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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."
Yes, but in Culture there were still things you could not just have. Like position in Contact or SC. There was kind of bartering involved with things like information also. So, overall, pretty well presented and believable post-scarcity scenario if you ask me. Note that Culture also had basic immortality as inviduals. And most of the "humans" were pretty close to well kept pets. And seemingly the whole society was kind of lost with their search for the meaning of life. Great books, highly recommended.
It's too bad the replicators had to become a writer's tool.
In some episodes, they can pretty much replicated everything and anything. In others, and you can't... because they need to cause conflict/issues/etc to be resolved.
However, if they can transmute elements, or create elements by converting energy to specific atoms, then they should be resolved, yes? And, they CAN do that, because the transporter sends anything and everything everywhere. They can convert the most complex weapon, medical scanner, medicine, electronic device, anything and everything, but apparently the replicators can't do so?
The human body alone has trace elements and complex molecules all over the place.
So, iridium can certainly be created from energy in their time.
However, I agree, something is going to be scarce. How about original, non-copied artwork originals... created by a specific human? That sort of thing.
After that things became scarce and quick. Wanted to be in Star Fleet and be a Captain of a starship, well you worked your ass off. Want your own ship and bypass SF, you were also going to have to work your ass off, and be smart enough to obtain or build your own, much less maintain and pilot one, but it wasn't something the average person could accomplish and obviously the world government wasn't just handing them out for free else we would have been seeing a lot more examples of "Red Neck Yacht Club" in space.
The other thing that they didn't get into but I'm sure was a thing was the right to have children. I'm positive they'd have some sort of licensing requirement before you could have more than say a single child, else the hoods of the world would have been overflowing with feral children.
They used the credit system for trading with other worlds. So there must be some form of currency.
However while it may not be money as we think of it. Not everyone can live in the favorite spots that they may want to live in. How many beach homes and/or mountain top view, are there for the population. Even in Starfleet, Officers get their own quarters, while many enlisted members share bunks. There is still a reward system in place for people who do the smaller supply and high demand job. As well in the trek world. there seems to be people who are doing some rather tough jobs, not because they really want to, but because they feel like they need to.
Now they may not have a currency system, but perhaps a system where your work that you performs allows for a particular quality of life. So a low skill job, such as the equivalent of a fast food worker. Will allow you to have a small 25 square meter studio apartment, with 10 square meter rooms for each child. You would have transportation privileges to go to places you need to go with a modest amount needed to go to places you want to go.
While if you are in charge of a galactic institution where you have a lot of responsibilities then you have the equivalent of a mansion, and access to nearly unlimited transportation, and other privileges.
Such a system while not using cash would require a lot of computation to figure out the status of a person's place in society figuring out in real time what is the current supply and demand for each job, and measuring the correct reward system to entice growth, without causing a bubble of greed to jump to a particular path.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Wow, that article had almost zero content.
First of all, Star Trek did a horrible job of explaining how this society worked, other than Picard's brief explanation in First Contact that people now sought to improve themselves. Not only was it glossed over like this, but there are lots of references to Credits and other forms of money. So trying to figure out how the economy of Star Trek worked is just an exercise in imagination. Admittedly that can be fun, but there's no real canonical answer.
Secondly, the economic system rests upon a much more fundamental difference. Roddenberry believed that in the future, if humanity wanted to go to the stars, they would have to put aside their "petty differences" and work together. Roddenberry worked very hard through all the shows to depict a future in which humans didn't fight with each other, often having arguments with writers like Ronald D. Moore who complained about how hard it was to create drama if people didn't do petty, mean, evil things to each other. Roddenberry insisted. This, by the way, is the main difference between the "new" films and the old ones. In the new Star Trek reboot, young Kirk finds himself in a bar fight a few minutes into the movie. Roddenberry never would have allowed such a depiction of humans behaving like this to each other (Picard, after all, did get mortally injured in a bar fight while he was a cadet, but it was with a Nossican (sp?)).
Roddenberry said that the humans depicted in Star Trek were just fundamentally different than ourselves. They're better than us. Of course a cashless society doesn't make any sense for us as we are right now. However, if you're already willing to imagine a new kind of person that can set aside petty differences and work together, then you've already imagined a person or society that's motivated by self-actualization rather than simple material wants.
On top of that, there are clearly still some limits on resources, energy, raw materials, etc. Nobody's running around in their own Galaxy Class starship. People "steal" shuttlecraft and runabouts... which doesn't make sense if you can have anything you want. It's a lot more likely that everyone has some kind of fixed ration of replicator time/energy, which is way more than enough to support their basic necessities and typical interests, and it's likely that people get together to do grander things, like pooling their resources together to tackle bigger projects, both for interest's sake and because they believe it's the right thing to do. That's probably the best that a post-scarcity society could really achieve, realistically.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
Yes, it was tried, and it worked, in Israel - it was called the Kibbutz (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibbutz).
