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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."
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.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
Yes, it can.
You have shared resources communities already in the world. It requires a change of mind to reduce the selfish temptations, but it is possible.
Please notice that lack of money doesn't mean lack of rules to access the resources, so if you abuse, you will still be punished.
Higuita
Star Trek couldn't even get rid of the concept of money in the show. This led to various inconsistencies throughout the various Star Trek shows and movies, even within the Federation. See http://en.memory-alpha.wikia.c...
Short answer, not really. Longer answer you'll always need some means to control supply, even if only for extreme luxury items.
Consider this scenario: a couple of centuries from now the solar system is well developed, we have gargantuan manufactories orbiting the sun, being fed near-limitless amounts of raw material by automated harvesting operations working through asteroids and comets. Technologically and economically it would be quite feasible to build and supply an entire 20th-century ocean liner for every one of the earth's 18 billion odd inhabitants.
Is it desirable to do so? Of course not. So for items with a vast physical, environmental or sociological footprint (like nuclear warheads) there will always be a cost price. While I'd expect things like one car per person to become almost free, along with ubiquitous healthcare and good spacious housing, economic competition aka capitalism will always have a place. The targets for the competition will simply become more grandiose.
Sure it could work, as long as you have a box that can turn energy into any physical good you like. Since there is only one real commodity, the system doesn't have to deal with different preferences, even time preferences. (They did have energy usage rations). Without that equalizer, different preferences and relative scarcity will produce 'money' in one form or another.
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Of course it can work, it just takes a whole bunch of people really wanting to be red shirts rather than space ship captains.
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Money of some kind will always be there as long as people enjoy exchange things, and assign values to the things they exchange.
Before the conception of money, people simply exchanged one thing for another. You can argue that the things they exchanged were money. If you use electronic payment to obtain physical goods, you are effectively exchanging information for something physical. However I think you would definitely agree that you definitely exchanged money. The point is that the money as a concept evolves over time.
I think there is a question that those people who propose moneyless society need to ask themselves. The question is whether they are willing to give away their favourite childhood toy away for free, or they want something back in exchange. The toy itself may not have any value in other people's opinion. However for the toy's owner, it may have some values because of the associated memories. I suppose this is why sometimes celebrities' possession can attract large amounts of money at auctions.
The money is only there to help the process of exchanging things. It can have many different forms. Ultimately I think as long as people need something to help them to exchange things, that thing will be called "money".
1. Star Trek was a TV show, where wasting valuable time on inconsequential things isn't done. They did not need to explain how they got stuff, they just got it. Plus, pocket on the uniforms would have ruined the look.
2. Even so, there was still evidence of some sort of medium of exchange and way to establish value. People did thing that produced valuable items, and had things that did not appear to be what they made, which implies there would be some way to establish value and determine what is a worthwhile rate of exchange for other items.
3. Academics write papers because that is the currency the value...
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Quite dismaying.
Hint: it's happening under everyone's nose while people bitch about obsolete ideologies...
Star Trek portrayed a very optimistic, indeed idealistic future. As with all such things, it's not entirely realistic.
Society without money? Um...no. Not unless you can make a fundamental change to human nature, by eliminating greed.
Look at the West now: no one is poor, not by any reasonable definition of the word. Barring drug addiction or mental illness, everyone has enough to eat, a roof over their heads, a mobile telephone, a television, and likely even a car. This would have counted as wealth 200 years ago.
The capitalist saying is very true: "a rising tide floats all boats". The problem is that no one wants to own the little boats. You can raise the bar as far as you like, but there will still be limited resources. Not everyone can have their own private island. Not everyone can be sole owner of a starship. Whatever goods count as rare, people will lust after them, and count themselves poor for not having them.
As long as this remains part of human nature, we will need money, or something equivalent.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
The Ferengi still used it... and the Federation used it to trade with the Ferengi.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
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.
....because human greed is infinite, whereas resources are not.
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.
That's an interesting thought experiment but since we do not and never will live in such a post-scarcity society it is ultimately meaningless. Some form of money is going to be a necessity for the foreseeable future. There simply is no scenario whereby we would have access to every possible resource we would need without some for of currency making the economy work. Star Trek is a fantasy that relies on fictional technology and unlimited harnessable energy sources. Since we do not have those things in the real world, such conjecture is ultimately academic.
People don't work for it. People don't work because they have to but because they want to
There are relatively few people who work because they want to. Most people are lazy, self indulgent and would happily sit on their ass doing nothing if there wasn't a fear of poverty driving them.
in the 1930 he said: "Thus for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem - how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well."
he was so innocent! the human appetite is infinite and we will consume everything we can: there is no limit, so more we produce more we consume and there is no room for downshifting
so it's obvious that money will never disappear
If you change basic human nature
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.
