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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."
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...
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?"
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.
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.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
For as long as communities have existed, there has been evidence of bartering.
This turns out to be untrue. Before the invention of money most systems seem to have been based on a gift economy, not barter. In fact debt, accountancy, and later money, were invented as a way of keeping track of the gift economy.
Barter tends to come into existence as when money collapses, it post-dates, not pre-dates money.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
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