The Kibbutz, a form of town popular in the twentieth century in Israel, were small towns where all the inhabitants worked together on some shared infrastructure, mostly agricultural (fields, cows, etc.) just like the Star Fleet guys worked together on their ship. Everyone had a role in the Kibbutz just like on the starship Enterprise: One person's role could be to milk the cows, while a second person grows wheat, a third cooks dinner for the first two, and a fourth would take care of the first three's children. No money was changed hand between any of these individuals. The kibbutz also had shared cars, collectively owned houses, etc. This arrangement worked pretty well for a long time, and did not involve any state coersion (unlike in the communist USSR) - people genuinely wanted to be part of their Kibbutz, and if they didn't, they were free to leave.
The Kibbutz lost its popularity as the economy in the rest of Israel improved, and people (rightly) started to feel that perhaps they could have better living conditions by making money outside the Kibbutz, and people started to leave, or worse - started to want to divide the Kibbutz's income unequally among them. At that point, the Kibbutz died. It still exists nominally, but not in spirit.
For as long as communities have existed, there has been evidence of bartering.
This turns out to be untrue. Before the invention of money most systems seem to have been based on a gift economy, not barter. In fact debt, accountancy, and later money, were invented as a way of keeping track of the gift economy.
Barter tends to come into existence as when money collapses, it post-dates, not pre-dates money.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
And most of the "humans" were pretty close to well kept pets.
True, but beside the general altruism of the machine Minds, who were for all intents and purposes akin to gods, they recognised that humanity did sometimes produce geniuses who could strategise and/or solve certain problems in ways that their exacting, methodical & statistical approach could analyse and replicate, but not always come up with on the spot at the same speed. See The Player of Games (I think it was the 1st one I read, great series).
It's too bad the replicators had to become a writer's tool.
It wasn't just the replicators and that's why I don't enjoy Star Trek much. The stories are fine but the writers ignore the internal "rules" of the universe whenever it is convenient for them. Replicators can make whatever you want except when the plot demands that they don't. Transporters have limits except when those limits are inconvenient to the plot. Every problem can be solved by the Particle-Of-The-Month. Known physics like relativity gets completely ignored. Language barriers are hand waved away.
However, I agree, something is going to be scarce. How about original, non-copied artwork originals... created by a specific human? That sort of thing.
Even if you have the ability to produce whatever you want you won't have the ability to produce it in effectively unlimited amounts in meaningfully short time spans. Eliminating scarcity effectively means invoking the powers of an omnipotent diety or granting such power to corporeal beings. Even the closest analogs to a lack of scarcity we have in our society (software) still have scarcity issues. You can reduce scarcity but you cannot eliminate it nor can you practically distribute goods evenly to everyone who wants/needs them.
The only way that I see that you could entirely eliminate the concept of "money" (aka currency) would be for everything that everyone wants to be available to everyone. This is the only way to eliminate the motivation to barter, and I just don't see how you possibly achieve that.
The only way to do that is to expand into space where raw materials and land are no longer scarce and/or reduce the allowable type of goods. (i.e. Noone is allowed to own their own jet). The only other way is for people to voluntarily exit the rat race. I have everything I want with excess money to spare but that's because I don't want much. I'm content with what I have. Sure, I would like my own jet and to be able to take 3 month vacations, but I've decided that I'm comfortable living at a certain amenities level which happens to be considerable less than what I make. Another example would be Bill Gates, he is at the "post scarcity level" and can buy anything he wants and spend approximately 6 million a day and never run out but I would be surprised if he spends even 6 million a year on "stuff". So you don't have to get to complete and total infinite resouces, there are plenty of people in the world that have enough "stuff" and have no desire to have more.
there will always be something that someone has which someone else wants, but can't get on their own
Star Trek and Iain Banks' Culture books would be really boring if that wasn't the case :-) - both are mainly based on the adventures of the minority of society who were not content to sit at home and enjoy their free bread and circuses.
For as long as communities have existed, there has been evidence of bartering. Unless you have infinite resources...
Yet one of the "wonders" of modern society is that we have a "fiat" monetary system that has dropped any pretence of a link between the value of money and essential resources. In the past, people could have starved because a crop failure made food unaffordable. These days, its just as likely for the problem to be that nobody has grown any food because the markets have gone chaotic and dropped the price of food below the cost of production. At times in the recent past, farmers in the West are being paid not to produce food to create artificial scarcity. Oil-producing countries will deliberately reduce their output to prop up the oil price.
