Where Daily Show anchor John Stewart plays it in some ways more conservatively, holding to a tradition of fake news and riffing on the real news that’s been part of comedy for a long time, Colbert’s a bit further out there. He’s constructed an entire seamless persona, one he calls a “well-intentioned, poorly informed, high status idiot.” In other words, he’s only half a twist further along the spiral of self-parody from half a dozen talk show hosts who take themselves seriously (and don’t know they’re parodies of themselves).

On June 23, Colbert hosted Barbara Ehrenreich. You can watch the entire episode online here. (And if you just want the Ehrenreich segment, you could go here.)

Ehrenreich came on to promote her new book This Land is Their Land, an analysis of the extreme economic divide in America. Ehrenreich’s message is familiar to those who have read her work before. For years she has been advocating for greater social and economic equality, investigating circumstances that go underreported (often through living them), and analyzing the social forces at work.

Despite Ehrenreich’s practice skill and focus, it is Colbert’s willingness to play the fool during their exchange that exposes so many of the economic attitudes coursing through the American body politic. Most people express them in a shaded or hesitant form, coding them, or leaving them implied.

Colbert does not. He flatly asks what is wrong with a divided country, with massive inequality, and why the poor can’t work harder. He even suggests that the lottery be embraced as a way of tricking the poor into thinking they have a chance, so they’ll get back to work.

His bald satire is shocking. It made me wince. And yet, and yet, and yet…he’s only saying directly what a lot of other people are insinuating. He’s trotting out free market aphorisms at their most social Darwinist.

And, again, yet…for all that Ehrenreich was very clear about what she thought was wrong with the situation, the solutions she mentioned during this encounter were…dubious. Taxing the rich was the main one articulated, but that was suggested without much more context than Colbert’s satire.

Perhaps solutions are proposed in more detail in This Land is Their Land. Perhaps her sound bite solutions were the result of the sound bit situation. And perhaps the situation is so complex that identifying any working situation is simply very difficult.

However, none of these prepared me for the harsh economic realities of The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing by M. T. Anderson. This is supposedly a YA novel—it won the National Book Award in that category in 2006—but to be honest, I wonder how many kids would willingly read this.

Why? Because Octavian is a slave, and this book hammers home what it means to be a thing rather than a person. This isn’t totally an economic matter; it is also a scientific matter, as Octavian is being raised as part of a scientific experiment to see just how smart Africans are (through how they respond to Western education).

Most of the book’s told from Octavian’s perspective, and it is, to be frank, both heartbreaking and hard to read. Octavian’s tutored into an elevated style from a young age and to reason and logic. If he cannot rationally justify a claim, it is given no weight. At one point, for example, Octavian discovers he has poisoned a dog he loved; he poisoned it accidentally from his perspective but as part of a scientific experiment on the part of his masters. He is then reasoned through his tears rather than being consoled.

The men running these experiments on Octavian measure every part of him, down to weighing his feces. Octavian’s life is completely rationalized. If he weren’t a thing—a slave—he would be the perfect economic man. That this scientific endeavor rests upon an economic base is brought home when the Earl of Cheldthorpe, patron of the entire experiment, dies. The new earl doesn’t have the same interest in abstract science, and the entire college is redirected to practical studies. Each science must justify its existence economically just as Octavian must do so rationally. As for Octavian, his study is redirected to serve the interests of those new backers now funding the investigation. This means he is turned from showpiece to house servant, that they try to hire him out (he’s a musician) to nearby parties, and that his education is reworked. It also means that the one possible justification (even in the period) of his treatment disappears. He’s no longer being raised for pure science. He’s being raised in a biased fashion, to fail in order to justify the economic interests of the slaveholding class.

There’s a lot more to The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing—the sub-economy of slaves in which personal energy is secreted away, the use of sexual desire as an economic counter—but Octavian’s position’s at the core of it. If you want to glimpse the dark side of economic forces (and get a sense of how much kids’ books have changed), you might dip in to The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing.

Editor’s note: Think slavery is no longer a part of today’s world? Read Mary Nichols’ report on human trafficking and how ineffective governments’ efforts are to stop it.

Yes, you can catch a glimpse of Thompson’s world by watching the movie version starring John Cusack, Angelica Huston, and Annette Bening, each in some of their more disturbing roles. However, the movie’s feel is off. It came out in 1990 while the novel was published in 1963, and Thompson’s sensibilities were really formed decades earlier. It’s worth watching, but director Stephen Frears doesn’t really capture the…texture of the novel: half gloss, half grit, all tawdry and addictive.

Grifters are con men, or con men and women in this case. The novel follows three of them: Roy Dillon, a young man raised in the trade by Lilly Dillon, his grifter mother who gave birth to him when she was but a teenager. Roy’s involved with another grifter, Moira Langtry, one who’s so good at the con, he doesn’t really even know she’s in the game until she outs herself in an attempt to join forces with him.

