Part of my hesitance to be persuaded that a Star Trek economy could possibly work is that in some senses it already has. In the 1850s 90% of the people in the

Part of my hesitance to be persuaded that a Star Trek economy could possibly work is that in some senses it already has. In the 1850s 90% of the people in the US were farmers. Around 1900 that number shrank to 30% and today it now stands at about 3% so farmers can now grow 30x as much food as they used to be able to. But even given a 3000% increase in productivity there are still people starving in the world. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/trouble/timeline/ http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/trouble/timeline/ Why is that? Well part of it is that making a single farmer 30x as productive involves a LOT more capital. You need tractors, plows, planters, sprayers, combines, and somewhere to store it all. You also need a lot of fuel to make everything go and maintenance to keep it all working. Worse, most of these items can't be co-oped between farmers because they'll all need them at the same time. It's not uncommon for a farmers to have several hundred thousand to several million dollars worth of equipment. In response to the complexities you've mentioned I think that's the whole of the problem; implementation. The technology exists to feed the whole world at least twice over and probably a lot more. It's not being done in part because of logistics (getting the food there isn't trivial), but primarily because of the political and economic issues. How do we decide who pays for it? I can't see human nature changing, you know? I guess maybe I have a hard time accepting the premise that somehow the world will get to a place where you can work for a couple of days and live on that for a year.