THE ECONOMIST: Why Vince Gilligan’s Pluribus is the perfect prism for macroeconomic models and AI

The funniest scene in Pluribus, the hit show from Apple TV, arrives in the fourth episode, when the heroine, Carol Sturka, discovers that the rest of humanity can no longer lie.

Carol starts the series as a burnt-out, boozy, best-selling writer of fantasy romance novels. Things take a turn when an alien virus arrives, melding people into a mysterious hive mind. Carol is one of only 13 individuals who remain immune.

The members of this collective consciousness share each other’s thoughts, memories and feelings, as effortlessly as breathing. They cannot deceive each other and they seem unwilling to lie to Carol, either.

That gives our heroine an unusual opportunity. What do you ask an all-knowing person who must tell you the truth? Why, you ask him what your spouse really thought of your writing, of course.

The second-funniest scene arrives in the previous episode. The members of the hive mind, known as the Joined or the Plurbs by the show’s fans, are eager to do everything in their collective power to please Carol (and the 12 others like her).

Some of the unjoined respond to this offer with more relish than others. One takes up residence in a casino surrounded by fawning women and rivals who lose to him at poker.

Carol is harder to please. She resents being waited upon. When she tries to do a grocery run, she is upset to discover that her organic supermarket, Sprouts, is empty and abandoned.

“I am a very independent person . . . I fend for myself,” she says. “I just want my Sprouts back.”

Her wish becomes the Plurbs’ collective command. Cue an elaborate logistical dance to restock a high-end American supermarket from scratch. Eight lorries hiss to a halt outside in a fletched formation; wave after wave of shelf-stackers, evenly spaced, bring boxfuls of produce; lights come on and music starts to echo around the depopulated building — all so Carol can “fend for herself”.

Like Leonard Read’s classic essay, “I, Pencil”, the scene highlights the hidden complexity of everyday economic life. It also makes clear that “very independent” people are helplessly reliant on an economic choreography they barely appreciate.

As well as abandoning supermarkets, the Plurbs dispense with many other familiar goods, services and institutions.

People do not have to verify their identities or strike contracts. There is no need for privacy or its opposite, self-expression. They wear whatever clothes they had on their back when they joined.

And in Carol’s hometown people sleep alongside each other in arenas, malls and churches to save on electricity. There is also no need for private property or money to motivate them or track their contributions.

The Plurbs seem to follow Marx’s maxim: from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs. Able to read each other’s minds, they work in uncanny concert with each other. When one of them hands her motorbike helmet, mid-stride, to another before he rides away, they do not even acknowledge each other, any more than your left hand would acknowledge taking something from your right.

Fans of central planning once hoped that computers would allow economies to get closer to the harmonious Pluribus model.

That dream has been revived by artificial intelligence, which cannot read people’s minds, but could in principle read everything they have ever written and eavesdrop on their conversations.

But Hayekian economists like Don Lavoie of George Mason University believed central planning would always have two flaws.

It could never harness tacit knowledge: the habits and instincts that managers and innovators cannot always put into words. Nor could it benefit from the clash between entrepreneurs, each with their own vision of success, and their own skin in the game.

The alien virus in Pluribus solves the first of these two problems. The Joined share far more with each other than they can articulate.

In one scene Carol plays croquet with a friendly Plurb called Zosia. Although she has never played the game before, Zosia now has the combined expertise of every living champion. In another scene, a former waitress at TGI Friday’s, still in uniform, expertly pilots a passenger jet.

What the Plurbs cannot replicate is true rivalry. Its absence no doubt spares their economy from waste, redundancy and foolishness. But it also limits the scope for progress.

However much wisdom they collectively possess, the Joined will also need to learn from trial and error.

Although they can presumably run polite, collegial experiments to test alternative economic strategies, none of them can pursue a strategy with the kind of blinkered, eccentric conviction that characterises many of capitalism’s most successful entrepreneurs.

The economy often makes progress through rare, successful attempts to defy collective wisdom. And to defy collective wisdom, it helps to be immune to it.

HANK v Plurb

Pluribus thus provides an interesting prism through which to view the economy. And it is not far removed from what you might find in a textbook.

Most macroeconomic models, after all, rely on the idea of a “representative agent”, modelling an entire population as if it acts as one.

“We continue to treat economic aggregates as though they correspond to economic individuals,” Alan Kirman of the University of Aix-Marseille once lamented.

In many models of the economy, the population is treated as if they had Joined. That assumption allows economists to concentrate on other things.

It also makes their equations easier to handle. Introducing heterogeneity yields models that are awkward and messy, if closer to reality. As Carol finds out, life seems easier when you accept the Plurbs.

But such contentment is illusory. They are not willing to let her remain herself. If she does not want to blind herself to that truth, she will have to find a way to turn the aggregates back into individuals. You can’t beat them unless you unjoin them.