Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
I think part of the newness of the situation would be the lack of the 'limited resources' thing. It is an extreme that is unlikely to ever take place, it is interesting to ponder how you would run a civilization when resources (raw materials and energy) are effectively unlimited. Right now our hybrid capitalist/socialist economy is more or less the best solution given the situation and human psychology, but change situation that much and we would probably need to find some new way to organize society... crow, we would probably need to scrap and rethink what success criteria to use. Right now it is wealth, society and individuals are generally judged on how much wealth they have/generate and pretty much every bit of domestic and foreign policy circles back to optimizing the economy for maximum GDP or distribution. Take that away and what do we structure around? It would be fascinating to watch.
In all fairness, most homeless in the streets aren't homeless in the streets because of a scarcity of food, energy and shelter. There's more than enough space, more than enough energy, and way more than enough food. The problem is that these things aren't getting to them. Whether that's because society doesn't care about them, or because a fat cat doesn't want to pay to help them out (so that the people blowing through savings to stay warm don't have to), or because the homeless themselves are refusing the help, or ... is another matter. You could suggest that it's still scarcity, but defining scarcity on an individual or even local level is a bit strange given the fairly globally connected world we live in.
A Ferengi without profit is no Ferengi at all.
In line with Star Trek's "Every species except humans has some ludicrously rigid hardcoded trait" style, that is a Ferengi problem; but I suspect that it'd be a major issue for at least some people and some cultures in a hypothetical post-scarcity environment.
In fact, we don't even need to hypothesize: In situations where supply starts to increase, particularly when it increases to the point where everybody who is remotely anybody can have some for pocket change, you virtually always see the creation of additional 'tiers' of artificially scarce versions. The fact that the creator bothers with this is a revenue maximizing move(and so the same incentive wouldn't exist if there were no scarcity generally, and no reason to bother with this 'revenue' nonsense); but the fact that it works... there's the rub. Everyone can have a high quality reproduction of FuzzyFuzzyFungus' masterpeice 'The Hyphae Horror', for the simple cost of printing; but they'll still pay more for the numbered-limited-to-500 edition, more still for print #1 in that edition. Why? All the prints are identical; any you value the one that possesses 'firstness'?
I suspect that people would love to get away from scarcity in whatever areas they feel are out of their grip right now(whether they are super poor and that is food and shelter, middle class and that is healthcare and college, and so on); but, in our perversity, we seem to still crave the exclusive, the unique, the rare, in whatever nonessentials are relevant.