5 ms·

It's worth emphasising that a great deal of work in unnecessary for improving net happiness and consumes resources in the process and so undermines long term pr

by gress 13y ago

It's worth emphasising that a great deal of work in unnecessary for improving net happiness and consumes resources in the process and so undermines long term prosperity.

robbiep 13y ago
But without a scarcity (market) economy how do you determine which is which?
- npunt 13y ago
  Awareness. Present people with a real problem, explain its implications, and show how someone can make a difference, and you get action. Most people want to do the right thing, but can't figure out where to start or what good looks like. The culture our kids grow up in (through media, educational institutions, community support, etc) is not particularly good at this yet. The work we can do on the internet is to translate phenomena into data, stories, and experiences that build awareness of problems and build skills to solve them.
  - tiatia 13y ago
    Yeah. North Korea is pretty good in this to help people figure out what they want. The typical person is closer to Homer Simpson than to the intelligent, long term thinking and rational decision making individual.
    - rasz_pl 13y ago
      Now that you mentioned it, Idiocracy (2006) is also post scarcity idyllic universe.
- gress 13y ago
  It's actually the scarcity economy which prevents us from determining which is which. Because we need to work to get the basic resources needed for living, there is a huge incentive to do whatever sells rather than actually makes things better. I am neither advocating nor rejecting a basic income as a solution, but you can use it as a thought experiment to consider this. If people didn't need to work, why would they do things that consume resources and make us less happy?
patio11 13y ago
A heretical thought I have had about Star Trek: the Federation has no need for Star Fleet. They're fantastically wealthy and cannot meaningfully gain from trade in physical items. They're not just singularity-esque wealthy relative to the present-day US, they're equally more secure. Nobody kills mass numbers of Federation citizens. That occasionally happens on poor planets elsewhere. Sucks but hey poverty sucks. So why have a Star Fleet? Because Jean Luc Picard is a Federation citizen, and he wouldn't be happy as other than a starship captain. It's a galaxy-spanning Potempkin village to make him happy. Why would they do that? You're thinking like a poor person. Think like an unfathomably rich person. They do it because they can afford to. He might have had a cheaper hobby, like say watching classic TV shows, but the Federation is so wealthy that Starfleet and a TV set both round to zero. This makes Star Fleet officers into in-universe Trekkies: a peculiar subculture of the Federation who are tolerated because despite their quirky hobbies and dress they're mostly harmless. Of course if you're immersed in the subculture, Picard looks like something of a big shot. We get that impression only because the camera is in the subculture, not in the wider Federation, which cares about the Final Frontier in the same way that the United States cares about the monarch butterfly: "We probably have somebody working on that, right? Bright postdoc somewhere? Good, good."
- stormbrew 13y ago
  Yep. Aside from the fact that Star Trek economics make no sense simply because there have been several ideological shifts in its fundamental nature over the last 50 years, this is by far the best and most obvious answer to any question of why there are still people flying around in spaceships. Post-scarcity doesn't mean post-danger. No one has to do luge in the Winter Olympics to survive, and not more than 4 years ago someone died doing it, and yet people continue to do so.
  - patio11 13y ago
    Yep. This means that when the Federation media covers the battle of Wolf 359 (11k dead, worst military disaster in centuries) it probably caused a brief flurry of controversy leavened with "Well at least they died doing what they loved: live-action role playing" and then it promptly went back to more interesting topics like which pop stars had just broken up. It naturally follows that Earth was never in serious danger at any point because, hah, are you insane? We just didn't hit the Borg cube with the Lance of Judgement and instakill it from half a galaxy away because that would have been a terrible affront to Picard's character arc, and we really care about that sort of thing. Look at our Prime Directive: we'd rather genocide an entire race than interfere too much in the story. (Heh, psych, we're not total psychos. The Prime Directive strikes a few chords with our culture, because it needs to sound plausible to Starfleet officers, but isn't our main guiding principle any more than the US is based on not violating a shot clock. The Prime Directive is actually just there to provide interesting moral situations for Star Trek officers. We wargamed out several hundred generations of officers on a Holodeck simulation and they end up tremendously unfulfilled when doing the right thing is obvious, possible, and successful, like it always is in real life in the Federation.)

