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Star Trek Economics
An anonymous reader writes "Rick Webb has an article suggesting we're in the nascent stages of transforming to a post-scarcity economy — one in which we are 'no longer constrained by scarcity of materials—food, energy, shelter, etc.' While we aren't there yet, job automation continues to rise and the problem of distributing necessities gets closer to being solved every day. Webb wondered how to describe a society's progress as it made the transition from scarcity to post-scarcity — and it brought him to Star Trek. Quoting: 'I believe the Federation is a proto-post scarcity society evolved from democratic capitalism. It is, essentially, European socialist capitalism vastly expanded to the point where no one has to work unless they want to. It is massively productive and efficient, allowing for the effective decoupling of labor and salary for the vast majority (but not all) of economic activity. The amount of welfare benefits available to all citizens is in excess of the needs of the citizens. Therefore, money is irrelevant to the lives of the citizenry, whether it exists or not. Resources are still accounted for and allocated in some manner, presumably by the amount of energy required to produce them (say Joules). And they are indeed credited to and debited from each citizen's "account." However, the average citizen doesn't even notice it, though the government does, and again, it is not measured in currency units—definitely not Federation Credits.'"
A Ferengi without profit is no Ferengi at all.
He couldn't be more wrong, the more likely scenario is collapse due to over population and limited resources.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Airy-fairy woo-woo utopian garbage.
>> we're in the nascent stages of...a post-scarcity economy...'no longer constrained by scarcity of materials—food, energy, shelter, etc.
Tell that to:
- The homeless in our streets
- People blowing their savings on heating costs this winter
- Middle-eastern residents getting blown up because there's oil under nearby ground
- African children still dying of starvation
>> European socialist capitalism vastly expanded to the point where no one has to work unless they want to
Yeah...ask the Soviets or Cuba how that worked. (Or Venezuela if you need a more recent example.) Hell,. just ask Europe how that's going. (Looking at you, France.)
Really? I haven't seen anything of the sort to be able to even consider that statement true. There is a huge segment of the population dedicated and paid to distributing things. They are truckers, couriers, merchant sailor and captains, rail road workers, road workers, logistics clerks, etc.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
The problem is simple, right out of the first chapter of a high school economics class. "wants" are infinite. Consider our daily lives in today's world. The "working poor" among us live lives right around the "poverty line". Yet they can generally afford motor vehicle transportation (even if it's the bus), to spend most of their time in air conditioned environments (even if it's the workplace at McDonalds), can call anyone on the planet in theory (even if it's from VoIP at a library), and so on. Even the shittiest life is the life of a king a thousand years ago.
Please note that I am not trying to justify social darwinism : I do think something is rotten in our society that causes all income gains to be accrued by the rich and NONE of them go to the middle/lower class.
If we have star trek grade technology, it merely means that the pie is a lot bigger. With Star Trek grade tech, presumably we can tap into the resources of entire stars and planets and manufacture almost anything with minimal effort. But people's desires for a slice of the pie have grown proportionally. Perhaps an impoverished person in Star Trek can get limitless food, basic medical care, and virtual reality porn. But he can't afford his own starship or planet or any of the other toys of the mega-rich. And can you imagine how expensive having a kid would be in such a world?
Mega City One, too, had a "post-scarcity" welfare system where few worked. It worked out rather differently.
and technology hasn't changed at all since, has it.
How about we don't ask "xxxJonBoyxxx."
... said the peasants of a feudal system when they described capitalism to them
This worked because people stopped trying to friggan kill each other. They just came out of a world war that decimated the Earths population. We are a long ways from not hating and killing each other 9if possible at all).
This is not future fantasy; it's happening right now. Just look into the current "basic income" debate in the EU: basically the idea is that all citizens get a basic income from the state, and can get more income if they go out and work. Switzerland is quite close to actually implementing this already.
For more details on implementation (and to keep your comments to my post informed and useful) please check out the wikipedia page on the subject, or simply google for "basic info" or "basic info switzerland".
Your penalty is 15 bars of gold-pressed latinum.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Does he have any idea what the world water situation is?
All we see are the pro-Federation propaganda. All those pro-Starfleet shows with their fictional "Prime Directive" and an emphasis on exploration are just propaganda to paper over the federation's relentless military buildup to support their imperialist expansionist policies.
They show Starfleet and the rich nomenklatura, but never the vast backwater gulag planets where slave laborers work tirelessly to keep the military and party elite in Saurian Brandy and Starships.
Why do you think so many crew members wear redshirts, comrade?
"Star Trek represents a post-scarcity society evolved from democratic capitalism"
Check, I'm with you. Limitless energy, etc. In fact, I seem to recall Roddenberry saying exactly that.
but...
"...we're in the nascent stages of transforming to a post-scarcity economy..."
WTF? That's so wrong it borders on the incomprehensible.
Clearly, this was written from the well-compensated, comfortable easy-chair in a Starbucks somewhere by an over-educated upper-middle-class American (ie, unfamiliar with the daily lives of 60%+ of his own countrymen and -women, or about 90% of the world)
-Styopa
What is THAT supposed to mean? That the grass is greener at the other side of the Pond? Somebody really lost hist touch with reality...
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
If we replace today's welfare systems with mincome, we can make a smooth and bloodless transition from capitalism to a post-scarcity economy - as more government-owned autonomous labor produces more, mincome can increase as the demand for work decreases...until at some point there's no need to work and lots of resources to go around.
It won't lead to a population increase - only adults get mincome and highly educated people reproduce less.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Most estimates show a bell-curve type of population growth. I think it is around 13 or 14 billion where it would peak and then it will go back down.
So I don't think he's that off. We waste tons of food a day.
I believe that this is best described by Ian M Banks in his culture series
Compare it to a century or two ago and you'll see that many homeless now have a higher quality of life than a good portion of the middle class did back then.
Bullshit. You CLEARLY have no idea what being homeless is actually like, nor do you have any realistic idea what being "middle class" was like 100 years ago. Let me give you a hint. My grandmother is close to a century old so she was around back then and her family could accurately be described as lower middle class. It wasn't all that different than it is now aside from some of the technology advances. Her father was a barber, her mom worked for a state agency, they had a house not so different from the one you probably live in. You seem to have some bizarre notion that people lived in caves and squalor a hundred years ago. It wasn't like that at all nor was it like that 200 years ago.
You know, concepts like socialism and even communism actually sound pretty good.. on paper, but in reality they forget one ineffable truth: Human beings like power and being in control. Money is just a way of gathering power and control. The rich always want to get richer, and the powerful just want to become more powerful. Of course, there are people who are exceptions to this, but let's be honest about them, too: even they are getting something out of the transaction when they spend their money and power for the benefit of others, even if what they're getting is a warm, fuzzy feeling of having 'done good'. Cynical as I am, I unfortunately believe that even in the fictional reality of the Federation where energy and posessions are easy to come by and essentially free, there's always going to be a group of people who want all the power and control they can amass. If someday the human race evolves past the need to be so transactional in nature and past the need to screw everyone else over if they can just so they can have all the sex, power, and money possible, then maybe we'll have a society where everyone makes sure everyone else is taken care of, but unfortunately I don't see that happening anytime soon.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
These people have been thinking in this for a long time already. Futuristic drawings are confusing I guess, but the ideas on how society could are similar.
http://www.thevenusproject.com/
In the history of humanity, and to this day, we have had societies with were scarcity was the rule and others where there was enough for everyone three times over.
Modern Western civilization (and based on some definitions, all civilization) is based on an over-abundance of the necessities of life. This invariably leads to hoarding, and monetary systems, and the rich and the poor; Because the economy can afford these inefficiencies; You might even say it needs them.
In hunter-gather based societies, things are different. There is a very limited food supply, and a huge scarcity of pretty much everything, and their economy is therefore a lot different. They invariably, share and share alike. Ownership of resources (like the only water supply for the entire village) is not a concept that is understandable. And monetary systems do not exist.
If you want a Star Trek style economy you are looking for a scarcity based economy.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
I know, don't get how people come up with this even if we do have unlimited energy resources and we do Fossil fuels/Nuclear/Renewable Energy Star trek is not going because energy is to cheap to meter and it will happen the very cheap energy will happen but not the star trek thing
ST's vision of the future economy (at least from TNG on; TOS wisely avoided touching on it but implied it was a form of Capitalism) is a pipe-dream Utopia. If food, shelter, and energy were in virtually unlimited supply no one would need to work, yes, but more importantly, no one would *want* to. Where would the goodies come from then? Automation? Okay then, the Machines rule the Federation. And no one would ever emerge out of their self-created kingdoms inside holodecks. The future would be more like Wall-E. There'd be no more invention, no more innovation, no more anything..... Just everyone plugged into their fantasies in their holo-simulators, a civilization of lotus-eaters. This is the sort of shit that would cause Captain Kirk to charge phasers. Rewatch "The Apple".
Straight from a VC's mouth people. I mean he even used medium.com, probably typed it on his $9k Mac. There's no scarcity problems in the world anymore. Guess we can all just relax. Let's SnapChat and Candy Crush our way to subliminal bliss.
I believe Sowell's definition of economics is correct--it is the study of how we allocate SCARCE resources.
Given the laws of physics and mandatory recycling of biology, there will always be a scarcity some place.
You might have an endless pile of food but that means you have an endless stream of shit to deal with also.
We have just realized that we cannot burn all the oil in the planet without also burning us out of house and home.
In economics, the term to grok is 'externality." They have odd definitions but essentially it is something you think is not scarce and then eventually it becomes scarce like clean air or water after industrialization. I know people who say they can always live off hunting if the economy collapses. Ask someone who knows about population biology. If enough people start hunting deer, there won't be more than one or two year's worth of meat in most US States, maybe 4 years in Maine and Minnesota. As long as only 5% of the population hunts, the biology can maintain itself. If 40% hunted for food, we'd quickly run out of large animals.
The natural processes of biology can handle things up to certain limits. The fish in the oceans can feed a billion of us sustainably, but not 5 billion hence the collapse of almost all the world's fisheries formerly thought to be unlimited. (I know there are 7 billion folks in the world but a third of them are starving).
To be a successful society we would have to eliminate large, unproductive portions of our population and tie resources to productivity.
FICTION!!!
I'm pretty sure there's not enough drugs to go around in such a society (leading to scarcity, etc. ad absurdum). Or perhaps you have a very unrealistic view of what people do when they have no constraints on their time?
Memory serves only certain species in Star Trek pride themselves with the acquisition of wealth (Ferengie, etc). For the most part, capitalism is replaced by replication and replication is powered by recycling. And only in certain circumstances such as low energy reserves is such replication limited through credits.
