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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.
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.
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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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.
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.
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.
Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra. Betteridge, sighing at a headline.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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).
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.