The novel’s plot is minimal. It’s more of a careening string of events: Roy gets injured during a con (a shop owner smashes him in the belly with a bat) and ends up in the hospital. His mother, who’s in Los Angeles on business (a moderately complex race track scam), takes care of him while he’s sick. She wants to drive Moira away and goes as far as to hire an innocent nurse to care for him. When Roy goes back to his cover job—one that gives him lots of time for the con—there’s been a shake-up, and the new boss wants to make him a supervisor. Roy goes away with Moira for a romantic getaway; she tries to get him to work cons with her. When they go home, the police contact him, telling him his mother’s been found dead. When he identifies the body, he finds it is Moira. His mother shows up at his hotel room, tries to scam some money from him, and ends up slicing his throat.

That race through the gutter doesn’t really give a sense of Thompson’s wonderful seediness. For example, the women look a lot alike and are close to the same age, giving the book one of many perverse twists. However, fun though the portrait of degradation is, that’s not the real attraction for me here. Instead, it’s the portrayal of the capitalist economic world. The grifters look on anyone who works an honest job with a horror that makes them almost physically ill. It is literally less repellent for Lilly to think of sleeping with her son than it is to consider taking a straight job.

It’s also one of the novels that gives the most naked looks at how people become commodities in a capitalist economy, and how economic forces distort things. The best example of this is when the manager of Moira’s apartment building comes by to collect the rent. She offers him the rent or sex. That in itself isn’t that strange. What’s amazing is how she loathes him but sleeps with him anyway, while phrases from ads and menus tumble through her head. She knows she’s packaging herself for sale, and yet somehow, she thinks it is better than working.

The grifters loath the straights but depend on them. The straights would jail the grifters, but they all desire them. It’s the American economy as one big red-light district… and who is in charge, really?

Art and commerce have long had an uneasy relationship. In fact, I can’t help thinking about economics and writing without being reminded of the saying attributed to Moliere, the French playwright: “Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for love, and then for a few close friends, and then for money.”

In other words, there’s a not too subtle association of pure artistry with poverty and an equally strong suggestion that if you write for money you’re somehow whoring yourself out…but we’ll come back to that point. What interests me is a subject that’s less frequently discussed even than art or sex: economics, specifically, economics in fiction. This means everything from how economic forces are shown to shape human identity and desire (hint: it’s usually bad) to how authors and their characters conceptualize economics.

I’d like to start with science fiction and the Free Lunch Question. In his SF classic The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, science fiction grandmaster (and libertarian) Robert Heinlein popularized the term TANSTAAFL which means “There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.” Meant to show the down to earth (ha!) pragmatism of his lunar colonists whose tough situations stripped all fantasies away from their economic calculations, TANSTAAFL has passed in to science fiction fandom as a generalized accepted truth. It even makes an appearance in Wikipedia where the entry on the phrase indicates it shows an understanding of opportunity costs.

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress came out in 1966. Flash forward 35 years to another writer, Spider Robinson (who was, early in his career, tagged as the next Heinlein), and we have The Free Lunch. Now, given Robinson’s well-known appreciation of Heinlein (he’s written a gushing essay on Heinlein and finished a work Heinlein left as a stack of notes), from the title alone I’d to assume this is meant to be read as an open and direct answer to the master, and that suspicion is confirmed in Chapter 17 when one of the main characters thinks of how universally true this “Heinlein proverb” has been.

But what does Spider offer in its proverbial place? The Free Lunch, while pleasant, falls decidedly short in its understanding of economics, especially Friedrich Hayek on prices. Robinson gives us a lovely portrait of a multi-sensory amusement park (Dreamworld), characters who are genius outcasts with hearts of gold, and a string of fun encounters that make the book a good light read. However, the free lunch that gives the book its title is, well, silly, and it’s tied in to an extremely complex plot twist.

A number of weak, dwarfish time travelers have come back to our time to interfere with the flow of history and make a new world. You see, humanity so polluted the world that it has poisoned itself. The crux point is suspiciously close to our own time; they must act now or miss the chance and let the world poison itself. These time travelers decide that most of the problems humanity’s had have come from “insufficient wealth” and that they’ll solve this by secretly using their advanced technologies to make everyone rich. Leaving aside a number of problems (Is this really where our problems come from? If they have this superior technology, why don’t they fix their damaged genes?), there’s still a major question of information contamination.

Among his other contributions, Hayek showed that prices function to communicate dense amounts of information. Pumping free goods into the economy, making technologies work better than they should, and increasing production by making software bug free, the idea is that the free lunch will enable us to build a civilization strong enough to weather the coming crash.

While this shows Robinson’s well-established good heart, I have to squint and say…hmm. You’ll destroy the price system and increase production and consumption to ward off an ecological crisis? I think, my friend, that your free lunch will be quite costly in the end.

But perhaps I’m wrong. Take a look at The Free Lunch and let me—and Spider—know what you think.