In what way are we going into a post scarcity economy? In what way have we eliminated scarcity of resources and arrived at a place where we can put them anywhere we need whenever we like?
Sorry, but Star Trek went post-scarcity because they had limitless energy, and the ability to create whatever forms of matter they needed, and more or less obviated the need for money and the like. When you can replicate enough food, shelter, and everything you need for people to survive, that is post-scarcity.
We are nowhere near this 'post scarcity' thing he's talking about. Not even close. We have finite resources, pollution, and a very highly unequal distribution of those resources as well as access to them.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Without money, how else are males supposed to indicate their status and desirability of their genes?!!
HA HA, trick question!
If you're still encumbered by the shackles imposed by DNA, you're a sucker. Who needs progeny when you can live virtually forever? The secret it to bang the rocks together, guys.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
In the timeline of a pre-post-scarcity world, we have a population of unemployed individuals which will grow as job growth - especially unskilled blue collar labor - flattens or becomes regressive. Until we're in a post-scarcity world, however, these individuals will be in a society that requires money for things like housing, food, shelter and clothing - whether it comes from the government or not.
At some point, the government simply won't be able to provide; their budget will be scraped too thinly over the nation. This is one of those situations where we'd be hard pressed to iteratively progress - it's a "flip the switch" sort of thing. Doing otherwise will create a massive underprivileged underclass, who are likely to be quite frustrated by their life; no job or job prospects, subsistence level living, inability to focus on personal goals or desires...
Two things can happen at this point:
Those who have focused their lives on acquiring wealth, the super rich, the 'haves', the ones who are most defined by the benefits wealth has brought them, they can all become completely selfless altruists, and together, agree to reduce their primary value to near zero by agreeing to, effectively, eliminate money in the spirit of pure socialism. Thus, utopia is achieved.
Alternatively, they will not do that, and at some tipping point - say, 60% unemployed - there will be a revolt that destroys the current economy, form of government, and so on, settings us back to 0 on the cultural progress - and likely technological/engineering scale, but removing the then-existing artificial constraint that says work=money.
I really don't see the first happening. Do you? Am I overlooking some important alternative choice?
In actuality, I think we're headed towards a more corporation-centric outcome, as predicted by many of the darker sci-fi novels out there, rather than a post-scarcity world, but hey, that's just my opinion.
that's exactly where humanity should aim for....I don't understand why people sees it as some kind of Utopian dream. so where do we set the bar? mega-corporations shit and police state you like that better? Cos I don't. Work can be superfluous, people can spend their lifes learning skills and knowledge just because they like it. Others will find continuous work still interesting and appealing and I think most will do in fact, given that works will exclude the robot-able ones and the pointless destructive money-making scams.. You will still have private property and all that , of course.... It's all about spreading resources and understanding that someone else does not have more power just because his daddy has an oil corporation... We are born on the same planet, with same rights and same share of natural resources. Accumulation of wealth by some specific individuals is the worst crap that can happen...and leads to the worst behaviors and unbalances. I hope to see just the hint of this change during my lifetime... else we'll just be another shit race in a once-beautiful planet that we turned to shit as well with our nice 'live to work to make someone else rich and to buy the items we need to go to work'....how excellent... but I want to believe a change is possible...
People were still engaged in capitalistic behavior under fuedal systems, so it wouldn't be a fantasy land like this nonsense.
We are a long way off from a post scarcity society, if anything some parts of our society are using more resources than ever. I pay at least 1/3 of my income to the government yet they are still spending more than than they take in, and I'm in one of the lower tax brackets. Companies are continually finding more ways of extracting money from us (rising service fees, marketing ploys, etc). We have come a LONG way to be sure, my grandparents generation made due with coal/wood heating half of a house, reusing nails, model T's & lard sandwiches. Today we have low maintenance central heating/air, power drills, 4 wheel drive cars in every flavor, and can stop buy Lowes for every imaginable home improvement item. And in their day they had to work 14 hour days to afford that much, today we work 8 or less and can afford much more. It will take a massive change (think replicators, "free" energy advances & major changes in government) before we get close to a post scarcity society.
In all fairness, most homeless in the streets aren't homeless in the streets because of a scarcity of food, energy and shelter.
What you are talking about is local scarcity. Just because the scarcity is caused by distribution problems rather than production limitations doesn't mean it isn't scarce. If you live in a desert, water is going to be expensive because it is relatively had to get. That is scarcity or more properly an economic shortage.
is the free communications devices like the prototype of the newest Android phone that Captain Picard is using.in the pic below
http://www.appsgeyser.com/blog...
Sig Follows: "Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself." -- Mark Twain
We're not *anywhere* near either. We are still laughably dependent on hydrocarbon energy and lack the political will to build enough sustainable nuclear (fission or fusion) to sustain our current industrial society much beyond this century. Without that power, other hard limits like phosphate depletion for agriculture will eventually constrain our ability to feed 7 billion people worldwide.
It's not hopeless. There's a natural, normal population bottleneck coming, as it does for all species as they run themseles out of natural resources. The survivors in the 2150s should start living fairly comfortably as the Earth starts cooling down.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
I haven't heard a good answer for that. Our entire society is built around work. You work, you get paid. The more people value your work ( regardless of it's objective value) the more you get paid. It's easy to sell the Narrative that it's morally wrong to give someone something for nothing. It's popular, and drives a substantial amount of American Politics at least. Nobody likes the idea of paying somebody to sit around and do nothing. They want that for themselves.
Also, if everybody is rich than nobody is. "Rich" means having more wealth than everyone else. If you're wealthy your status and power are based on your ability to control people's access to food, shelter, transportation, etc. It feels good to have people waiting on you hand on foot. You can't get that unless you have something (money) to give them in return.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
One of the funniest moments in the Star Trek series came when they brought aboard a frozen 20th century businessman. The tragedy of the commons became all too real when the businessman discovered he could just touch the wall and demand to see the Captain.
Federation society was based on an ethic of getting along, not demanding everyone's attention for yourself. If that ethic exists in humanity, it is certainly not nurtured by the corporate capitalism that now controls the world's resources. Sadly, this may explain why we never hear from technologically advanced society's -- either they destroy themselves or they learn to hide.
Why not "Trekonomics"?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Unlimited free energy* = low cost desalination = no water problem.
Just because you have some magic technology allowing you to get it doesn't mean you can or should use it. Now you are talking about moving massive amounts of water around from the oceans to locations where it would not have been ordinarily. You think that will have no ecological impact? Just because we can build a city like Phoenix or Las Vegas in the desert doesn't make it a good idea*. The limitations aren't just economic or material, they are also consequential. If you do something it will have an effect on the world around you and there is more than a small possibly it will not a good one. We're not all that great about foreseeing all the consequences of our actions. Removing energy limitations will not make us better at predicting the future.
* I've actually seen idiots saying we should divert water from the Great Lakes to fill up Lake Mead to support Las Vegas. Here's a better idea, don't build a major city in the damn desert.
I always wondered how people in a society with no money could play poker.
Well I guess the banks won't mind cancelling all the debt they hold over the rest of us.
In banking the balance sheet is flipped. Your asset (money in your checking account) is a bank's liability - their obligation.
More importantly, your student loan debt, mortgage and credit card debt (and interest to service debt) is a short and long term liability or obligation for you, but it is in fact the Asset for the banks and makes banks the most powerful force in the economic world.
Debt is used to control people and allows for a very small minority to pick presidents, choose when and where to war.
As the US economy is intentionally forced to implode, a new super-national currency will be launched to replace it and the old ideas of economics in the hope of stability. The problem will be "they" will confiscate your wealth and lead billions into more debt, which everyone will be toiling to endlessly service.
Debt is slavery.
Creating a society completely dependent on a government body is the surest way to ruin that I think I have ever heard. Governments invariable fail, or become mired in bureaucracy, coruption or in some cases turn on their citizens. Thats not to say that we don't need government, but power (in the form of labor, resources, etc) should always flow FROM the citizenry TO the government, never the other way around so that if said government does turn into something undesirable those citizens can withhold that power until the time that government again works for the people.
Do you not think a robot garbage collection truck would work at least as well as today's garbage monkeys, whose entire job consists of hooking a mechanical arm to the bar on the side of the bin and pushing a button to dump it? The whole point of the article was that, if the job was unpleasant, robots would do it. And why the hell not? Well, of course, unless you think that working automatically brings some sort of nobility to a person, which, judging from most people I know, it doesn't.
I worked with the poor in a volunteer position I have. In the US, the biggest concern among the poor - especially the working poos is healthcare and dentistry. When Walmart workers have to beg for medical care because they don't qualify for Medicare and health insurance (before Obamacare) was unattainable, you have to wonder about our society. Obamacare is a great step, but it's not far enough.
Then there's food. Due to the subsidies to the corn and certain other farmers, junk food is too cheap. And when you have a time pressed family, they go and eat crap like McDonald's instead of getting some greens at the local super market - it IS interesting that I have yet to see coupons for Swiss Chard and yet, there's coupons for corn chips EVERY week.
And we need to understand that the poor don't have 40 hour a week jobs. Jobs for the poor are scheduled on a weekly basis. So one week, they're working M 8am - 3 PM, W 3PM - 7PM, Thrs 8am - Noon. And maybe another day. Then it switches completely the next week to a completely different schedule; so planning ahead is impossible. And you are very rarely scheduled for more than 30 hours - so, you have to get another job that pulls the same crap.
Ask for a day off? Well now, you inconvenienced the manager who has to work around YOUR schedule?! How dare you! He just doesn't schedule you for a week.
All for minimum wage.
The work is boring, fulfilling, and the work environment is abusive. You are treated as minimum wage scum. You are not a human being: just a piece of meat to do work that the company can't get a robot to do.
Don't like it?
Well, there is a HUGE line of others waiting to do it - ALL Americans.
There's a growing underclass- most of whom are ex-middle class.
This bromide of "just get retraining" doesn't work because the jobs aren't there to begin with. And getting an employer to hire someone who had no experience is nearly impossible. And getting hired when unemployed - especially if it's been long term is also impossible.
There are some serious changes happening in our economy and society. The have-nots are increasing and they're getting angry and irrational. Case in point - the protests against the Google workers. More of that is coming.
And instead of pointing fingers saying "the poor did it to themselves!" or whatever other ignorant blaming is done, a solution will have to be found or we as a society are headed for some serious upheaval - maybe not a revolution, but some radical leftist leaders who'll go over board.
AC rant over. Flame away - but the data ( LT unemployment for one and home ownership increasing among hedge funds and etc ...) shows this post to be true: our economic system is failing for most of us.