Without a financial obligation, who are you going to find that is still willing to do the dirty jobs that nobody wants to do? Sure, you can find people who will volunteer to become starship captains, but what about somebody to clean up a messy public bathroom? Or work outside in freezing temperatures doing some kind of thankless manual labour job? What about extracting raw materials from mines?
There are many unpleasant but necessary jobs in the world and these will likely persist into the future. They won't all be automated. Almost nobody would and the rare few that will would number too few to sustain society.You would just end up with something like the soviet union but even worse.
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.
"Most people are lazy, self indulgent and would happily sit on their ass doing nothing if there wasn't a fear of poverty driving them." Presuming were were post-scarcity this really wouldn't be a problem. It isn't like the good workers would be dragging these folks along. If anything it would free up the good workers to do greater things because they wouldn't have to burden themselves with worrying with social or familial support.
Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra. Betteridge, sighing at a headline.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
That's an interesting thought experiment but since we do not and never will live in such a post-scarcity society it is ultimately meaningless. Some form of money is going to be a necessity for the foreseeable future. There simply is no scenario whereby we would have access to every possible resource we would need without some for of currency making the economy work.
There is a difference between "need" and "want". It is conceivable that what we need will be available freely - food, lodging, etc. - but if people want more than what they got, the troubles begin (and scarcity will return). For example, imagine one random member of the Star Ship enterprise. He gets a room, food, entertainment, security - all for free. But what if one day he decides he wants his quarters to be twice the size he now has? *that* resource is scarce. What if one day he decides he wants to replicate 10 tons of gold, just because he likes gold, but the replicator capacity is limited? What if one day he wants other Enterprise employees to become his servants - but these people have better things to do? If he wants any of that, he will need money (or some futuristic equivalent). The only solution is for people to stop wanting what they don't have. It seems the Star Trek guys got this solved - I never saw anyone on this series wanting anything...
Really?
I'm far from a Trekkie but from what I remember of watching it and the various spin-off series when I was a kid, money did indeed exist.
The Ferengi, for example. Profit was their main aim.
End of argument.
Sure, we can argue canons and spin-offs and all kinds of junk but imagining something to be "free" because of some (mis-remembered) imaginary perfect world just isn't going to work in the real world.
The Deep Space Nine episode "In the Cards" has a wonderful bit of dialog between Jake and Nog. Jake wants to give a certain baseball to his father, and needs money from Nog to buy it. Nog says "Your society is so advanced that you don't need money." Jake: "Right." Nog: "Then you don't need mine!" (I only saw this episode that once, when first broadcast, but I think that's close enough.) The whole sequence of bartered exchanges is pretty hilarious, especially when they take advantage of Weyoun's hypochondria, but this comment on the absurdity of having no money is just perfect.
people will lust after them
Except people won't lust after these things in a post-scarcity economy because the primary information channels won't be saturated with messages instructing us to lust after these things.
Human nature is one thing, but what you see today isn't human nature, it's the activity of a caged animal. The idea that we must be so caged because of our nature is one of the great lies of our civilization.
There was a scarcity of land/space/freedom on the core worlds pushing people to gather resources and colonize.
Starfleet regulated that colonization so political capital was needed as well.
The core tech was replicators, it depicted places where they were in scarce supply with no good explanations why you can not easily replicate more replicators.
There was a lot of trade the unreplicatable latinum as a currency.
The human universe seems more like if you were ok with federation rules on earth you were assured a roof, food, clothing. Replicated food was looked down upon, the fast food of the universe. With picard having a family estate/vineyard. But many episodes dealt with people going out to colonize to get away from federation control.
No sir I dont like it.
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.
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
Sure bartering has existed forever. But money is not bartering - it is a quite different thing entirely. Money is just a man-made asset that we arbitrarily produce in quantities that are meant to maintain its price relative to a bunch of real assets (the inflation measurement). It is quite incredible that we can create real material prosperity or real starvation based on how much of this arbitrary asset we produce. It really does make this current 'great recession' just seem like the height of human communal stupidity. We did not run out of all the labour and resources that perpetuated the boom years. Yet now we can barely build basic infrastructure despite having high unemployment, exceptional technological abilities, and low commodity prices.
The root cause of all this is that neo-liberal economics put the control of the production of money into the hands of the financial system. The obvious outcome of this was that the financial system has been trying to create asset bubbles anywhere it possibly can since this happened. Now, in defence of neo-liberal economics, it is not clear that the previous scheme, where you just had some guy with an arts degree who was good at winning elections, controlling the money supply was much better. What is clear is that we need a better scheme of allocating resources in the economy than pieces of paper who's value only exists in our minds. That probably doesn't look like the star-trek economy, but surely what we have now is not the best we can do.
