The Mandibles: A Review
Dystopian books have a fine tradition. 1984, Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451. These are classics because they give a glimpse of what people fear and give voice to the dread that lurks underneath the doldrums of the day-to-day.
I heard about Mandibles from some Bitcoin podcasts about how it "predicted" some economic ills that we're facing now, and given that I hadn't read modern fiction in some time, I decided to give it a go.
The book is, as the author describes it, a different kind of dystopia, one that's economic in nature than scientific (post-apocalyptic wasteland), environmental (asteroid or climate disaster) or political (authoritarian oppression). It's set in 2029-2049 and imagines a world where fiat games have gone haywire and have resulted in economic disaster. The book follows 4 generations of a single family, the Mandibles, whose wealth has been wiped out from the economic reset.
It's a delicious setup. There are so many possible things to explore in this world and much opportunity to explain how bad economic policy choices lead to bad outcomes later on. I wanted to like the book. I wanted to be able to recommend it as reading for people that were just getting into Bitcoin, to be able to use as a warning of what could be if we kept our theft-based economic system.
Unfortunately, the book misses more often than it hits. The economic disasters in the movie are heavy handed and presume an all powerful government. In that sense, what could have been an economic dystopian story just ended up being a subset of a political dystopian story. There is some good dialogue about how the system works, but precious little thought seemed to have gone into how those systems would break or what would cause it to break.
So much of the book is spent on the economic disasters that befall the members of the Mandible family, which is to give you the impression that this is what could happen to everyone when the economy breaks. But so much of it doesn't make much sense, like a well to do family selling their house but not their stocks and being forced to live with their cousins. There's also the continued existence and perfect functioning of the internet, TV and futuristic mobile phones, but somehow there are food shortages everywhere. There are lines for things all over the place, but no mention of price controls or government subsidies that create them.
I found that I most liked the parts where the internal monologues of the family were articulated. The emotional turmoil and subsequent action and motivation in interpersonal relationships between characters in the book were the best parts. I wish the author had put in that much thought into the actual economic system and how it would actually collapse than declaring it did so for the convenience of the plot. There was just a little too much deux ex machina in the book for me to really get into the story.