The economics of Star Trek never made any kind of sense to me, which is, I suppose, why the various series and movies never real dove into them that deeply.
....and don't get me started on the holodeck. If everything is 'free' I'd just move in there.
Why are Ferengi obsessed with gold-pressed latinum if you can just replicate anything you might need to acquire? Why, in Undiscovered Country, DS9 and others do you see people working menial jobs? If there's no notion of pay why would you do something menial and boring? Why, other than Data, do we see virtually zero automation via robots? Why do people crawl around outside spaceships welding them together?
Like many utopias, it is the how you get there that is the issue.
I would venture to say we could have had a post-scarcity economy ever since 1920s or so (plus or minus a few decades) . I would suggest communism became a reality precisely because people could see that we could organize society and create adequate production and distribution for all.
The hard part is getting there.
As long as there is a single human job that needs doing, it will be hard to get there.
As long as you need people to do jobs that are not of their interest, it will be hard to get there.
This is a big one. It is relatively easy to imagine a world of people doing things out of their interest if you're an academic or doing something you love. It is much harder when you think of jobs you'd rather not do.
Even something like a doctor, which would be a job that might exist just out of interest. You'd have to ask, if you'd want to be that doctor working the 3 AM midnight shift in the ER instead of lounging off the state?
Already in the Western world, we have the mentality that some jobs should be done by immigrants or overseas? We don't want to work our own farms, take care of our own elderly in old homes...
Already we have issues with labor unions wanting a better standard of living than the rest. We have rich people who want to keep more of their money. Already we have homelessness. We have people who demand more of the state than the state can afford. We have monetary issues...
I'm not saying some government won't come up with way of solving this. I'm just saying, it is the how we get there that is the hard part. We'd had the technical means for quite some time.
Then blame you because they got a better deal from Romulans..
The survivors in the 2150s should start living fairly comfortably as the Earth starts cooling down.
Why would anyone in their right mind want to be living on Earth in 2150?
There is no limit to human greed so there will always be scarcity. For some, it will be simply because their desires outstretch their ability to consume, and for others, because the desires of the 1% enforce poverty on the other 99%.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
The only think I'd add is to this part:
And we need to understand that the poor don't have 40 hour a week jobs. Jobs for the poor are scheduled on a weekly basis. So one week, they're working M 8am - 3 PM, W 3PM - 7PM, Thrs 8am - Noon. And maybe another day. Then it switches completely the next week to a completely different schedule; so planning ahead is impossible. And you are very rarely scheduled for more than 30 hours - so, you have to get another job that pulls the same crap.
Ever since the housing bubble collapsed, many employers are taking this one step further by demanding continuous availability. That means that your schedule must be open at all times, and if you have conflicts with another job, then you'd better pick which one is more important.
I know a few friends who can't even get a second job because of this "dance for it, monkey!" attitude.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I know it sounds loopy but I think he has a fair point
People's wants are infinite but people also want free time to enjoy themsevles. People are only willing to work so hard for their wants.
If you look at how far things have some in the last 500 years, the amount of stuff provided by the government even in capitalist countries is incredible. Basic literacy was once limited to the elites, disease was rampant. Yet today here in Canada, 1/3 of the population will get a high school diploma, 1/3 a college diploma, and 1/3 a university degree or higher. Healthcare is provided by the government. So what happens when the GDP per Capita continues to grow? In real terms it was $30k in 1994 and stands at $40k in 2011, what will it be like in 2100? What does a country with a $100k GDP per Capita look like?
I don't think that it is unreasonable to think that at some point the level of services provided by the government will be high enough that many people will choose not to work. And instead spending their time on other pursuits. The maginal benefit you gain from going from just government services to a full time job just would be enough for some people. Now obviously not everyone will do this, some poeple will always strive for more. But some people will.
Imagine if you had the choice between $60,000 a year from the government, but $100,000 if you got a full time job. In dollar terms the marginal benefit is $40,000. But at $60,000 you already have enough for the comforts you already enjoy like food, clothes, TV, Internet, vacations, etc. Would you really work 40hrs a week for a little more comfort, or would you take all of that extra time you have been afforded and persure your passion, or spend time with your kids?
Seriously. How can anyone read from this shit?
Our energy mostly comes from non-renewable resources. Even if we produce enough that there is plenty for everybody we are all screwed when it runs out.
There are still many parts of the world where people live in horrible conditions.
In those parts where people live relatively well the gap between the richest and everyone else is going up not down. How can one take away from this that the problem of resoource allocation is getting closer to being solved? If anything a true solution is getting even farther away!
Whoever posted this lives in a nice place with a very limited view of the rest of the world.
Or...
It's just a troll.
Whooosh!!!!!!!!!!!
What they never show in ST is that due to transport technology, if a redshirt gets killed on an away team, shortly after, they drop another copy out of the transport buffer and he goes on with his day unaware that he beamed down in the first place.
holy fuck, I never realized what a bleak, Lovecraftian horror story ST was. An endless line of Johnny Redshirt beaming down and getting killed, over and over again. I assume they must be psychologically screened for that position, you must really have to have a major screw loose to volunteer for such duty. Just imagine what a bloody slaughter invading a resistant planet could be while the power holds out. Makes WH40K look like Teletubbies.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Realize all the "fake" money machines die.
Making million on music, movies, etc... Those will be the first to die and go back to what their real values are. Mozart was not a billionaire, none of the bards and musicians before the 1920's were filthy rich. THAT is reality, today is a fake reality that is only lucky it did not collapse earlier.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
In Star Wars, your Sith overlords exploit you and discard you like garbage. Sort of like what managers in corporations do to workers now, only Darth Zannah is a lot cuter and it's a lot more fun when she does it to you. Star Trek's hippie utopian nonsense is why I never liked Star Trek.
I think the open source movement is a much better analogy. Think about it, what happens as the cost to replicate an item decreases to nothing. Open source software exists because the cost of replicating code is 0. The same with open source IP, such as the various maker projects. The star trek economy seems to me to be the ultimate evolution of open source, where the only capital of value is human ingenuity. When production costs are zero, the greatest possible freedom and prosperity results from a "socialist" economic model. Intellectual contribution becomes the coin of the realm. Exactly the opposite is true when the cost of production is high. Human time and labor are what creates the value in any particular product. I suspect starships will always be scarce, however.
While I'd love to think that the world will be post-scarcity anytime, the fact is the human brain evolved over millions of years of scarcity and this is what we're stuck with. Even if all the technical tools were in our hands, we automatically revert to schoolyard politics. There is power in having more than the next schlub, and power in keeping stuff from him. Unless we re-engineer the human brain, this is how it's going to be.
Still, the mechanism "you do something, you get something in return" seems to work better than "do nothing and get stuff for free" since well, you figure it out...
The real problem begins (or it starts to get interesting) where too much of the things that can be done is being automated and there isn't enough work to do for less educated people.
Privacy is terrorism.
For one thing, we on the verge of worldwide food shortage from global warming and overpopulation. Additionally, Americans and most other similar nations will never, ever be convinced to have a different attitude than "I'm smarter than you, paid for college, and work harder, I should get more than you" monetary system. Let's say we have unlimited energy due to fusion and somehow unlimited food too. Where's the incentive to do any work at all ever if everyone is compensated the same and money becomes irrelevant like Star Trek?
There's a lot of companies that do nothing productive, yet our system gives them lots money.
Why do we debase non-productive people? (well the ones who aren't celebrities or already wealthy)
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
And most of the governments in Europe have been around for how long? Most are arguably less than 70 years old. The US government has been in force for over 150 years (since the civil war) and possibly over 220 years depending on how you tally it. Capitalism is far from perfect to be sure, but government control of resources is inherently unstable and prone to failure.
The Trek universe shows what a post-scarcity world could be like. It also shows what it would take to achieve it: a practically unlimited source of energy and a way to convert it into human sustenance. Fortunately for the chances of seeing it happen in my lifetime, we don't need anything as powerful as antimatter to meet our needs here on Earth.
'Socialist capitalism' is an oxymoron; a confusion of terms. You either have market order, or you have central planning. The one precludes the other.
I think the really difficult thing to overcome is when there truly is a labor surplus. Still a need for labor and particularly like you say, labor that not enough people 'just want' to do and particularly jobs almost anyone could do given a near trivial amount of training, but not enough demand to keep everyone meaningfully occupied.
Say hypothetically you are facing a situation that would mean massive unemployment, but realistically you could feed, clothe, shelter, and provide health care for everyone. But you still need people like delivery drivers. So either you provide all the fundamental needs for the unemployed and have a hard time finding people to do delivery work, or you resign society to screwing over the unemployed.
Of course, I think a key flaw that leads to this situation is the bad assumption that the choices are either 40 hours of work/week or 0 hours of work/week. A less ambitious goal might be to have more people working but for fewer hours. At least in the US, the stack is very heavily stacked against this evolution. The current healthcare situation is the worst of both worlds. When they first started talking health care reform, I imagined foolishly that we would be put on a path where one's employer did not have anything to do with coverage. Instead, it doubles down on that and as a result people are getting fewer hours, but without the health care. For such a goal to move forward, the 'magic' around 40 hrs/week has to go away.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Nature
Nature doesn't pollute. Bzzzt, wrong.
According to YOUR definition of pollute.
As far as I am aware all that geological activity (incuding Meteor/comet strikes) helped bring LIFE to the planet.
By your logic, we are the result of that polution and a non-polluted planet is actually what we would call barren. Which makes the Volcano activity NOT polluting at all but trying to clean up the mess that is us and the rest of growing things.
In his book Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom Doctorow describes the post scarcity economy as running on a form of social capital called 'Whuffie'. Although everyone has their basic needs met their 'reptutation', or opinion's of others adds or subtracts from their Whuffie. They can exchange Whuffie as payment and can earn and lose Whuffie both through direct and indirect means. Shoving through a crowd rudely could result in those that were shoved and witnessed the shoving to lower their opinion of you (even if they don't know you) while those that enjoy a poem you wrote would increase your Whuffie. This is all made possible by the fact that everyone has a computer implanted in their brain that measures and tracks both the history and current values of everyone's Whuffie. I always found this to be a clever and more likely shift for capitalist society than going to a Star Trek economy.
a post-Scarcity economic environment in the universe of Star Trek is impossible -- especially when you consider TNG and Cmdr Data.
All wealth is the application of human ingenuity to natural resources.
Resources in the universe are already consumed faster than they are produced. The uranium we have now is billions of years old. We have only been using the uranium deposits on Terra for about 70 years.