Post-scarcity huh? Well there's always scarcity - it just depends on what scale of stuff you're talking about. Generally "post-scarcity" is used to refer to things like food, housing, medical care - you know, the basic needs. What if each person wanted their own star ship? It's not like someone pushes a button and they come into existence. What if everyone wants their own planet? Obviously there are limits and there will always be scarcity.
One thing that all the Star Treks make clear is scarce is talent and skill. Not everyone can do what Geordi does. What about people like Deanna Troi who can sense others' feelings and emotions? How many people can do that? So even if everyone had their own star ship, why would anyone else want to be crew members on them to make them functional? The people on the Enterpises are all highly motivated because they're the best of the best on the best starship probing the outermost reaches of the galaxy. Yeah, that sounds fun. What about the people that operate trash frigates? What's their motivation for learning and bettering themselves and climbing the ladder of command?
Really, it all falls apart very quickly when one begins to think about it.
Better known as 318230.
medicare for all and or basic income are needed. Need to get rid of the profit in health care as well as the overhead from keeping up to days system.
Now as more and more people are automated out of work we will need some kind of basic income / maybe look at moving full time to say 32-30 hours a week + maybe even added X2 OT starting at 45-50 hours a week with the salary exempt min going to like 90-100K + varying COL some places like the bay area can be like $120K-$150K under that system.
no more student loans / make them all income based (with no interest / very low interest / interest does not apply to people with incomes under X) also maybe make the schools have to pay some of short fall from income based system to make it so that they don't have a unlimited tap of funds like they do today from loans.
so say when some has a 100K loan for a 4-6 year art history degree and is working at mc'd and paying $0 mo on the loan the school takes a big hit.
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.
"not by any reasonable definition of the word"
Maybe your own blindfold hid that line.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
We already have societies where money isn't used or at least isn't that useful, such as a submarine on a long deployment, which just happens to be the model upon which Star Trek starships was founded.
Outside of starships, the Federation still had to deal in gold-pressed latinum with Quark's establishment. (Whether that was a "site license" or a per-person allowance was never made clear, but we can conclude from the in-story characterizations that Quark wasn't donating out of the goodness of his heart.)
So Star Trek really isn't too far off from today's military environment.
That one wasn't entirely true.
Yes it is entirely true that the writers in the Star Trek universe completely ignore the effects of relativity. If you believe otherwise then you do not adequately understand the effects of relativity.
Roddenberry at the very least seriously considered the FTL problem and came up with a novel solution, the warp drive.
Relativity and its effects do not go away even if you have the magical warp drive. Relativity is not just about FTL and a warp drive does not make it go away. Relativity matters any time you are moving at a substantial fraction of light speed (which they do routinely in the show) as well as any time you are in a strong gravitational field (which also happens routinely in the show). The effects of this with respect to time, mass, etc are completely ignored in the show.
And now phycisists actually think it could be done
Find me one credible physicist who is making this claim. The most they will say if they are honest is that it hasn't been proven to be impossible, which is true. Our knowledge of physics is insufficient to credibly make the claim that a warp drive or anything remotely like it is possible at this time. We have a few unproven notions about how it might be possible given our current models but nothing remotely close to well formed theories.
Interestingly Alcubierre, the scientist who proved it's theoretically possible
Coming up with a mathematical model is NOT the same as proving something to be theoretically possible. He didn't prove warp drives to be possible - he merely proved that under Einstein's theory of relativity it is not conclusively impossible given our current understanding of the some of physics involved. HUGE difference.
Of all the inventions of Star Trek, a political or economic system that successfully controls human greed seems the most futuristic.
As the title suggests, any society and it's economy are one in the same. Two words, same concept. To truly understand this, you must first be willing to see what drives people together; what makes us want to be around others.
It's greed.
Alone we can survive, more or less. Depending on where, and one's ability, that "Survive" can range from "just barely" to "thrive", yet even in that "thrive" category,we still want more stuff. Better shelter, better food, better tools, more leisurely time, ect...It's this greed which drives us to work with others, to share in the responsibility of surviving so that we might both be able to "get more stuff".
Take away this need, and you take away society. In a truly post-scarcity environment, people wind up being hermits with little to no social interaction. Of course, that's a moot point as there will never be a post-scarcity environment.
