Can Star Trek's World With No Money Work In Real life? (cnn.com)

The economics of the Star Trek universe were discussed at New York Comic Con on Sunday. Paul Krugman was among the panelists who debated whether a world without money could actually work. CNN reports: "Star Trek has dared to 'boldly go where no man has gone before' — including a world without money. 'One of the things that's interesting about Star Trek is that it does try to imagine a post-scarcity economy where there's no money. People don't work for it. People don't work because they have to but because they want to,' said Annalee Newitz, the editor of Gawker's io9 blog. Newitz -- along with Nobel Prize winner and economist Paul Krugman, 'Treknomics' author Manu Saadia, economics professor Brad DeLong, Fusion's Felix Salmon and Star Trek writer Chris Black -- discussed economics through the lens of the Star Trek world at a New York Comic Con panel Sunday."

Comments

No

[kuzb]

The star trek fantasy is exactly that - a fantasy. For as long as communities have existed, there has been evidence of bartering. Unless you have infinite resources, which we don't, there will always be something that someone has which someone else wants, but can't get on their own.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

Just because you don't know any communities that do not have money, doesn't mean there aren't any.

Besides, there is clearly reward in Star Trek in the form of career advances.

Re:No

[jhigh]

I think the poster's point is that whether there is formal currency or not, humans will always barter. Inevitably, this will result in some goods and services, based upon their supply and demand, becoming more valuable than others. This becomes de facto currency.

Re:No

[91degrees]

Yes. Star Trek doesn't seem to quite have that. Iain M Banks' Culture series presented a genuine post-scarcity society. In one of the books there's brief exchange where a character is asked whether someone could have a whole planet if they wanted one. The answer was essentially "I suppose so, but why would you want one?"

Re:No

[Richard_at_work]

No we couldn't, as there is always a scarcity to overcome - we can't reasonably give everyone on the planet million acre estates for example, and we couldn't ensure everyone has the best weather or a sea view.

Re:No

[Feral Nerd]

The star trek fantasy is exactly that - a fantasy. For as long as communities have existed, there has been evidence of bartering. Unless you have infinite resources, which we don't, there will always be something that someone has which someone else wants, but can't get on their own.

Why would an economy without money not work? Just because we and our economic elite are so entrenched in money and free market theories that border on religion that does not automatically mean that other ways of organizing a civilization do not work as well. If you pulled a Roman citizen off the streets of Rome and told him/her that in 2000 year or so people will buy silk (a very expensive luxury back then) with something resembling papyrus money rather than solid gold aurei he/she would have either laughed at you or if they were a kind hearted person offered to escort you to the temple of Apollo so that you might have your lunacy treated by a skilled healer. That same reaction would have remained a constant reaction into the 18th century everywhere on earth except perhaps in parts of China where paper money came into general circulation earlier than elsewhere in the world. Outside of China, except for the mercantile and banking communities in Europe and the Middle East who were familiar with the basic concept of promissory notes and trust based value, the rest of the population would have written you off as a lunatic for talking about paper money. It's all a matter of culture and common consensus about value and how things should work.

Re:No

[king neckbeard]

I doubt that they would have such an issue. Keep in mind that most Western countries currently have sub-replacement birth rates, and women have much greater career and education opportunities in Star Trek, as well as far superior birth control.

Re:No

[silentcoder]

And the core point of Star Trek is to ask what happens when the supply of everything you could demand is infinite ?
Strictly speaking the price of anything with infinite supply is always zero. In fact, it doesn't even have to be infinite - it just has to APPEAR infinite. Nobody can survive without oxygen for more than a few minutes, it's the ultimate requirement. The highest demand any product can ever have... yet none of us pay for it. The SCUBA and Space Travel industries are the sole places where anybody makes a profit out of selling air to breath. Everywhere else it's available for free -because the supply is close enough to infinite that we don't need to charge for it (of course, assuming regulations are kept intact and this remains true...)

This is actually of great interest right now as we have other products which exist right now which we can produce at post-scarcity levels but not INVENT that way. Raising the interesting question of how to reward inventors appropriately when that dichotomy exists ? Intellectual products are foremost on this list. Right now the favored approach is to try and *create* scarcity where it doesn't exist, in order ot allow a market with a price to exist. This artificial scarcity is created by government intervention (in the form of laws like copyright) - and the more easy technology has made the replication, the more draconian the artificial scarcity laws have had to get.
The current path leads to dictatorship (and if you compare copy laws in the west today to what they were like under ACTUAL dictators - we've long surpassed them - the motivation for the laws is very different - but the practical implementation is not).

So what other paths are there ? If everything is post scarcity, perhaps that solves the problem because you don't NEED to pay the authors, after all - they can get everything they need for free. But when only some products are post-scarcity, that creates a conflict between "produces a post-scarcity product" and "needs to eat".

Frankly we haven't got a good answer to how to deal with this yet, only a very BAD answer which politicians are unwilling to question.