The hydrocarbon fuels on earth took somewhere between 10e4 and 10e7 years to form. We've depleted a massive amount of this resource in the last 150 years.
The main resource that limits the speed at which we can extract and consume resources to create new wealth is the amount of human labor required to create the wealth.
In other words, if we wanted to, we could mine all of the remaining coal in the world in a short amount of time; limited primarily to how much human labor we could allocate to this task.
Humans continue to improve the speed that some resource can be consumed by building tools, machines, etc, that increase their productivity.
Cmdr Data is, in a sense, the culmination of this effort. He is a synthetic human; more capable than other humans, and with (presumably) the ability to replace himself.
He is the singularity. Once he exists, there is no fundamental limit governing the rate at which the remainder of the universe's resources can be extracted and utilized.
All higher-order matter in the universe, whether it is uranium or hydrocarbons or anything else, represents a chemical battery of the only fundamental energy source -- star radiation.
Post singularity -- when machines can replicate themselves by consuming resources, to build more machines to consume more resources -- it is theoretically possible that all of the star-energy "batteries" (all higher-order matter) will have been consumed. At that point, the agents within the universe will be limited to consuming energy at the rate it is globally emitted by the stars they have access to, less capture efficiency losses.
Human conflict still exists in TNG, and cross-species conflict also exists.
Humans consume resources more quickly than humans or societies that they are in conflict with, to give them an advantage.
The fact that human ships with life support systems exist in the same universe with a super-human artificial intelligence suggest that resource consumption and production are not unlimited. There is still a limiting function.
Thus, resource scarcity still exists. The resource extraction singularity has not come to pass in TNG, despite the many advantages it would bring to those entities that were in conflict with other entities.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
..but, the way things are going, the future will be a very small number of ultra-rich with the rest of the population living like rats in the sewers of Calcutta
The fundamental difference between our world and Star Trek's is that everyone there is shown to be self-motivating and productive.
I can easily see a scenario where progress and culture stagnate because everyone's needs are provided for. I think all that would happen is the majority spends their life engaged in hedonistic pursuits and doesn't contribute much of anything to society. If you ask me, it sounds a lot like Hollywood and trust fund kids. The problem is that the majority will probably end up bored and restless. And they'll still find ways to stratify society.
I don't think humans have hit that critical cultural shift that could enable a Star Trek-like society.
I guess in this beautiful socialist wet dream, the future equivalent of Edward Snowden never got to reveal the Federation's version of the NSA spying on its citizens, quashing dissent and stepping on humanity with their velvet covered jackboots. Of course, no one would (or could) dissent against that beautiful galactic empire. Only haters wouldn't accept the Federation's rule.
The first assumption made is that we're anywhere's near a Star Trek style Post Scarcity economy and I can sure as hell say we're not. The key reason is that to reach a Post Scarcity Economy, Corporatism and Consumerism both have to die. Until that happens, we will never be in a post scarcity world as the corporations will not allow such a thing to happen.
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
Claiming that overpopulation is only a problem for India and China is nothing more than extreme ignorance. North Americans use 20 times the resources as Chinese people. Our economy and resource distribution system is global. Places like California DO have real water shortage problems.
About the only thing I agree with you on is the last point that things will work themselves out naturally. This is true, but it won't be only India and China who starve to death.
If you want to eat Cheerios instead of cardboard, well, that's going to require either 1) a job, or 2) a waiver based on medical hardship, inability to find a job, etc.
// Hey, you want suggestions? How about defaulting the goddamned subject line? Oh yeah, and don't let me forget, get rid of that goddamned Metro-style front page!
/// BTW, since when has Slashdot - Somewhat famous for ONLY removing content because of court order - Added the concept of "flag this post"? Make no mistake, Beta pisses me off, but the first time a post of mine gets administratively deleted will count as the last time I visit Slashdot.Dice.com.
Clearly you missed the intro lecture to "Socialist Utopia 101", where we learn that everyone really wants to work a dirty, demeaning job, if only they didn't need to worry about where their next ultra-high-def TV will come from.
Why do you hate America? Don't you realize how much better we'd all have it if the 99% just stayed home eating Cheetos while the 1% pay for everything?
/ So, Slashdot has "heard" us, and will adapt Beta to our needs... By breaking the non-Beta site until we have no choice but to "voluntarily" come here (or leave entirely)?
Thats why at least in the U.S. it seems like we keep inventing artificial scarcity. Our GDP goes up but the average salary has been stagnant. There is more wealth than there use to be, but for most people it is more scarce. You can access this wealth, but you must pay interest. Now you have a system where people can make money on the artificial scarcity of wealth.
In America's current society, if somehow we invented technology that could create unlimited energy and then invented replicators, you would still have a class of people controlling those resources and creating artificial scarcity so they could profit from it. We need to progress more as a society before we are ready to deal with evaporating scarcity in a way that is just for everyone.
Star Trek economy did have scarcity in it. While the "general population" did not starve or suffered from things like lack of clothing, there was a notion of money and privilege.
For example, in many episodes there was a notion of "working for credits" to get access to things like transporter instead of a shuttle ride which supposedly was cheaper. Or access to holodeck. People also had to sign up for their turn to access holodeck resources.
People that abused their privileges (like transporter) were eventually cut off.
So while Star Trek transitions mostly from the "need to work" to "want to work", scarcity remains for things like vacations off-world and similar. Contribution to society was the capital, instead of notion of abstract number as capital that we have today. Star Trek killed off idea of trust-funders and capital, for example.
I you own a "Matter Replicator" scarcity no longer exists. Food, Shelter, anything, can be recreated; down to the atomic structure.
I see you completely failed to respond to anything I said.
In what circumstances does it make any sense for me, as a business owner, to give money to the government so they can spend some of it buying stuff from me?
Hint: it doesn't. So if that's the only choice other than closing down the company, I close it down and keep the money.
'Basic income' or 'citizens income' or whatever you want to call it is just the latest twaddle from the commies who haven't died out yet.
I would not agree with everything he has said but I do think its a better way of looking at things that some of the recent discussions (recent as in the last 150 years or so). I wholeheartedly agree that looking to literature as a source for outside the box thinking with regards to economic models is a point worth studying. Being freed from the social conventions that we have grown up in and some of the historic context. For example I had never heard of gift economies or zero growth theories until I read the Red Mars Trilogy (wonderful books but so long and dense, that man can be a bit .... something, ever read The Years of Rice and Salt you know what I mean)
Silly peasant. Time is purchased with MONEY. Can't spend a day getting to your destination - hire a plane. Can't be bothered worrying that the a plane won't be available - buy one and have crews on standby 24/7! Why spend time when you can hire people to do almost everything for you! You just go from place to place, with everything prepared to meet your every whim - and even when you don't have a whim, you can hire people to know you well enough to have your whim available even when you don't know what it is.
And even without enough time, desire can easily outstrip the life of a human. Look at all the rich people building entire estates they may only live in for weeks out of their entire lives. Larry Elliston bought an island. A FUCKING ISLAND. Yachts you don't have time to sail, so many cars you could never drive them, jewels and jewelry and one-of-a-kind clothing you will only wear for a single evening is commonplace.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
The real question is How many years are left before trucking is done by a bot who does do meth?
Your $50 - every single cent - came from people spending money. Maybe it was some of the taxes you paid, maybe it's some of the taxes your neighboring business paid, maybe some of it even came from your rival business.
The difference is that the baseline consumer has $50 to spend. Because you're not a baseline consumer, you have $100 to spend.
You don't shut down because you have the desire for creature comforts or to be better than the unwashed masses - you would hate life living on $50. You'd hate it even more because you would know people living on $100.
This isn't really sustainable, imho. Humans are very, very lazy creatures on the whole. That laziness is reinforced by their perception that wages do not represent the value they provide (yeah, that's arguable in the abstract, but not for them personally). The flip side is that the equivalent output (in goods/services) of a single human really has vastly outstripped wages, but workers don't see this as it is managements view that increases in efficiency due to technology and capital plant should solely benefit those providing guidance and capital. The reason we don't have a 10 hour workweek is that a human will trade 40 hours a week for a sum of money. An employer would no more pay $40 for a $10 barrel of raw material that could be made to produce 4x the goods due to new machinery, than pay a worker 40 hours of wage for 10 hours of performance, even if the output resulted in 40 hours of "production" based on old benchmark.
There is no common good in capitalism. If there was, the top would take only a small multiple of the bottom in compensation, we'd hire more people and have them work less, leveraging efficiency gains to benefit everyone. But because we don't, the government (who, in Europe, is more likely to speak for the people) is taking the ham-handed approach of just taking that extra from the top and sprinkling it about.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
This kind of article (as usual) ignores the actual Star Trek canon, that the era of abundance and lack of capitalism came ONLY after a global nuclear war that shattered the pre-existing nation-state system and reduced the planet's population dramatically. There was no 'natural evolution' to this state, it took catastrophe to bring it about.
interesting read, even though I'm past the age where I think it's possible: Manna, by Marshall Brain.
"The hallmark of humanity is the ability to move beyond sensory inputs" - Mary Helen Immordino-Yang
In a post-scarcity economy where people only work if they want to, who does the jobs that no one wants to do?
I agree that instead of full employment the real goal should be universal unemployment, but I'm not sure how we get there. There will always be a few a-holes who insist on working and prevent the achievement of that goal.
Puritans (read: Red Americans) would rather blow up the world than allow this to happen.
As they always do in nature (work themselves out). In systems speak I think it is called a neutral feedback loop, which basically just means self balancing.
The key is how rocky or drastic is the negative swing to right the balance. That is do we get to a place where there is a massive die off, followed by some pretty lean years, or will it be a much more gradual thing.
Rick Webb has an article suggesting we're in the nascent stages of transforming to a post-scarcity economy
Proof positive that 2014 will without doubt be the Year of the Linux Desktop!
Wir sind geboren, um frei zu sein - Rio Reiser
Maquis traitor to me...
Actually each one of those chips was a redshirt under the command of each officer. How do you think they decided which disposable crew to send on away missions.
Cut full time to 32 hours or less and have OT caps (other then in some Emergency settings) and even with them forced comp time after the Emergency is over.
Right now we have a lot people pulling 60-80 hour weeks and that Leeds to not only poorer work but it takes jobs that 2 people can fill and makes one person try to do the work of 2 people.
The continent of Europe is very old, but most of the governments there aren't. Between the collapse of empires, being concurred by Germany, economic collapse & civil upheaval I think my original statement remains accurate. That's not to say that the government here in the US is perfect by any measure, in fact we're on our way to our own failure if things keep going as they are. But it is not due to capitalism.