Which is not to say anything negative about start trek, mind you. In fact, it's flawed concept of a economy-free society is what first got me thinking about this stuff, and underpinned my explorations of economics and society for decades to come.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
As imagined by Roddenberry, Star Trek is a more or less communist utopia.
As other writers have shown, there's lots of nasty things going on under the hood however, so that the "feel good equality" of society can continue.
In terms of "wealth" as the source of power, we have a great equalizer in Star Trek.
The replicator. You can basically create anything you would want to eat or drink, and any tool you could possibly want to use.
Basically any society that can build such things renders wealth more or less meaningless.
We're nowhere even CLOSE to this.
And, as I said, the society of The Federation has its own issues. And there are still people who are (or are trying to become) "more equal".
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
There was no mention, that I saw, in TFA about the fact that in the Star Trek Universe (at least in the Federation) energy was essentially free and unlimited. Add to that replicators and everyone's material needs are met.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
A prime example is a family. Within most families, you don't pay money to get something done. The father doesn't pay the wife, they share the money. The kids don't get paid per se (though they may or may not get an allowance), but they get fed.
It can even work reasonably well for a small community of 20 people. But once you hit 100 people, you start having serious problems and it doesn't work. You need money.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Consider Burning Man, a large temporary community that functions without money or barter.
I recall that it was canon that certain things like dilithium crystals and antimatter fuel could not be replicated (at least, not on the kind of scale that would be necessary to power a starship).
They also couldn't replicate gold-pressed latinum. They needed a currency for cultures that were more capitalist, and it had to be one that had natural scarcity.
Star Fleet is a conceptual futuristic military space navy. This means people are provided uniforms, living quarters, meal rations, and a function to perform. If that's the kind of thing you like it's available here on planet Earth today at your nearest military recruiting station (or the FFL if your country has none such.)
However, that's not how any of the rest of the Star Trek universe works. The Ferengi are notorious "horse" traders and they sell for gold-pressed latinum. That's a currency, and it's only one of the many currencies. Even in the original series there were traders (Harry Mudd) and crimes and criminals and evil doctors who experiment on people and fame and fortune and money.
Those who call Star Trek a utopia are conflating "not much need for cahs aboard a naval vessel" with the rest of the universe -- where it is very much in need!
Ehud
Look at the West now: no one is poor, not by any reasonable definition of the word. Barring drug addiction or mental illness, everyone has enough to eat, a roof over their heads, a mobile telephone, a television, and likely even a car. This would have counted as wealth 200 years ago.
The capitalist saying is very true: "a rising tide floats all boats". The problem is that no one wants to own the little boats.
Is this what they're teaching people on the Google campuses now? But then when I look closer, Bradley, this is you:
I am a professor of computer science at the University of Applied Sciences, Northwest Switzerland. If you are one of my students, you may find some of the links on the right to be of interest.
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Life, the universe, and everything
My favorite hobbies are programming and math, when I can find the time for them. I am currently working on a new ERP system for my wife's whisky business. You can also find links to a couple of other projects on my software page.
I am also interested in political issues. Politics is too often driven by special interest groups, while the rest of us just stand by and watch the train wreck happen. We - the ordinary citizens - need to be involved. I am interested in three main areas:
Technology. Too many "green" and "eco" groups do not understand technology. They oppose everything and offer no alternatives - apparently they want to go back to squatting in caves. Technology and cheap energy are the foundation of civilization!
Freedom. The free exchange of information is essential to a free society. Freedom of expression is a basic human right. Yet every western country has laws that enforce censorship and restrict your right to express your opinions.
Africa. Send food, and destroy the livelihood of local farmers. Send money, and watch it be sucked up by corrupt governments. "for God's sake, please just stop!" Africa does not need aid. Africa needs long-term projects that help people help themselves.
I see that you ALREADY live in the Gene Roddenberry post-scarcity future and act as if you do. You give resources freely and share information, though you're making assumptions like 'African farmers need to be able to compete for money on the global marketplace' which seems a weird assumption in this context. I'm just going to suggest that from where you're standing (not even IN THE WEST if you take the West to mean the USA. You're in Switzerland! We'd be doing pretty good too if we were in freaking Switzerland!), you should not be saying things like 'no one is poor, everyone has enough to eat, a roof over their heads' etc.
Go on with your nerd self, you're beautiful. But capitalism is not worthy of your faith, and I gotta say, you being in Switzerland and relatively wealthy as a college professor and not in economically challenged areas of the USA, YOU don't get to say nobody is poor.
Precisely. Economies of scale can do amazing things, and when you include massive automation and robotics into that equation: technology and the industrial efficiency of the future can and will lead to a situation where a company employing like six people could EASILY replace the whole market providing food to the world. You'd have a bunch of hardworking AIs and algorithms, roboticized farms (that might not resemble Big Agra much) and simply incalculable output.
