernfeminist economics.

There is something strangely attractive about dystopian, post-apocalyptic and speculative fiction of all sorts.When writers throwup the pieces and have them fall innew patterns, readers are helped to imagine new systems of political economy.

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To those fearful of the power of the Trump administration, The Handmaid's Talealso servesas a warning that people must stand up to abuse of power. That people in the U.S. are standing up againstencroachments on their freedom some dressed as handmaids givesAtwoodsome optimism.

"I think the fact thatthere is a lot of pushback is what is going toweigh in on the side of this not happening," she says.

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