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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."
>> 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.)
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.
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?
Really? I haven't seen anything of the sort to be able to even consider that statement true.
Which statement? The one which only appears in the subject line of your post? I don't see anyone else claiming the problem is solved. To quote the summary: "While we aren't there yet..."
There is a huge segment of the population dedicated and paid to distributing things.
That is the current "solution." Has getting something from one side of the planet to the other ever been easier or quicker?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
"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
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!
>> and technology hasn't changed at all since, has it.
That's my point: France and Venezuela and other countries have money and access to the latest technology, but have still been unable to summon their slacker's utopia.
If you want a counter example, look how much the lives of Chinese citizens have improved since they began to emphasize reward-for-effort models (capitalism) over exist-get-paid models (socialism).
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.
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".
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).
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.
I've seen both sides of the pond. It IS greener over here.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
Well, it could be argued that what it takes is aliens. Humans will probably always have problems with otherness, but aliens are so other that it could easily refocus people to outside earth.
>> The difference with capitalism is that there is no big investor owning the company, doing what he wants and (the most important part) living from your work.
And in the Soviet Union...the party bosses did what? :) Time to re-read "Animal Farm," I think.
>> A cooperative is the best example of people working in those conditions.
As are churches, many charities and other groups where the membership is small and motivated to achieve a common purpose (as typically demonstrated by a large body of volunteers). The model falls apart once applied to government of any size, however...
Why? Luxury cars can parallel-park by themselves already; clearly, the final few meters is the easy part!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Yeah, but until we have some really good robots (seriously, you don't know how smart an idiot is until you try to design a walking robot) they will still have trouble with brining the package up to your door.
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.
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.
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!!!!!!!!!!!
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
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.
And yet given the choice to be a French citizen or a Chinese citizen, I as would a vast majority of people if I can speak for all people in this one area, would still rather be a French citizen. Hell most people would rather be a Venezuelan citizen than a Chinese citizen. Happiness and contentment studies show Venezuela being one of the happiest places in South America despite not being a terribly rich country.
Why do you think that is? The safety net in France is a sure thing. If I get sick I know I can be taken care of. I have more personal freedoms and liberties. I have peace of mind in knowing that which is something that in capitalistic nations you need to spend or save an exorbitant amount of money to guarantee. Hell personal freedoms and liberty, freedom of speech and assembly, a non-corrupt justice system (for the most part...) are things that simply can't be bought on any market that I am aware of. Nobody can afford that in China unless you are politically connected.
In a socialist country you start out 10,000x as wealthy as you would in China by default because of the very popular government programs in place. So China's middle class has unprecedented growth. Cool whatever, I can show you a bunch of penny stocks that have had over 100% growth but they are still risky as hell. I could get rich on them but more than likely I will lose most of my money on them. Some people would rather buy a blue chip stock that tend to be much safer.
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?
Seems like a good idea to me. What happened?
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
You need to understand that there is more to life than work.
Think families, friends, recreation, socialization, art...
As for the people who "need" to have somebody waiting on them hand and foot... I say we don't need those greedy bastards.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
"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.