The question then becomes, do you make people compete for this oversupply of food by proving their willingness to fight and defeat each other and thus their worthiness to be fed? We could call it 'Hunger Games, the society'.
> Wow, can I have... uh... your blindfold?
Is this the voice of experience or are you just some idiot bleeding heart born with a silver spoon in his mouth?
As the voice of actual experience, I agree with the OP. Material want is not the problem with our "urban poor". Security is. All of those scary gun statistics are driven by people for whom the meager welfare state is insufficient. They have some ambition. They want more and they see crime as the way to get it.
In a strange, perverse, warped way the drug criminals are showing that they are worth something to society. Their energy is just misdirected.
Fixating on "self improvement" would help but nobody in the really poor neighborhoods really buys that.
How much is "enough" and who decides?
That's a point of contention across the board.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
> Except people won't lust after these things in a post-scarcity economy because the primary information channels won't be saturated with messages instructing us to lust after these things.
Why not? Who is going to stop them? Are you saying that the Federation is some sort of communist nightmare with information tightly controlled so that ideas contrary to the agenda of the ruling party is never seen.
That is the sort of thing that explains offworld colonies and fleeing to the Cardassian frontier.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Money's article shows a picture of TOS Kirk and Spock. Back in those days the Federation was clearly STILL using money as Spock was about to give Kirk a figure for the cost of their training down to the tenth-credit before Kirk stopped him, when he was replying to Kirk's rhetorical question.
The money thing was still an issue as Roddenberry was a diehard capitalist back in the day, a firm believer in Big Buisness, when David Gerrold was firmly told that his idea of a corporation for the Big Bad in "Trouble With Tribbles" was a no-go. It's really hard to imagine how the Federation of TOS could have evolved into the self-righteous Utopia of Picard's time, other than admitting it's all due to a different generation of authors..
Holodecks.
It's already a concern: we can make fantasy objects of desire with superhuman qualities, and if the realism of these things increases way beyond what real humans can offer, nobody's gonna be breeding. Male and female, we'll all be in the holodeck and extremely pleased ;)
HA!
I wish I had mod point to mod you funny.
I may just have to steal that line...
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
1) Functional, humanlike, scalable AI (e.g. the Doctor)
2) Unlimited power (i.e. matter/anitmatter generators)
3) Instant replication of virtually any legal object (replicators which can produce replicators at the behest of AIs or humans)
4) Holodecks as an outlet for all unacceptable behaviors.
5) Inexpensive FTL travel for a myriad of colonies which serves as an outlet for those who want to live under governments like constitutional monarchies and/or anarcho-syndicalist collectives.
So, TNG would have worked. TOS, not as well, or maybe not at all.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Yes, so in the Culture, it wasn't about having money, it was just about asking the Minds to do what you want.
Want a diamond, big as your fist? The Mind will do it for you if it has the resources; or schedule to make it for you later when it has collected them.
Want to make a big cable car system, no problem; it will make it for you. etc.
But obviously some things you might ask for the Mind it couldn't do for ethical or resource issues; and then the Mind would presumably not do it.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"An unlimited source of magical power would as well. Just as feasible if you don't mind solving the problem with fantasy.
saved in the 23rd century by not having to touch their communicators and say "Spock here. Oh, and you're on speaker. Bones, Captain, and two red shirts are here with me." or "Hold on I have to take this..." and then duck behind a foam rock for privacy.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Even the Star Trek world is forced to admit that scarcities exist. For example, if they truly were "post scarcity", why would the Enterprise have to negotiate for vaccine on Ligon II?
So let's do away with this "post scarcity" nonsense.
For all intents and purposes, we already live in a "post scarcity" world. Even homeless bums and mentally ill in the first world do not starve to death. I spend less than 30 minutes per day earning the food I eat - everything else pays for other stuff. And yet, scarcities exist, and money-based economy is still chugging away. I want the latest indie song. My clients need me to write a program to help solve a regulatory issue. Etc.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
I have always thought about it like this: Most of the citizens are provided energy credits, which they can use to replicate most mass produced items and food they would need. Energy is obviously very cheap in the Star Trek Universe but not free. I would assume that based on your contributions to society you might get extra energy credits which could translate into more transporter use to visit other cities and additional replicator use.