Just sayin'.
Some days it's just not worth chewing through the restraints.
Most definitely, I think work sharing is the way forward as a means.
But again, it means addressing labor unions, 'forcing' or 'assigning' people to work while still somehow making sure they are productive.
It's a socially difficult thing to do.
education needs to move to less of big blocks of time and to a system that is more on topic and less about is it 2-4-6+ years
Yeah
My blog has an article, one of my most popular ones, on the topic of economics in Star Trek. It contains some relevant facts from Star Trek's "future history," debunks claims that such an economy is either fascist or communist, and sugges ts that it has similarities to Major C.H. Douglas's Social Credit theory.
-Gareth
I read through about 75% of it. It is not a great read. It takes a lot of time to get to a little meat.
It relies on "social pressure" to stop conspicuous spending. Lets see that work for real in womens shoes and I might believe it possible. Otherwise there is a substantial bit of anthropology that the author is hand-waving his way past.
Reproductively speaking, the minimum cost of reproduction is much smaller for the male than the female. For the female the time-cost is 40 weeks, while for the male it can be around 4 minutes. That is a 100,000 to one ratio. Although females have oestrus cycle times that are 9x less frequent than optimal cycle-times for males, this does not establish a reproductive cost equality.
This high asymmetry in cost drives different general normative behaviors.Game theory says that when the costs are so asymmetric, and so much larger, then you will see radically different optimal strategies. For women they have a huge vested interest in maximizing the input the man gives - they are selective in partners, and selective in frequency. This also drives a strange phenomena of "Costly but worthless gifts facilitating courtship". (link: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm...)
The most archaic, currently used, globally useful, non-worthless gift that can be given is not gold, diamonds, cash, or camels - it is footwear. If any commodity is hard-wired into female brains through the selective processes of 10,000+ years of recorded history of civilization it is a candidate such as this.
If your "social pressure" to stop "conspicuous spending" can actually apply to womens footwear, then it has substance. Don't just stop sales, show that the desire has been resolved. It has not been resolved in Europe - this means that the fundamental forces are still extensively at work in that culture. It also means that the Star Trek economy, while worth considering, is still a work of fiction.
Best regards.
Doctor Marcus' Genesis Project seemed to require "Federation Funding" based on her video proposal. The Federation dispatched U.S.S. Reliant to be at the disposal of the project scientists. Anti-matter fuel consumption and ship's supplies for their mission to find a suitable location for the "stage 3" experiments could have been quantified in some manner. Did the Starfleet Corps, of Engineers work for free when they tunneled out the subterranean "office complex" on Regula? They must have been compensated in some manner for their work. Then when it was revealed that David Marcus used the forbidden "proto-matter" in the Genesis matrix in order to solve "certain problems," the stock in that company must have dropped like a stone in the vicinity of a neutron star's gravimetric field!
I think the idea here is that we're quickly approaching a point where automation resolves the need for, for example, garbage men. In our area, the garbage truck rolls up in front of the house, a man flips a lever, and the machine automatically aligns itself, grabs the can, flips it up into the back of the truck and it's done. There's no reason that once we have vehicular automation (Google's driverless cars), why would a driver be required for that? We shouldn't need drivers for streetsweeper vehicles either in that case. Or even things like Pizza Delivery; imagine the car just pulls up and you get a phone call to grab your pizza from the car parked out front.
Add in automation in the form of Tesla's upcoming battery swap stations, and electric vehicles could become driverless even for purposes of refueling. For that matter, it shouldn't be too difficult to automate dough-making, placing toppings, and putting a pizza in the oven... or delivering ingredients to the pizza restaurant for that matter.
In a world where the "bare necessities" jobs are handled autonomously, and even more advanced tasks become automated, unemployment becomes a massive issue. You really only have two choices. Allow welfare to become a normal and significant part of life (after all, there are no more jobs available for untrained labor in this case) or expect a societal collapse.
First: Star Trek is FICTION and we should no more attempt to model an economy on it than on Hansel and Gretel
Second: Rodenberry was politically left-of-center and writing morality tales from his personal point of view ... but his political views did not always align well with stories that would be satisfying to a general audience, fit in the budget for a weekly TV show, and neatly wrap-up in an hour .... and the result is right there before your eyes and ears, though most trekkies never seem to notice.
How many episodes include violations of the upposedly inviolable "PRIME DIRECTIVE"?
Ever notice how often the characters in the stories actually DO refer to THEIR money?
To anybody who is actually paying attention, as opposed to wallowing in an ocean of willing suspension of disbelief, Star Trek is a tidal wave of contradictions of economic ideas, principles, etc. As they had production cost issues, or various episode writers had plot problems to solve, they added more sloppy hacks to more unsound ideas, and then later needed ways to get around the issues the newer hacks had introduced... so they hacked some more. Of course, people who love Trek will then jump through all manner of logical hurdles to justify any of these problems with the fantasy world they love (an act that, itself, echoes the hurdle jumping of Mr. Rodenberry and his team). It's all very understandable (including the transporters that need to malfunction in so many episodes, or the idea that the best crew in Star Fleet keeps getting the flagship destroyed in all the recent films) as long as you remember that it's JUST ENTERTAINMENT packaged and sold to provide spots for marketers to insert TV ads, and in that context it can even be reasonably entertaining.
Yeah except your hunter-gather society doesn't scale up to billions of people. Those economies were contingent on much higher levels of trust which was possible because it was much smaller groups of people where most people knew each other. That theory completely falls over with larger populations.
Some time in the middle of the last century Fuller realized that much of what passes for "work" contributes nothing to the happiness or well being of humans. To quote Fuller: "We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors." In a post scarcity world, there is no need for entire industries - banking and insurance, just to name two obvious ones - that do not directly contribute to putting a roof over your head, food in your stomach or a smile on your face. Fuller guestimated that ~10% of humans could provide for the needs and wants of all the rest at an income equivalent of $50k in 1950s money. He further thought that the desire to stand out from the herd would have people competing for these jobs as only the best of the best would be allowed to perform them.
Banks was a genius.
Of course when the culture did encounter our Earth, amazing how many planet dwellers name their home dirt, there was a vigorous debate over whether to intervene, leave us alone or destroy the entire planet.
I'm not seeing the connecting-gap between ' Amercans no longer fret over iPhones (because we can print one with a 3D printer ) ' and 'We can build a star-ship because we've decoupled interest-in-work from the-need-to-work-to-earn-money-to-survive / acquire the things we wish to have'.
I don't fundamentally understand how a star trek society can exist. If we can all convert energy into material things. Consider the fabel, "these are rich people's problems".. Meaning the stresses that make us work harder are ultimately enslave us to our commitments, _change_ as we get wealthier (individually and socially), but they do not disappear.
You might consider the man that has earned enough money that he can go back-packing in Asia for 10 years.. Could the world function if everybody did so? Assume even that we had robots to build houses / plant our food. SOMETHING is always going to be present that prevents eutopia, even 1,000 years after such a world.
It's too narrow minded to look at today's problems, remove a single variable and say; now sci-fi happens.
-Michael
Maybe they are referring to the West, but in many parts of the world, it would be hard to argue that we are shifting from to a post scarcity society. Even in the US there are millions that do without, so it isn't just a 2nd or 3rd world issue. Of course that is typical of those with plenty, they only see the world as it impacts them instead of how they choices they make impacts the world (or others).
In addition Gene Roddenberry never had to explain how the world got from its present day economics to the future. Even in TOS, there was a lot of inequality and social unrest. Then somehow 300 years later, all of the conflict was resolved. That's the beauty of fiction, you can make things the way you want them to be without having to deal with how they could ever really get that way.
Lowering the overall cost of energy will consequently lower the cost of materials, products, and services proportional to their embodied energy. Materials like elemental aluminum have a material cost almost entirely determined by the energy required to separate it from its common mineral form: bauxite. The cost of the energy required to procure any common material or service largely determines its availability. It is certainly possible that poverty could be largely addressed by lowering the cost of energy, but disagreement remains over how to accomplish this.
There are plenty of factors that contribute to the cost of energy, and it isn't until an energy production system is considered in its entirety that it can be evaluated for its energy cost and return. This 'energy return' (aka EROEI or EROI) is what sets the availability of common materials. Energy costs include storage, transmission, liability, generation backup, material inputs, real estate, fuel, etc. When renewable systems are considered in their entirety, extra costs due to low power density (high material and land costs), remote siting (increased transmission), and intermittency (substantial backup, storage and redundant transmission) all work to diminish the value proposition of the source. Furthermore, the industrial system that produces renewable equipment largely depends upon subsidy from fossil inputs, further raising doubts as to the viability of a large-scale self-perpetuating renewable industrial system.
Currently, global energy consumption is on the order of 17 terawatts, but that only provides on average a little over 2 kW per person. Within the United States, that average is closer to 10 kW. If we raise global energy production to 50 TW by 2050, the global average would still only be around 5 kW, but we should be much farther along in our goal to reach ecological sustainability. It is not the least bit reasonable (or environmentally responsible) to consider trying to produce this much power without adopting a non-carbon system with high power density. This limits our options to technology built to exploit nuclear energy.
Nuclear fission is certainly a viable source, but several major industrial accidents involving the dispersion of highly dangerous and unstable byproducts like Cs137, Sr90, and I131 have undermined the public's confidence. Meanwhile, some researchers are pursuing high risk ventures involving nuclear fusion, hoping to avoid issues pertaining to proliferation and waste. A prudent course would aggressively develop both approaches as a hedge against the enormous economic risks we face.
I don't think renewables can play an important role in combatting poverty or global warming due to their inherent limitations. Rather, our future lies in finding widespread agreement in how we manage fissile materials and their byproducts. We should be opening up domestic rare earth mining and exploring prototypes of energy machines that are already understood to be capable of addressing our projected energy need.
Limitless power or power at no cost, as they create mass from energy or plasma in their replicators.
How can the concept of globalised economy then have any meaning?
Do we know that energy is free and abundant? Is it only the elite, i.e. the Federation that has this privilege?
There is a gathering of people with billboards in the background in one scene , maybe in the movie with the interstellar whales, does that suggest that people are not equal?
Picard often reefers to the quest for personal knowledge and insight as the driving force behind his professional ambitions. Would that also apply to the factory worker getting up at 5:30, or is the only job possible, one in the industry surrounding the military infrastructure?
Like the Spartans, they take their whole family along when going on battle missions. What kind of social consciousness is that? You can choose to work for the federation and your whole family will die with you if you don't do your job right?