by gress 13y ago

It's worth emphasising that a great deal of work in unnecessary for improving net happiness and consumes resources in the process and so undermines long term prosperity.

robbiep 13y ago

But without a scarcity (market) economy how do you determine which is which?

npunt 13y ago
Awareness. Present people with a real problem, explain its implications, and show how someone can make a difference, and you get action. Most people want to do the right thing, but can't figure out where to start or what good looks like. The culture our kids grow up in (through media, educational institutions, community support, etc) is not particularly good at this yet. The work we can do on the internet is to translate phenomena into data, stories, and experiences that build awareness of problems and build skills to solve them.
- tiatia 13y ago
  Yeah. North Korea is pretty good in this to help people figure out what they want. The typical person is closer to Homer Simpson than to the intelligent, long term thinking and rational decision making individual.
  - rasz_pl 13y ago
    Now that you mentioned it, Idiocracy (2006) is also post scarcity idyllic universe.
gress 13y ago
It's actually the scarcity economy which prevents us from determining which is which. Because we need to work to get the basic resources needed for living, there is a huge incentive to do whatever sells rather than actually makes things better. I am neither advocating nor rejecting a basic income as a solution, but you can use it as a thought experiment to consider this. If people didn't need to work, why would they do things that consume resources and make us less happy?

patio11 13y ago

A heretical thought I have had about Star Trek: the Federation has no need for Star Fleet. They're fantastically wealthy and cannot meaningfully gain from trade in physical items. They're not just singularity-esque wealthy relative to the present-day US, they're equally more secure. Nobody kills mass numbers of Federation citizens. That occasionally happens on poor planets elsewhere. Sucks but hey poverty sucks. So why have a Star Fleet? Because Jean Luc Picard is a Federation citizen, and he wouldn't be happy as other than a starship captain. It's a galaxy-spanning Potempkin village to make him happy. Why would they do that? You're thinking like a poor person. Think like an unfathomably rich person. They do it because they can afford to. He might have had a cheaper hobby, like say watching classic TV shows, but the Federation is so wealthy that Starfleet and a TV set both round to zero. This makes Star Fleet officers into in-universe Trekkies: a peculiar subculture of the Federation who are tolerated because despite their quirky hobbies and dress they're mostly harmless. Of course if you're immersed in the subculture, Picard looks like something of a big shot. We get that impression only because the camera is in the subculture, not in the wider Federation, which cares about the Final Frontier in the same way that the United States cares about the monarch butterfly: "We probably have somebody working on that, right? Bright postdoc somewhere? Good, good."

stormbrew 13y ago
Yep. Aside from the fact that Star Trek economics make no sense simply because there have been several ideological shifts in its fundamental nature over the last 50 years, this is by far the best and most obvious answer to any question of why there are still people flying around in spaceships. Post-scarcity doesn't mean post-danger. No one has to do luge in the Winter Olympics to survive, and not more than 4 years ago someone died doing it, and yet people continue to do so.
- patio11 13y ago
  Yep. This means that when the Federation media covers the battle of Wolf 359 (11k dead, worst military disaster in centuries) it probably caused a brief flurry of controversy leavened with "Well at least they died doing what they loved: live-action role playing" and then it promptly went back to more interesting topics like which pop stars had just broken up. It naturally follows that Earth was never in serious danger at any point because, hah, are you insane? We just didn't hit the Borg cube with the Lance of Judgement and instakill it from half a galaxy away because that would have been a terrible affront to Picard's character arc, and we really care about that sort of thing. Look at our Prime Directive: we'd rather genocide an entire race than interfere too much in the story. (Heh, psych, we're not total psychos. The Prime Directive strikes a few chords with our culture, because it needs to sound plausible to Starfleet officers, but isn't our main guiding principle any more than the US is based on not violating a shot clock. The Prime Directive is actually just there to provide interesting moral situations for Star Trek officers. We wargamed out several hundred generations of officers on a Holodeck simulation and they end up tremendously unfulfilled when doing the right thing is obvious, possible, and successful, like it always is in real life in the Federation.)