However what I imagine would happen and we are seeing a little of this today with the Maker movement and 3d printers, is that the world would return to more of a cottage industry. People Like Sisko's father who make real food non replicated and provide a fun atmosphere could charge in currency for their products. Weather that is latinum or energy credits I am not sure. Anything that is hand made with care and passion would be worth insane amounts of currency. This is probably what solves the real estate issue in Star Trek as well. Land is finite and there has to be some way to decide who gets to live in the nice neighborhoods or the mansions overlooking the water. I think there is probably a bustling economy in the Federation utilizing energy credits as mentioned in a few episodes. However I think scarcity is a thing of the past and anything can be had by anyone. If you want a licensed replicated Gibson guitar no problem, however if you want a hand made one with intrinsic value that is more than the sum of its molecules, that will cost you extra. I think this encourages people to work in their passion without having to do something they hate to pay the bills.
If all the bills were covered just for being a citizen, then you could focus on your passion, and that might actually earn you a very good living, after all its easy to strive for perfection on a project you are passionate about.
But obviously some things you might ask for the Mind it couldn't do for ethical or resource issues; and then the Mind would presumably not do it.
Sure, but if you were crafty enough you could go take some LPs (limited personalities, that is) off to an asteroid field someplace and do whatever you wanted.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
If everyone is handed a free replicator, and power is free, I suppose you wouldn't need money. I suppose you could get someone to make you a replicator with their replicator. I guess I didn't spend enough time watching Star Trek, but how do you get a house?
-- sudon't
Air-ride Equipped
prostitution
"Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs," I said. "we have a protractor"
NO it will NOT work. This is why it was called a science FICTION show. It's the reason why communism/socialism/collectivism does not work. When you reach your "goal" of production, you stop working. When you have the government guaranteeing your income, you don't care about quality or quantity. In the free market capitalism (not the crony capitalism we have in the USA), those that work harder, produce more, are rewarded more. You would have thought, the plight of the first "pilgrims" that came here who ALMOST DIED would have been enough. They tried the collective idea of their group, and it FAILED! You had a few that worked, and a bunch more that did nothing. Once they released the power of the free market, it took off. But, considering we have 2 generations of children who have been brainwashed that private sector is bad, government is good, it's going to take a while to reverse that trend. Socialist are "good intentions" people. Just because their ideas failed, we had "good intentions". Capitalist, true conservatives, don't work that way. Most are "realist" who understand that good intentions won't put food on the table. More examples are education. We spend, in the USA, some of the most money per student, but, they come out dumber than they went in. We have college students, getting degrees in subjects, THAT HAVE NO INCOME POTENTIAL, coming out of college so in debt, they will never hope to pay it off. Welfare, the "war on poverty", going on since I was 5 years old, has the same level of poverty, or higher, with trillions spent. We give handout after handout without getting them OFF OF welfare, making them "slaves" once again. And, after each one of these programs fails, the cry across the land from DC is always, MORE MONEY. We are now at least 18-20 TRILLION in debt, several billion in unfunded liabilities, and the government never once kills a welfare program, because they use the "it's for the children" line.
Possibly, yes, however...
Only with the advent of a game-changing technology that somehow provides for functionally unlimited energy, or at least insofar as the sum total of both the average persons' needs, as well as the average of all of humanity's needs, are concerned.
With functionally unlimited energy available for both the individual and society would come associated revolutions in the ability to readily meet all of our other needs on both scales, from housing to food and transport and everything else. Most likely - at least by that point in our technological development, assuming other fields keep pace - far fewer human "work hours" would be needed per-capita to meet everyone's needs, and thus it becomes much more possible to move to a society that does not revolve around the exchange of human effort for needed - much less basic - goods and services.
The invention of matter-to-energy and energy-to-matter conversion devices would cement such a money-less society as a real possibility, but without such things - and probably even with them - the trade-off is likely going to be the acceptance of a government with a high level of central planning authority and all the woes that accompany people being given authority over other people.
"Inveniemus Viam Aut Faciemus" 'We will find a way... Or we will make one!' --Hannibal of Carthage
Generally speaking, no, people do not want to work.
Glad I could clear that up.
I get why some people might 'work' for no money - Ability to be on a Starship, for example. However, in the Star Trek universe we also see people working as waiters etc. Why would they do those jobs, as opposed to just moving into a holodeck?
Born in 1921, Roddenberry's lower middle class childhood must have made him deeply aware of the importance of money and jobs and the hardships that arose from their absence. In inventing a new world order for StarTrek, no doubt he wanted to turn our attention away from such age old Earth-based strife to instead focus upward and outward... to be starry eyed.
Likewise, the timing of the StarTrek series made it a child of the 1960's. It aired only 3 years after the death of Kennedy's Camelot. And it co-ocurred with major reforms like Johnson's Great Society (and Vietnam) and King's civil marches. And only 20 years had passed since the global destabilization that was WWII (and the counter culture engendered by Kerouac and Ginsburg). Hopeful change was in the air.