For many people, most of their salary goes, not on food, but on paying back the artificially-inflated price of the roof over your head (and much of the other money you spend goes to pay other people's wages so they can pay their rents and mortgages). The only reason housing costs so much is that the prices have been severed from 'what people are willing or able to pay' to 'how much phoney money banks are prepared to lend'.
The other area to look at is software, music and film: in the 21st century the cost of physical production and distribution has become trivial, the only significant, necessary, expense is the human talent - and that work is sufficiently enjoyable that people are prepared to do it for nothing. The open-source software scene is the closest we come to 'post-scarcity' economics, and it doesn't seem to be a total bust. The internet was largely created by government-funded science, education and military establishments (i.e. by people who had food, clothing and housing provided by society so they could work on interesting things) who gave away the software. Early websites were made by volunteers - capitalism's main contribution since then has been continual efforts add artificial scarcity to the internet by introducing proprietary standards and abusing the patent system. Music and film, again: the whole digital rights mess is caused by the old industries trying to create artificial scarcity - film and TV are being pushed 'upmarket' because the low end of the market are happy to watch their peers' cat videos on Youtube.
The problem is always how we could get from here to there, not whether "there" would work. If everybody is provided with food and a place to live so they don't need wages, all your resources are harvested by machines and your machines are made by other machines then it won't cost you anything to build the infrastructure to give everybody food and a place to live etc. Oops. serious bootstrap problem.
Plus, human nature - one problem with Socialism/Communism etc. is that, in the past, if the wealth had really been shared out evenly, it would have been spread rather thinly and the majority of people (at least in the 'first world') would have to put up with a simpler lifestyle, so huge numbers of people have an incentive to game the system and be a bit more equal. Post-scarcity needs to improve the life of the majority, and to provide plenty of opportunities for the remaining psychopaths to become starship captains, order people around and shoot Romulans or join Special Circumstances and go rogue on some primitive planet...
Of course, in the Culture it kind helped that humans were basically being kept as pets by all-powerful AIs, and in Star Trek every citizen of the Federation seemed to be such an absolute paragon of virtue that you wanted to slap them...
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
People in outlying colonies used money, too. In fact, it was really only the Federation's core worlds that didn't, and I'm not even sure how it worked there, either. (How did they decide who was allowed to eat at Sisko's dad's restaurant? How did they decide who got to live in a sweet penthouse overlooking the Golden Gate bridge, and who had to commute to Starfleet Headquarters via transporter from Iowa? How did they allocate holodeck use? You know a significant fraction of the population would want to spend 24/7/365 in there...)
It almost seems like less of a utopian "no money" thing, and more like a European socialist "basic income" kind of deal.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
That's stated but never really supported or fully explored. None of the obvious implications of it seem to really exist in Trek. One glaring example is how a brilliant legacy candidate could not easily get into Starfleet academy on the first try, or why people even bother with Starfleet to begin with.
Want to explore the stars? Just have your own ship and as much of a crew as you want.
Although the "humans are now perfect" theme just made people less interesting, eliminated sources of drama, and just made Trek need to use one dimensional aliens as a crutch to represent interesting human characteristics.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Which characters were those? The ones I remember were military/science/government-approved people who requisitioned one, criminals (or rogue military officers) who stole one, or merchants flying around in a beat up piece of shit. Even for Quark, it was the fulfillment of a life-long dream or something when his rich cousin gave him a [sabotaged] shuttlecraft.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Not really - if anything, we're defining the 'basic necessities' upwards.
In 1800 (to pick an arbitrary date in the past), basic necessities might be a shack with a wood stove and a bland, basic diet. Would that cut it today, in any modern countries? Building safety codes alone would mean it's going to be more expensive, nevermind things like utilities, or the fact that we wouldn't consider that bland diet to be anywhere near healthy/varied enough. What about things like a cellphone, or internet access? You may not need them to stay alive, but you certainly need them to pretty much do anything in today's modern society.
But is it really more expensive, in comparison to how much productivity has gone up? Per Capita GDP, adjusted for inflation, has risen by a factor of 50. This means that despite the increasing amount of stuff we're putting in the 'basic necessities' category, our productivity can much more easily support even that raised level, than we could the much more basic one back in 1800.
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.
Well, no. Not really.
http://money.cnn.com/2015/10/0...
"For the first time ever, the number of people living in extreme poverty is set to fall to below 10% of the global population in 2015, the World Bank said."
Things are better than they've ever been for the most people, ever.
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!