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

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

Comments

No

[kuzb]

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

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

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

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

Re:No

[jhigh]

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

Re:No

[91degrees]

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

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:No

[Charcharodon]

Probably what they had was more like the happiness theories that at the time found people stopped gaining happiness around $70,000 a year of income just from the income. You wouldn't need a ridiculous amount of resources to bring the population up to that level and keep most of the sheep happy. After that it became self improvement. STNG had an episode about that.

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.

Re:No

[king neckbeard]

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

Re:No

[silentcoder]

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

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

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

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

Re:No

[Eunuchswear]

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.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

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).

Re:No

[Wycliffe]

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.

Couldn't even get rid of it in the show

[Brian_Ellenberger]

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...

And then there's gold pressed latinum

[popo]

The Ferengi still used it... and the Federation used it to trade with the Ferengi.

Re:And then there's gold pressed latinum

[mrchaotica]

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.

That article sucked

[RobinH]

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.

relative wealth

[duckintheface]

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

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

Re:relative wealth

[fche]

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

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

Re:relative wealth

[Fire_Wraith]

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.

Re:relative wealth

[ArmoredDragon]

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.

Re:relative wealth

[Shadowmist]

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

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

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

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

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

Re:relative wealth

[thinkwaitfast]

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

Re:relative wealth

[EllisDees]

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.

But we're already relying on artificial scarcity

[itsdapead]

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...

Re:Scarcity CANNOT be eliminated

[silentcoder]

>Known physics like relativity gets completely ignored

That one wasn't entirely true. Roddenberry at the very least seriously considered the FTL problem and came up with a novel solution, the warp drive. And now phycisists actually think it could be done (whether this will realize I have no idea - but it's still in the realm of plausible right now).
Interestingly Alcubierre, the scientist who proved it's theoretically possible (with our currently known physics), is on record as saying that Star Trek inspired him to do the research in the first place (in an e-mail to William Shatner).

The point isn't really whether Alcubierre drives are possible (and can actually be built with human technology and all practical difficulties overcome), it's simply that not only did Roddenberry consider relativity (at least to a degree) but that his solution was sufficiently plausible for real scientists to investigate and affirm.

This is quite an achievement in science fiction, it's not a very common occurrence but it does happen sometimes though it seems SF inspires engineers far more frequently than scientists - which is why Clarke's geostationary satelites are a thing now. It could be that engineering is just a little easier, and so good SF writers get good engineering ideas more often ?

Re:Unlimited Energy

[jedidiah]

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.

Star Trek is a MILITARY service

[gavron]

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