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A review by synoptic_view
The Steerswoman by Rosemary Kirstein
5.0
A fantastic, original book. I am shocked I had not heard of the series or author before this was recommended to me by Nick.
I am not going to review the book per se, but I will note the main elements that interested me while reading it. The story functions as a sort of counterfactual history. What if technological development was protected not by a patent system, but by a guild of "wizards" that collude to keep the mysteries of the technology out of the hands of the public? The steerswomen in the book draw a sharp contrast between this form of intellectual property protection and a more open access approach where all knowledge is readily shared.
The scene where Rowan, the primary steerswoman protagonist, is shocked by the detail and completeness of the wizard maps underscored the trade offs involved in these two different systems. As Grossman and Stiglitz (1980) point out, laissez faire markets will inefficiently *underproduce* knowledge as the return to exploiting new knowledge falls below the price of acquiring knowledge. Publicly minded steerswomen can try to offset this tendency through intrinsic preferences for knowledge that compensate for the costs of knowledge acquisition even in the face of low financial returns, but then society is relying on possessing a sufficiently large group of people with other-regarding preferences. The fact that the wizards have such greater knowledge suggests that there are not enough steerswomen in society to overcome the Grossman-Stiglitz result. I am curious if this is explore further in subsequent books. I suspect that the technology of the wizards might come from a previous high technology civilization that fell and led to the current state of the world, but it would be way cooler to me if the difference in knowledge was the result of endogenous processes flowing from the two, contrasting incentive schemes.
I am not going to review the book per se, but I will note the main elements that interested me while reading it. The story functions as a sort of counterfactual history. What if technological development was protected not by a patent system, but by a guild of "wizards" that collude to keep the mysteries of the technology out of the hands of the public? The steerswomen in the book draw a sharp contrast between this form of intellectual property protection and a more open access approach where all knowledge is readily shared.
The scene where Rowan, the primary steerswoman protagonist, is shocked by the detail and completeness of the wizard maps underscored the trade offs involved in these two different systems. As Grossman and Stiglitz (1980) point out, laissez faire markets will inefficiently *underproduce* knowledge as the return to exploiting new knowledge falls below the price of acquiring knowledge. Publicly minded steerswomen can try to offset this tendency through intrinsic preferences for knowledge that compensate for the costs of knowledge acquisition even in the face of low financial returns, but then society is relying on possessing a sufficiently large group of people with other-regarding preferences. The fact that the wizards have such greater knowledge suggests that there are not enough steerswomen in society to overcome the Grossman-Stiglitz result. I am curious if this is explore further in subsequent books. I suspect that the technology of the wizards might come from a previous high technology civilization that fell and led to the current state of the world, but it would be way cooler to me if the difference in knowledge was the result of endogenous processes flowing from the two, contrasting incentive schemes.