Fictional Portrayals of Planned Economies
The 1888 novel Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy depicts a fictional planned economy in a United States c. the year 2000 which has become a socialist utopia.
The World State in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and Airstrip One in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four are both fictional examples of command economies, albeit with diametrically opposed aims: The former is a consumer economy designed to engender productivity while the latter is a shortage economy designed as an agent of totalitarian social control. Airstrip One is organised by the intentionally sarcastically named Ministry of Plenty. Other literary portrayals of planned economies were Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, which was an influence on Orwell's work. Like Nineteen Eighty Four, Ayn Rand's dystopian story Anthem was also an artistic portrayal of a command economy that was influenced by We. The difference is that it was a primitivist planned economy, as opposed to the advanced technology of We or Brave New World.
In Ursula K. Le Guin's science fiction novel The Dispossessed, published 1974, mainstream capitalist and state socialist economies on the planet Urras are contrasted with an anarchist self-managed economy on its orbiting twin Anarres.
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