It can very well be that Star Trek Earth has become a global totalitarian warrior society where ideals are forced upon people. There might be a Blade Runner like sub culture where money are good and the real people live.
Have I just offended a lot of die hard Trekkies?
Washing machine, dryers, dishwashers, vacuum cleaners, central heating and AC: these are important time and laborsaving devices that were unheard of 100 years ago, but taken for granted today.
In this silent short, ca 1915 produced and distributed by General Electric, a middle class homeowner introduces his neighbor to such new-found conveniences as:
an electric car
a central vacuum cleaning system
an electric washing machine
an electric range and oven
an electric toaster and other small kitchen appliances
an electric sewing machine and iron
electric space heaters
The Home Electrical
Gensets for rural use became available about the same time. Radio is less than ten years off. The Sears kit homes of 1926 are recognizably modern throughout, though the furnace will most likely burn coal not natural gas.
The availability of common materials, goods, and services is largely determined by the proportion and cost of their embodied energy. Lowering the cost of energy is vital to alleviating poverty.
Studies constantly show that people are HIGHLY price/cost motivated and if municipalities simply offered either:
a) Free recycling pickup and paid only garbage pickup
or
b) Financially rewarded recycling pickup
The primary job need would become recycling pickup instead of garbage man. At that point the job is a relatively clean job in which people get to be outside all day collecting everybody's clean, sorted recyclables instead of their pile of stuff that got toss in the trash. I've even heard whole foods is experimenting with some cost effective technology that will extract the liquid from other forms of waste, which would go a long way toward reducing smell issues and separating out the other stuff for reuse.
The price impact here would really need to be minimal overall for the incentive to motivate people and the less sensitive people are to price changes the harder it would be to create such a shift.
"Don't teach a man to fish, feed yourself. He's a grown man. Fishing's not that hard." - Ron Swanson
Why?
If labor becomes unnecessary, why do you believe it should still be required?
If the work of all garbage men could be performed by robots, or nanites, or uplifted dung-beetles, why would it be necessary to make people do that work?
If there were sufficient food, shelter and other basic necessities for everyone, and then some, why do you want to compel people to work for economic gain when that time could be used to pursue their own fulfillment?
I am not saying it is possible, I am just saying if you are making a ST style economy it would resemble the trust and communal well being type economy of the scarcity based systems. I am not even saying that there needs to be scarcity, but in the broad strokes that it will resemble these scarcity based economies.
But I think Star Trek does have scarcity. Everyone has limits, people use up their transporter privileges, their replicated credits, etc. Everyone on Earth cannot have a galaxy class spaceship built for themselves, and even master scientists do not have unlimited resources to conduct their research. I think if we are considering ST real/a possibility we might theorise that technology and specifically the warp drive opened up so many possibilities that they completely blew past their ability to gather resources, creating nearly unlimited scarcity. I could imagine this immensely challenging and resource intensive new frontier opened up by warp drive making Earth and all of its population directly analogues to a small scarcity based hunter and gather tribe.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
See James P. Hogan's 1982 sci-fi novel Voyage from Yesteryear. Or any of my own numerous postings.
Some related ideas by me on moving towards post-scarcity:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
http://www.pdfernhout.net/reco...
http://www.pdfernhout.net/post...
http://www.artificialscarcity....
Not enough time right now to respond to all the great things people are discussing here. Glad to see so many posts on this topic. And the original topic by an investor.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
This story proves my theory that critical thinking is no longer taught and is no longer in use!! This foolish person is completely ignoring the recent, several years, droughts and silly water rationing for odd fish out west and in the mid-west! They also neglect the droughts and waring nations on the African land mass! And the list goes on. Get reality! Watch FOX NEWS and begin to exercise critical thinking again!
You may think this is a dumb example but hear me out.
In the online shooter counter-strike, winning earns you money to buy the guns you use each round. If you find yourself with more money than you need, and a team mate is broke, buying that team mate a weapon improves your, his and the group's chances of survival and success. Similar to the hunter-gather sharing example you mention.
By 2050 the Earth will be cooling down. Global warming is a scam. Climate is cyclical.
Something just hit me, I didn't even realize this.
Klingons = Rage/Anger
Romulans = Uncertainty/Corruption
Vulcans = Logic/Reason
Ferengi = Greed/Lust
I wonder if Gene was using alien civilizations in Star Trek as metaphors for human traits to portray on what could happen if we lean too much on one side of our humanity.
I somehow feel this is so damn obvious.
It was classic idealistic communism.
Of course it would never work at that scale, as few people will have any incentive to excel, and everything slowly falls apart into apathy as most will just sit back and ride on the backs of others. ( until someone comes along and takes over )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
"The key here, to me, is to start thinking about how economics would work when we decouple labor from reward. Does that make a system inherently communist? I don’t think it does."
So you're one of those morons that says the sky is red and, when confronted, reply "everyone is entitled to their opinion."
Loved this too... "for who can claim that a Wall Street banker works more than a teacher?" Though not a Wall Streeter myself I know several, and many if not most do work more than a teacher, a lot more. The term "worked to death" could even be applied to some - http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-11-22/bank-of-america-staff-quizzed-as-coroner-probes-intern-s-death.html
Republic credits are no good out here. I need something more real.
There is only so much beach front property
Exactly right: some resources have always been effectively infinite -- I can breath as rapidly as possible, and never exhaust the supply of air around me -- and some resources, like electrical power, have become more abundant and accessible. But the "finiteness" of other resources is staying the same, or dwindling.
And even though lots of people like to complain about free markets, no one has invented a superior way to allocate finite resources.
Even if we construct off-world habitats that contain a million times more beachfront property than Earth does, it will still be a finite resource.
So, talk of a "post-scarcity economy" is extremely premature.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
The Federation is evil, they stole their shit from Freezing Scientologists and go crazy at baby shapes. On the other hand, if you will, the people on the show are alright ever, even the space station niggers.
Are you trying to imply that members of hunter-gatherer societies were more charitable than members of Western civilization? Even if they were inclined to be more charitable, which is dubious, they didn't have the means to be more charitable. When the hunter-gatherer has eaten some of the scrawny basket of berries she picked that day, there is very little left over to give to her lame and blind grandmother. If I were a disabled person who could choose to live in either a modern Western civilization or a hunter-gatherer society, you can guess which one I'd choose.
A more modern analogy to the village water supply is an electric utility. Private ownership of electric utilities is pretty common. It serves the public well because if I am a private owner of an electric utility (i.e. a shareholder), I will profit more if I insist that management maintains the reliability of transmission systems, expands generating capacity to keep up with demand, and provides high-quality power (as opposed to a supply full of power spikes and brownouts).
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
It probably clarifies to take an extreme example of the scenario. Say, there is no "social safety net" at all (for there to be one, at all, is already contradicting your stance, anyway), and without the "basic income" people would simply starve to death and die.
On a pragmatic level, if we leave ethical presumptions entirely aside, this would cost you money. Firstly, because it is unlikely that large groups of such people will, upon recognizing their impending death, minimize the inconvenience to you by helpfully digging themselves a grave, jumping in, and burying themselves with dirt. More likely, they will violently (and understandably) seek the resources they need to continue to exist. Before you make a pseudo-moral objection to this that it is based upon imposition of force, so would be the "ideal" social norms that would enforce your ability to keep 100% of your "earned" money.
Even assuming people do not react violently in an attempt to sustain themselves in such a scenario, just disposing of all the bodies (something of a self-interest requirement for you to avoid the resultant disease from not doing so) would cost you money.
But, all of this is really secondary. What you providing (a small part of) the costs of a minimum income allows, is for the actual generation of value by such people to resume, from which you ultimately benefit. Your long-term interests are not served by people who will never acquire further money by which to buy your products and services, due to them being dead. Your short-term cost "unlocks" that future value-generation in which money is earned (from others, your hypothetical of an economy-of-you is not actually analogous to reality) and your products bought. It's essentially the same rationale as unemployment benefits, simply not as chaotic and arbitrary in amount and duration. Some people hold the view that in general people would not work, even if able, to improve their economic condition if even a subsistence level of existence were provided "for free". I don't think most people are like that. You, I assume, don't think you are like that. Why do we presume others are?
Did you even read my comment? I am not talking about any of the same things you mention.
I just explained in broad strokes how hunter-gatherer scarcity based "economies" worked, and continue to work today; And how these economies are at the very least the closest thing to the fiction of Star Trek.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
"Our society has become massively automated compared to the middle ages. And we have 25 times the world population now. Yet we still have plenty of jobs; I'd wager that employment as a percentage is much higher today. This seems to contradict the idea that we will ever come to a point that automation will reduce jobs permanently."
See Bob Black: http://www.whywork.org/rethink...
"I don't suggest that most work is salvageable in this way. But then most work isn't worth trying to save. Only a small and diminishing fraction of work serves any useful purpose independent of the defense and reproduction of the work-system and its political and legal appendages. Twenty years ago, Paul and Percival Goodman estimated that just five percent of the work then being done -- presumably the figure, if accurate, is lower now -- would satisfy our minimal needs for food, clothing and shelter. Theirs was only an educated guess but the main point is quite clear: directly or indirectly, most work serves the unproductive purposes of commerce or social control. Right off the bat we can liberate tens of millions of salesmen, soldiers, managers, cops, stockbrokers, clergymen, bankers, lawyers, teachers, landlords, security guards, ad-men and everyone who works for them. There is a snowball effect since every time you idle some bigshot you liberate his flunkies and underlings also. Thus the economy implodes."
On the other hand, we all need to do meaningful things. That includes for many people having time to be a good parent, friend, neighbor, volunteer, or citizen -- something ignored by an emphasis on paid labor. There are at least five major types of economic transaction: subsistence, gift, exchange, panned, and theft; the issue is the balance between them for a particular civilization.
See also E.F. Schumacher' essay "Buddhist Economics" for another take on things:
http://neweconomy.net/publicat...
"The Buddhist point of view takes the function of work to be at least threefold: to give man a chance to utilise and develop his faculties; to enable him to overcome his ego-centredness by joining with other people in a common task; and to bring forth the goods and services needed for a becoming existence. Again, the consequences that flow from this view are endless. To organise work in such a manner that it becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve-racking for the worker would be little short of criminal; it would indicate a greater concern with goods than with people, an evil lack of compassion and a soul-destroying degree of attachment to the most primitive side of this worldly existence. Equally, to strive for leisure as an alternative to work would be considered a complete misunderstanding of one of the basic truths of human existence, namely that work and leisure are complementary parts of the same living process and cannot be separated without destroying the joy of work and the bliss of leisure."