Repeatedly, StarTrek's episodes dealt with many of the 'social rethink' topics that dominated the 60's (racism, the Vietnam War, democracy and constitutionalism, Nazism and its postwar, totalarianism, rule of law, NASA's race to the Moon, etc). Short term thinking and corporatism had yet to overwhelm America's world view. Thus in 'looking beyond' to seek 'a better world' sought by so many in that post WWII generation, money and the status quo were very much something to rise above.
Thus it was natural for the man and his fantasy world to put worldly travails like money and the trials of a job far behind them. But as to the viability of StarTrek's post-scarcity economic model... that's a fantasy of another color entirely.
Roddenberry wanted a post capitalistic society with no currency. That's what he wrote, and the few things that did revolve around scarcity economics were things that weren't subject to straight economic deals. Dilithium was rare enough that an unlimited supply couldn't be put on every ship, so if something happened they would need to acquire more unexpectedly, but it wasn't just traded on the NYSE.
The "problem" (from an analysis perspective) is that Roddenberry didn't go on record with enough details. He would sometimes come down on a story that involved economics, but not always, and didn't lay it out in an explicit "this is how their system works" setup. This is fair- he's positing a warp drive, transporters, invisibility cloaks, and several types of lasers and states of matter, it's by no means impossible that an advanced society would have solved economics by some method as well, and it's unfair to expect him to deliver a detailed economic model for a post scarcity society - it's interesting to claim that one could exist, and write stories in that world.
So when people in this thread point out various inconsistencies, or point to specific times where "federation credits" were used, or whatever, the fact is that the ramifications of those plot elements were not considered by all the writers, and often not really "meant" to describe a coherent system.
But here's what we do see consistently:
We see that there are some private citizens who have their own ships, and some that simply work jobs that aren't well respected or all that interesting.
We see that the Federation has a lot of ships, but they aren't war ships, and they aren't preposterous in numbers normally.
We see that the majority of Earth and other core worlds doesn't own starships. We also don't see flying cars or privately owned skiffs or whatever.
We see that there's some mechanism for gearing up for wars- the Federation absolutely has to fight wars at times.
We see that energy is thrown around trivially in most cases, but not in all cases.
We never see anyone going hungry if they are anywhere near functioning civilization.
We don't see anyone rebelling or fighting the Federation in a way that we can really sympathize with. The closest we get to understanding their position is mindless revenge, and mostly it's useless external conquest.
We don't see signs of over or under population.
It stands to reason that there's some manner of rationing going on- stuff isn't infinite. It stands to reason that almost everyone is ok with the state of affairs, and that they feel represented or are otherwise ok with stuff. If we go with Roddenberry's "there's no money" position- and I think that's fair, because that was one of his overriding design concerns- we're left with some kind of command economy that leaves some amount of resource distrribution as discretionary, and has enough resources that this finite limit is totally reasonable for essentially everyone. No one is busy *championing* a different form of government- there's no group of capitalists in Newest York or whatever claiming that the Federation will do better if it only really puts the squeeze on people, or something.
Now, for him to claim that this space computer communism is effective would require diving into all manner of crap, and that's what this thread is about. So I'll answer the question:
Yes, it could work, but not without a serious understanding of how individual and group psychology works. Not without a serious understanding of what motivates people. I don't think we really have that, because most of the studies in these areas are set up to fight battles politically, not uncover truth- and certainly not to figure out what's going on for any reason other than maybe advertising to people more effectively. Everyone we see in Star Trek ranges from highly talented and trained to ludicrously talented and heroically experienced- is education really that good? Is it really that capable? In the real world, people don't just see
That the individual discussing the "economics" of Star Trek was not an economist.
So, I'm bit confused, is it good or bad that the individual discussing "economics" is an economist?
Columbus brought Smallpox and took virulent Syphilis back to Europe as a swap.
Demographics of Indian graveyards disagrees with the rest of your myth. They died young, often of starvation.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
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.
A large part of that is that the government went on a spending spree that hasn't abated. The extra work is to provide the value that's sucked out to pay off the creditors and for the latest spending schemes. That value has to come from somewhere, whether it's devaluation of the currency (from more dollars chasing the goods) or the double-whammy of government borrowing sucking out the investment market, which means that money isn't making more consumer stuff AND it has to eventually be paid back, at interest, out of taxes.