Re:No

[roman_mir]

I suggest trying more freedom, not less to allow people to build their own businesses and to be hired by more businesses. To have more businesses there has to be more savings in the system which allows for real investments. What we have today is no savings, huge debt, no way for new businesses to get access to meager savings to attempt building themselves up. We have fake money created on the whim by pseudo government banks, we have fake interest rates, preventing and discouraging savings. We have income and wealth taxes that prevent and reduce savings and prevent business formation. We have government licensing laws that prevent free market capitalism and instead try to maintain a command economy with its monopolies in so many sectors, including utilities, transportation, insurance, health care, education, energy, food, you name it.

What people need is a free market economy - economy free from oppression of the mob itself through impossible to deliver promises of the politicians.

We need freedom more than anything else, otherwise there will be ghettoes and unstoppable crime. For most of human existence we have had oppression, how about freedom for a change?

Red shirts

[OzPeter]

Of course it can work, it just takes a whole bunch of people really wanting to be red shirts rather than space ship captains.

relative wealth

[duckintheface]

There is a difference between "post scarcity' and "no money". Post scarcity means that you have the basic needs of life met with no work requirement. We are quickly approaching the ability in the western world to provide that. There will always be crazy people who will eat every meal on fine china and then throw it away at the end of meal because they can get more at no cost. So that will never work.

People in a post scarcity economy will work because of the joy of working, the joy of being creative and of helping fellow citizens. The joy of designing circuits or the joy of writing poetry. I'm sure there will continue to be monetary reward for those activities that produce something of value which can't be made by machine. And the people who do it will have extra "buying power" to acquire things in excess of the universal income that is provided to everyone else.

Re:relative wealth

[kuzb]

"Post scarcity means that you have the basic needs of life met with no work requirement. We are quickly approaching the ability in the western world to provide that."

No, we really aren't. If anything, basic necessities in the western world are getting more expensive. Just because we have a lot of things doesn't mean people will start giving them away for free.

Re:relative wealth

[fche]

"People in a post scarcity economy will work ..."

That "will" part expresses perhaps an excess of expectation. A post-scarcity economy is in the apprx. "never will" happen category.

Re:relative wealth

[Shadowmist]

No, we really aren't. If anything, basic necessities in the western world are getting more expensive.

And you base this on what? Adjusted for inflation, food is cheaper than it's ever been. Luxury items (for example, smartphones, computers, big screen televisions) are affordable by basically everybody now. 100 years ago, poverty meant you were starving because you couldn't afford to eat.

Today poverty means you have a house, plenty of food, and can afford your own means of transportation (in less urbanized areas, that means owning your own car) and probably a few (though not necessarily many) luxury items. The biggest thing separating poor from rich these days is how expensive your house and/or your car is.

You base it on the fact that the costs of basic necessities is a greater percentage of a working income than it ever has been. 20 years ago, a working man could pay for his rent with one week's salary. Now on the average it costs 2 weeks or more... and that's before you've paid for other necessties such as food, utilities, and car payments and gasoline. The upscale are paying much less of a percentage... but that's only because their grab of the pie has gotten so much larger. Poverty in modern America means that you're skipping behind in health maintenance, and you're not saving for retirement because the alternative is that you and your kids don't eat. And you're more likely to either not have health insurance, or have a plan which fail you when you need it most. There is much less upward mobility than there used to be a generation ago. And while food is cheaper than it used to be... it's of a much more long-term toxic variety for the lower classes who can't afford to shop at boutique grocery stores.

The future isn't Star Trek.... it's Shadowrun.... without the magic

Re:relative wealth

[thinkwaitfast]

All 7+ billion inhabitants of earth would easily fit into Texas, California and Montana with the population density of Seattle. Not running out of room. Also it has been estimated that there arable land in Africa alone could feed all 7+ billion people, so not running out of food either.

Re:Unlimited Energy

[Dr_Barnowl]

I think the resource profile associated with interstellar travel is the scarcity economy of Trek.

In TOS : dilithium was a scarcity commodity.

In TNG : probably anti-matter and Starfleet Academy graduates are the limiting factors. Honestly, how many of the comfy happy people on Earth are going to want to go to the dangerous outer space? (Creating anti-matter is incredibly expensive for us now ; even with significant improvements it's efficiency level will never be very good).

The energy requirements for a comfortable life on Earth are minuscule next to those required for interstellar travel. They don't worry about feeding the population ; they do worry about being able to build and crew enough ships to stand up against their enemies.

Once you have replicators and big fusion reactors, you can re-process all the nasty toxic waste on Earth, solve everyone's hunger problems, even have room for fancy premium goods and services like Château Picard and Sisko's Restaurant. Fusion reactors are portrayed as being insufficient to power faster than light travel though - the fuel for starships presumably represents a vast amount of energy generation capacity that is too bulky for the starship to carry.

The only goods worth trading (both locally and over interstellar distances) would be cultural curiosities like Yamok sauce and various forms of unobtanium (of which there are rather more in the Trek universe than in the real world, mostly for their use as MacGuffins and other plot devices).