Consider, for example, this point by an AC in another article from today on why engineers go into management:
http://developers.slashdot.org...
"Most of us who love engineering, find it impossible to love our work (extreme time pressure, a 600% workload, often having to abandon/throw away things you love... kinda kills any enthusiasm for the next thing management tells you to do). Management comes as a relief, and you can enjoy coding on your free time."
Consider how true motivation for intellectual tasks comes from a combination of challenge, mastery, and purpose, as Dan Pink says:
"RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
The thing that makes many jobs unpleasant is lack of control over how they are done, lack of resourc
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Modern Western civilization (and based on some definitions, all civilization) is based on an over-abundance of the necessities of life. This invariably leads to hoarding, and monetary systems, and the rich and the poor; Because the economy can afford these inefficiencies; You might even say it needs them.
I might at that. It's hoarding (saving), monetary systems, and the rich and the poor (indicative of private property rights) that allow for economic growth. If these things disappeared, Modern Western civilisation would swiftly transform to a hunter-gatherer society.
To agree with your point to some extent, I think Elysium (the movie set partially in a space habitat) would have been a much better film if Jodi Foster as a villain had made the point that the solar system would be "full" in 1000 years of unchecked growth, and so as a matter of policy, the "unworthy" breeders on Earth had to be kept down and away from Elysium. I'm not saying I'd agree, but it would have provided a justification of her actions on a larger scale -- a justification very similar to that made by many wealthy people today or in years gone by.
"Billionaire club in bid to curb overpopulation"
http://www.thesundaytimes.co.u...
"Scientists have created the ultimate GM crop: contraceptive corn. ... The company, which says it will not grow the maize near other crops, says it plans to launch clinical trials of the corn in a few months."
http://www.theguardian.com/sci...
Seven years later: "New Study Links Genetically Engineered Corn to Infertility"
http://www.organicconsumers.or...
Or maybe I've just watched too much "Star Gate: SG1"? :-)
http://stargate.wikia.com/wiki...
"The Aschen's intentions were eventually uncovered when members of SG-1 unearthed the remains of what used to be a thriving urban civilization on the Volian world, learning that the Aschen's Anti-aging vaccine had the effect of sterilizing the entire population, after which they were wiped out."
Robots, Terrafoam, and contraceptives in the water is probably more reliable though, as Marshall Brain envisioned in "Manna":
http://marshallbrain.com/manna...
"I replied, "We could change it now. Robots are doing all the work. Human beings -- all human beings -- could now be on perpetual vacation. That's what bugs me. If society had been designed for it somehow, we could all be on vacation instead of on welfare. Everyone on the planet could be living in luxury. Instead, they are planning to kill us off. Did you hear that women were trying to drink the water out of the river? Some people think they're putting contraceptives in the water.""
That reflects and aspect of my sig: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity."
It may well be the case that there are always current limits. Perhaps everyone can't have their own private Caribbean island (yet, but maybe someday via SeaSteading or HoloDecks). There may always be some level of competition, including as young men and women struggle to show off for potential mates. But as a society we can shape how those competitive urges are directed to some extent, like James P. Hogan talked about in "Voyage from Yesteryear".
Still, there is a huge difference between people going hungry and being forced to take jobs they do not want versus people who can eat what they want and choose to spend their time how they want (subject to what other people are willing to do together with them). There may be many levels of abundance, but it seems that such a change in people being able to choose how to spend most of their waking hours without a direct need to earn money, such as via basic income, may be the biggest one.
And there may be dark sides to it too, like the potential for addiction, alienation, and isolation that can come with a wealth of material objects and personal space. Related items:
http://europepmc.org/articles/...
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm...
https://www.drfuhrman.com/libr...
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
First, Star Trek meets circa 2000 Earthlings (YouTube): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
On your question, I guess there is a big difference between "wants" and "needs". It's true they shade into each other though, so it is not black and white. It also depends on context and culture.
http://frugalliving.about.com/...
Also, they could easily give that guy his own star ship on a Holodeck (or via some direct brain stimulation that would be even cheaper), and he may never have noticed unless they told him (as with Moriarity in "Ship in a Bottle"). Of course, if the universe is a simulation, we all may be in that situation already:
http://en.memory-alpha.org/wik...
http://www.simulation-argument...
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
It sounds great until you realize that money still retains its meaning, and income distribution is becoming less equally distributed as time goes on, and welfare is not going to even it out. As time progresses there will still be the haves and the have nots.
Will things get better than they are now? Maybe, but that's no guarantee, and they certainly won't be anything like what this article describes during our lifetimes.
Wishful thinking leads to dreams of a distant Utopia...
AC wrote: "A post-scarcity society, where labor becomes decoupled from the product, would result in a society of manically depressed people who are simply to bored to live."
People keep saying variants of this, and there may even be some truth to it for some US Americans whose whole notion of self-esteem has come to be associated with their job or their income. However, in general, being a good parent (or grandparent), a good neighbor, a good friend, a good volunteer, and a good citizen and informed voter can take about as much time as people can put into it. So, I think people who suggest this probably have little experience trying to actively do those sorts of things to any great extent (especially parenting young children).
As another counter-example, young children are able to keep themselves amused with something a s simple as a cardboard box. Also, as yet another counter-example, most people used to have to be farmers (90% 200 years ago), but now that essentially nobody (2%) is a farmer in the US, gardening is the most popular outdoor hobby. Likewise, now what manufacturing jobs are going away (down from about 35% to 15% over the past 50 years), the Maker movement is resurging and people are playing with Arduino and home 3D printers.
Many people can find endless things to do for personal reasons if they want to and are not already beaten down by some oppressive regime (and often even if they were, and have time and support to recuperate). In your own example, you point out older people taking different approaches to free time. If someone is feeling ill and listless amidst abundance and free time, it is more likely due to lack of vitamin D, lack of adequate iodine, lack of Omega 3s, lack of enough fruits and vegetables, lack of enough sleep, lack of enough exercise, lack of enough community, too much junk food, too much of other addictive stuff, etc..
Look at it this way -- as Marshall Sahlin's wrote, hunter/gatherers worked short hours (with little supervision) and were the original "affluent society". So, some of this would just be returning to the better parts of that model.
http://www.eco-action.org/dt/a...
"Reports on hunters and gatherers of the ethnological present-specifically on those in marginal environments suggest a mean of three to five hours per adult worker per day in food production. Hunters keep banker's hours, notably less than modern industrial workers (unionised), who would surely settle for a 21-35 hour week."
Still, it is true that a nation of schooled individuals, taught always to do what they are told and only what they are told, may have trouble making the transition back to freedom and self-direction.
https://www.johntaylorgatto.co...
"I'll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, entrepreneurially based economy of confederated families like the one the Amish have or the Mondragon folk in the Basque region of Spain, any number of self-reliant people can be accommodated usefully, but not in a concentrated command-type economy like our own. Where on earth would they fit?"
And it seems true that challenge, mastery, and purpose are essential to true motivation (see Dan Pink's RSA Animate talk on motivation). The question is, in a world of robots than can do everything humans can and more, will humans still find challenge, mastery and purpose?
"RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
I suggest they will, at the very least by raising children, learning new skills, being social, and making their own fun. However, even Iain Banks in the Culture Series has to invent a "Special Circumstances" group for people who wanted a big
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Despite what I wrote, one thing that would drive people insane is probably robots that did not allow them to do anything, as in this 1947 sci-fi story I first saw mentioned on Slashdot a year or two ago:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...
We already see that with various state institutions that take over various functions (including education), and people complain greatly about it (especially US conservatives). Here is John Talylor Gatto talking about "Schooling as a form of adoption": http://www.the-open-boat.com/G...
One other point, most work in our society has already disassociated labor from the product, given all the complexity of modern supply chains and also that so many people now work in "services" which can be pretty abstract.
Anyway, I'm sure there will remain challenges... Even if just to get around the helpful robots... A gilded cage is still a cage, and a bird in a cage can not escape from potentially deadly fumes..
I don't think the lack of challenge will be an issue anytime in the next 50 years, but in 1000s of years to come, depending on how things go, and with very advanced robotics, it might have to be revisited... Although, if most sentient creatures are robots eventually, then it is perhaps their welfare that might be of most interest in absolute terms. So, lots of uncertainties remain depending what paths we choose or drift into.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
You probably wouldn't know a narcissist if you were looking at one in the mirror.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Y'know, from some POV's, the volcano and the asteroid strikes are just part of the main system, and we are the pollution. A nasty little surface infection. Kind of like the dinosaurs. That last one seems to have been successfully cauterized, though. Just saying. ;)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
>If food, shelter, and energy were in virtually unlimited supply no one would need to work, yes, but more importantly, no one would *want* to.
This is incorrect. If food, shelter and energy were plentiful, people would still work. They would just work on things they wanted to work on. Some people enjoy their work or enjoy aspects of their work. (They do.)
> Where would the goodies come from then? Automation? Okay then, the Machines rule the Federation.
In Star Trek they come from essentially a microwave that spits them out. Using your logic, I have determined that the United States is ruled by microwaves. (It isn't.)
> And no one would ever emerge out of their self-created kingdoms inside holodecks. Just everyone plugged into their fantasies in their holo-simulators, a civilization of lotus-eaters.
And no one would ever emerge out of their self-created kingdoms inside books. So, I say, Mr. Gutenberg, we should burn the infernal press! (We shouldn't.)
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
I really don't understand these comments about the star trek universe of no-money/post-scarcity...
In every one of the series they had stuff like "credits", and several groups in the federation yet outside of star-fleet seemed to be characterized with a significant economic (or underground economy) component.
For example:
Rich dilithium miners on TOS Mudd's women.
The price of Tribbles on TOS Trouble w/ Tribbles.
The market on Farpoint on TNG Pilot
The motivation for the Krieger wave generator on TNG Perspective
Pretty much all of DS9
The closest analogy I can find is the military. People in most military organizations live in somewhat funny-money land (on-base housing, meals, px, etc) there's really no accumulating wealth in such a society, because many of the laws of economics don't fully apply (influence peddling and possessing certain skills are infinitely more valuable than any abstract credits and these commodities are durable wealth, not exchangeable wealth).
My interpretation is that Starfleet is like the military in a fascist society. In a fascist society with a dominating military, members *inside* the military might feel that money doesn't really matter if all their basic needs + minor luxuries are met. However *outside* the military all bets are off, and in star trek, there appear to be many elements of fascism (ultranationalism, primacy of the government over the individual, cultural and racial purity of worlds based on exceptionalism) in the worlds that make up the federation... As example, the Vulcans, Betazoids, Giedons all are portrayed in that vein...