There was some government debt for a long time. But the big fall-off-the-cliff turning point, IMHO, was when LBJ ran, first the Vietnam (undeclared) war, then also the Great Society welfare entitlement programs, on credit (meaning looting future generations). Then Nixon tried to fix things by unhooking the dollar from gold, and it's been unchecked government spending, explosive inflation, and accumulating debt and interest ever since.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Remember when Bones got Kirk the antique reading glasses because Kirk is allergic to retinax? And he noted that Kirk liked to collect antiques. Well, even with replicators, there is a limited supply of antiques. So if/when people wanted to connect "real" antiques, they would need a way to coerce those who possessed them to give them up. Hence something akin to money would be required.
I can imagine other uses. If someone wanted a servant to assist them with cleaning house, getting dressed, keeping them company, wiping their ass, etc; money may also be required. Robots and volunteers may serve some functions, but I can't see them doing everything without some form of compensation.
Ninjas don't carry tic tacs
We already live in a word of abundance. It's simply being hoarded by a very few. To change things, we need to live in a world of generosity and not be pummeled by a media that makes up live in fear.
Thanks, that is a much better reply than mine, which was going to be "shut your fucking overpriveleged mouth you stupid, selfish cunt".
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
It's almost like most people here are financial and political reactionaries.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
That's an interesting thought experiment but since we do not and never will live in such a post-scarcity society it is ultimately meaningless. Some form of money is going to be a necessity for the foreseeable future. There simply is no scenario whereby we would have access to every possible resource we would need without some for of currency making the economy work.
There is a difference between "need" and "want". It is conceivable that what we need will be available freely - food, lodging, etc. - but if people want more than what they got, the troubles begin (and scarcity will return). For example, imagine one random member of the Star Ship enterprise. He gets a room, food, entertainment, security - all for free. But what if one day he decides he wants his quarters to be twice the size he now has? *that* resource is scarce. What if one day he decides he wants to replicate 10 tons of gold, just because he likes gold, but the replicator capacity is limited? What if one day he wants other Enterprise employees to become his servants - but these people have better things to do? If he wants any of that, he will need money (or some futuristic equivalent). The only solution is for people to stop wanting what they don't have. It seems the Star Trek guys got this solved - I never saw anyone on this series wanting anything...
Presumably you'd have some sort of replicator allowance, and a group (or just the Captain) who vetted particularly extravagant demands. The size of your quarters on a spaceship is always going to be limited, for the same reason that land on Earth is limited. You'd have to accept that, no, you can't have the whole planet as your private playground.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
The problem with post-scarcity economies is that they fail to realize that not everything can be "post-scarce." There will always be things that need to be rationed, and there will need be mechanisms to deal with it.
Front row seats to Taylor Swift are scarce. Manhattan and Tahiti beachfront real estate is scarce. Only one person gets to be President. Being the first person to own that new Fendi bag is scarce.
If stuff was free, we would all turn into BLEGs Everything hoarders get they gather for free and the fill their space, be it house or box world on the street.
If stuff is free to start, it must then have a cost to keep or the BLEG effect will rule.
If stuff cost $$ to keep, the richest piles would belong to the richest people, Larry Ellison would have an island covered with stuff - OH, he has that now?
http://en.memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Federation_credit
they got no pockets. can't carry keys, spare change, random hardware parts, firearms...
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
Do we know that the federation does not use money? Or do we just not see it happening?
The computers could easily be "running a tab" for each person, identifying them by appearance and communicator links. No-one would need to worry about small stuff and just check accounts at the end of the month or something.
There is not really any such thing as "Post Scarcity", things will still take -some- resources even if it is very small. And some things will still be expensive to make. But with computer convenience it could be close.
I have seen bars and resteraunts where there is no money or cards in sight. They keep a tab (record) for each customer and just send a bill at the end of the month. But new customers must "sign up" before they can enter. And, most customers are regulars.
Think about this: How much energy do you think it takes to power a warp drive? If you guessed "a metric fuckton per second", you might be close. Like, we're talking numbers so large they'd be mind boggling to anyone who understands the concept of "megawatts". And they were able to make it work IN SPACE. With the invention of the warp drive in the Star Trek universe, we also solved all of our energy problems. The bare-bones cost of anything can quite easily be directly tied to how much energy it takes to make or do. When you have nearly infinite energy, you can justify a limitless R&D budget to invent or research anything you want to, because when you bring it to market you can make infinite profits because UNLIMITED ENERGY to do it over and over and over with very little cost to you. This would have had a hugely profound effect on Earth's economy and probably changed things over night. No one had to work for anything anymore because infinite energy meant you could just make robots do it for you. Or completely automated farms to create food. Or pretty much anything. That is what drives the Star Trek universe's utopia: infinite energy from whatever the fuck it is that powers the warp drive.