I personally fail to see the utopian connotation of the way this "no-money" philosophy as it is portrayed in Star Trek (even though I'm generally a fan of the ST-universe). It seems to be out of character and something that is far from utopian to me.
Rent-seeking is defined as "spending wealth on political lobbying to increase one's share of existing wealth without creating wealth."
This tells us two things:
1. Rent-seeking happens when government is susceptible to political corruption. (Corrupt governments can reward the non-creation of wealth, but free markets never do.)
2. A democracy or republic with well-informed voters, who have the ability to fire politicians that don't act in the public interest, is less susceptible to rent-seeking than other forms of government.
In anarcho-capitalism (a term coined by libertarian Murray Rothbard), society would operate under a mutually agreed-upon libertarian "legal code which would be generally accepted, and which the courts would pledge themselves to follow." This pact would recognize sovereignty of the individual and the principle of non-aggression.
No system could be more diametrically opposed to feudalism, in which serfs lived in a state of bondage (the "sovereignty of the individual" was nonexistent). Indeed, Rothbard's colleague, fellow libertarian, and Nobel Prize-winner Friedrich Hayek wrote a cautionary book titled "The Road to Serfdom."
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Very insightful! The Culture series is great for exploring these ides and clashes.
And on your water example, there was an episode in Star Trek: Voyager where Neelix is first introduced and he considers water a rare luxury. There is a a funny scene onboard Voyager where he surrounds himself with glasses of water the way we today might surround ourselves with gold and diamonds and i7 cores. But as you said, Neelix did not then drink himself to death, and he went on to find other useful and interesting things to do with his time.
http://en.memory-alpha.org/wik...
See also James P. Hogan's "Voyage From Yesteryear" (VFY) sci-fi novel which has a gift economy in it where people acquire status by being good at something and using it for the public benefit. There is a clash of cultures there (one from old Earth similar to ours today) which includes a scene where some aristrocratic person in the old culture is going on about how fine some new silverware or something is (the old status system in play) when the two people she is trying to impress know such things could be had just for the asking in the new culture (which is powered by fusion energy and automated production lines). I think VFY really addresses the culture shock of the transition, something so brilliant I did not recognize how insightful it was when I first read the novel, thinking instead how silly that the old Earthlings could not get that things have changed and abundance is there for the asking. Sadly, I know see how prescient James P. Hogan was.
http://p2pfoundation.net/Voyag...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V...
http://www.baenebooks.com/chap...
Sadly, the late James P. Hogan's site seems to be down recently:
https://web.archive.org/web/20...
So I'll quote this here at length:
https://web.archive.org/web/20...
-----
An Earth set well into the next century is going through one of its periodical crises politically, and it looks as if this time they might really press the button for the Big One. If it happens, the only chance for our species to survive would be by preserving a sliver of itself elsewhere, which in practical terms means another star, since nothing closer is readily habitable. There isn't time to organize a manned expedition of such scope from scratch. However, a robot exploratory vessel is under construction to make the first crossing to the Centauri system, and it with a crash program it would be possible to modify the designs to carry sets of human genetic data coded electronically. Additionally, a complement of incubator/nanny/tutor robots can be included, able to convert the electronic data back into chemistry and raise/educate the ensuing offspring while others prepare surface habitats and supporting infrastructure, when a habitable world is discovered. By the time we meet the "Chironians," their culture is into its fifth generation.
In the meantime, Earth went through a dodgy period, but managed in the end to muddle through. The fun begins when a generation ship housing a population of thousands arrives to "reclaim" the colony on behalf of the repressive, authoritarian regime that emerged following the crisis period. The Mayflower II brings with it all the tried and tested apparatus for bringing a recalcitrant population to heel: authority, with its power structure and symbolism, to impress; commercial institutions with the promise of wealth and possessions, to tempt and ensnare; a religious presence, to awe and instill duty and obedience; and if all else fails, armed military force to compe
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Indeed. Capitalism existed even in Roman times, probably before.
slivers will solve everything related to work
It means going without eating for days.
Not having a coat when it is cold.
Not having shoes.
Not having clothes.
Not having a place to sleep.
Bajor was a member of the Federation, but was also rebuilding after a catastrophic war.
The way Federation policy had things, they were willing to help, contributing supplies, and general aid.
It was up to the citizens to make use of it. I don't think there was an issue of "repaypent" involved.
First worlders may think we are transitioning to a post-scarcity world, but the third world remains unconvinced, whether they are in SE Asia or Detroit. The question you should ask yourself is whether we are on the path toward "Children of Men" (less the issue of no children for 20 years) or "Star Trek" (less the warp drives).
"There is no god but allah" - well, they got it half right.
No. We choose not to 'fix' these issues, not because we would rather spend money on drone strikes, but because spending money on these issues does not fix them. One does not throw resources blindly down a hole in the hopes that they will do some good.
So people with mental issues don't benefit from showers, a comfy bed, regular food and professional treatment?
People with early stages of breast cancer who can't pay for healthcare doesn't benefit from treatment?
People without healthcare who accidentally get their fingers cut off in a freak accident, don't benefit from having them reattached?
People who are have problems paying for food and heating at the same time, won't benefit from financial aid, or higher minimum wage?
People who can't pay for tuition wouldn't benefit from free public universities?
I think there is a lot of things the working poor would benefit from, and I never said you should throw money blindly.
and with the new health care law i am told i can quit my job and go paint
In hunter-gather based societies, things are different. There is a very limited food supply, and a huge scarcity of pretty much everything, and their economy is therefore a lot different
Perhaps you are getting your data from Thomas Hobbes, in 1651, with the classic "nasty, brutish, and short" view of primitive society. I applaud your willingness to use historical sources, but in this case your source is just plain wrong.
Modern research has shown that many hunter-gather based societies have MORE leisure time on average than many other societies. They have sufficient resources available to permit this, quite the opposite of your assertions regarding "very limited" and "huge scarcity". Rather than being resource poor, they are resource rich, relative to their needs.
The issue comes down to the balance between population and resources. The hunter-gather lifestyle doesn't scale to relatively large populations relative to the available resources.
You might try looking up the work by Sahlins, and by Sackett. Any recent introductory anthropology text will probably discuss this as well.
what do you expect from the clueless?
socialism creates shortages, not prosperity. It is regressive and progress ceases until change is forced from the outside.
It will be more like Star Wars economics.
"I see you've turned a profit with your labors. Thank you for your contribution to The Empire"
There are 2 groups of people you can make fun of on the Internet without fear of attack. The illiterate, and the Amish.
Elected covers a wide range of things. Anglo-Saxon kings and Holy Roman emperors were elected.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
You will get to see how the World will cope when the Fiscal System collapses under the weight of Debt very soon Jythie. Only a matter of time till China and it's "alternative" G-8 (of Currencies) make the U.S. Dollar redundant. Then anyone not their friends will feel the Wrath of China! Then the real heroes will emerge when everybody is starving in the streets. After the Lord did feed the 4,000 and the 5,000 in 2 seperate miracles. YMMV.
I'm currently watching through the DS9 series. The other day I came across an episode, a two-parter, that was sort of shockingly close to reality. If started off with Cisco accidentally going back in time and ending up in our near future (within a few decades). The majority of the population had been moved into walled-ghettos because they didn't know what to do with all of the jobless people, so they hid them all away from the job-having class so as not to have to deal with actual social change.
I was sort of left in awe as the episode came out in the 90s yet felt very much similar to what might end up happening to Occupy Wall Street. They were certainly treated by the government in a *very* similar manner.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
Did you even read my comment? I am not talking about any of the same things you mention.
You said that in "hunter-gather based societies," "They invariably, share and share alike." You also said they are "different" from modern Western civilization, and you talked about " Ownership of resources (like the only water supply for the entire village)".
Things that you talked about were the entire foundation for my post, and your reaction makes me wonder if you even read my comment.
You also described monetary systems as "inefficiencies." Do you really think that bartering, say, a coop full of chickens for a wagon wheel, is more efficient than conducting transactions using money?
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
hunter-gatherer tribal cooperation is no way similar to Western charity. These are completely different things.
And the entire discussion of either is useless. Both Hunter Gather economies and charity have been researched in depth.
And I have no interest in being brought into a discussion about merits of free market capitalism. Which has nothing to do with this article or my comment.
Well I was mostly referring to hoarding, but yes of course. Like any mechanism, money, by the very basic principals of science is not perfectly efficient. It costs resources to create money, which itself is unless. For example. To create a single gold coin, worth X, it costs X+the work involved; Or to create a $20 bill, it costs the work and resources involved, both which needs to replicated on decaying bills. Creating currency, enforcing it, and protecting it always costs resources, and never adds any. But these are all necessary inefficiencies in abundance based economic systems.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
No matter how much we have, I believe at least some people will always want more. Yes, we will have enough for survival (we have that much today), in other words we can support everybody's *needs*, but not their *wants*.
On Star Trek, what prevents everybody from spending their whole lives on Reisa (a resort planet)? The planet wouldn't have enough room. And part of the attraction of Reisa is being waited after, but who would do the waiting if nobody had to work?
People will always want huge houses, their own islands, huge boats, huge starships, their own planets, etc. How do you allocate those limited resources without money?
What can i say, good job, man, you're just a century or so late.
I think there is a reason we distinguish between fiction and non-fiction.
We're not getting closer to that reality we are getting farther, and we'll continue to get farther as long as our population continues to grow exponentially. Our population would have to shrink before this could become a reality
ROTFLMAO @ "Chumpy" -> http://yro.slashdot.org/commen...
(You sure "talk a good game" -> http://games.slashdot.org/comm... but you can't even produce a MERE SCRIPT!, windbag...)
You aren't even on the leve of a "script kiddie", & full of HOT AIR!
You certainly won't reply there in that 2nd link I posted either, as that would remove your downmods to my posts like this one you can't validly disprove or justify your downmod on -> http://games.slashdot.org/comm...
Oh, I suspect that IS the case here (simply logging out of a registered account & trolling by ac is a common troll trick around here OR using alternate registered 'luser' accounts sockpuppets to do the job will also, & Lumpy is LOADED with those & trolling - which doesn't matter: He PROVES he's all talk, no action (or skills, OR brains, lol))
(You're all TALK, & NO action "CHUMPY!)
* :)
(You know it, I know it, & so does anyone reading AND laughing their asses off @ you now... lol!)
APK
P.S.=> Answer the question in the subject-line Lumpy - since you had to "eat your wrods" in the 1st link above flavored with your FOOT IN YOUR MOUTH + the "bitter taste of SELF-defeat", lol...
... apk