20 ms·

The Economics of Star Trek (2013)

119 points by Schwolop 12y ago

jonnathanson 12y ago
Whenever people discuss "Star Trek Economics," they seem to limit their discussion to the apparent economics of, and within, the Federation -- and specifically, within Starfleet. This is problematic for two reasons. The first is that the Federation is but one of many interstellar powers within its galaxy, and that's putting aside any of the thousands of unaligned or independent worlds and smaller coalitions. Many of these societies, even some of the Federation constituent societies, appear to use their own currencies or means of exchange. Take the Ferengi as the most extreme example. They are basically an anarcho-capitalist society, bordering on kleptocracy. Money is important to the Ferengi, to put it mildly. So how does the Federation conduct trade with the Ferengi government? On a more microeconomic level, what happens when Bashir and O'Brien order a couple rounds at Quark's? Who picks up their tab? Clearly Quark pays for his own supplies, and charges hefty markups, and he's always seen fretting about the difference. I have a hard time believing that Federation officers can just consume his (clearly limited) resources without contributing to his profit margins. And if they pay him in Federation Credits, what good are they to a non-member of the Federation? If they are not currency -- if they are more like scrip, or rations, or promissory notes good for X units of energy, or what have you -- then this creates a serious problem for Quark. Presumably, the value of Federation credits is relatively fixed and/or tied to some other unit or commodity. It is not a fiat currency. So why in the world would Quark accept credits, when he'd strongly prefer latinum? And how does one go about exchanging one for the other? For that matter, what would the Federation make of someone who decided to exchange all of his credits, even if he could, for gold-pressed latinum? If credits are not money, then perhaps they are something along the lines of notes or bonds, floated by the Federation government. In which case, Bashir and O'Brien pay for their drinks in the equivalent of US treasury bills, or perhaps in fractional shares of a Federation sovereign wealth fund. Or perhaps they are energy rations of some sort, in which case, Quark needs energy as much as any other business, and so he's happy to accept it (and to charge as many energy-units as he sees fit for his food, drinks, and games of chance). The second problem has more to do with using Starfleet as the lens through which we draw conclusions about Federation society. If I were to show some alien society a documentary about the United States, set primarily on a US aircraft carrier, with ~90% of the situations and characters taking place in a military context, my alien viewers would draw some very interesting inferences about the US (or, more broadly, all of human society). They'd think we were a rigidly hierarchical society. They'd think we have a handful of basic professions, and that nobody really cares too much about personal property. They'd wonder how everyone gets by, and how resources are allocated, and they'd probably assume it's through a quasi-socialist system of rationing and stipends. The microcosm of the US military is different from the macrocosm of US society, and especially different from that of the entire world. It's sort of a mini society within a larger society, operating under its own rules and organizing principles. Similarly, we should suspect that life in Starfleet is probably different, in some meaningful ways, from ordinary life in the Federation. And life in the Federation is different from life in the Klingon Empire, or in the Cardassian Union, etc. None of this is to discount the deep and insightful thinking on the part of this article's author. Nevertheless, I think we should consider the limitations of the framework through which the shows allow us to view the Star Trek universe. We get our fair share of glimpses into the outside-Starfleet world, but we should still be mindful of the observational lens through which we catch those glimpses.
- personlurking 12y ago
  As someone finally watching DS9 for the first time, how does it work when Quark thumb-scans/charges Odo for 8 slips of latinum (in exchange for the baby changeling) in 'The Begotten' episode? A few questions arise: Who does Odo work for? Who pays him? Does he use money (he doesn't seem to in any other episode)? How does Quark get the latinum?
  - smorrow 12y ago
    I don't know, except that he's wearing a Bajoran uniform. I don't know if you noticed, but it's the same as the one Major Kira wears except in colour, like different-coloured Starfleet uniforms. Rom wears a Bajoran uniform too when at work.
  - bane 12y ago
    Odo works for the Bajorans, who are not Federation members (for most of the series at least), though they are under the military protection of the Federation.
  - pavel_lishin 12y ago
    Odo is not a member of Starfleet, he's (now) employed by the Bajoran government - Deep Space Nine is (now) a Bajoran installation, with the Federation administrating it until the Bajoran government basically gets its shit together after the occupation.
  - drdeadringer 12y ago
    > how does it work when Quark thumb-scans/charges Odo I find it funny that a scheming Quark would bother thumb-printing a shape-shifter. It's only Odo's honor that prevents him from saying, "Oh, no, that's not my fingerprint. Let me show you my current set..."
    - personlurking 12y ago
      Also a bit funny is the Founders all look like Odo, or rather his "father", the scientist who experimented on him when he was "young".
Schwolop 12y ago
(was posted six months ago, but fell off the radar.)
- tempestn 12y ago
  You might be getting downvotes from people who think this comment is a dupe complaint, not realizing you're the OP.
  - Schwolop 12y ago
    If so, they're getting outweighed by the upvotes on the post itself, so I'm not bothered... :-)
dnautics 12y ago
"The key here, to me, is to start thinking about how economics would work when we decouple labor from reward." Economics has always had a weak association between labor and reward.... That's where I stopped reading.
- darkmighty 12y ago
  I think he means something like "Economic value of a certain function largely decoupled from reward" -- otherwise you couldn't contemplate the possibility of not working at all and having a high baseline reward. You'd have gotten the spirit if you read the rest.
  - dnautics 12y ago
    your comment makes even less sense. Economic value is coupled to reward, but value != labor. It's actually Marxist (and to a lesser degree classical Smithian) theories that conflate value with labor. There are plenty of economic theories that generally disregard the relationship between labor and value, except the causal relationship that labor sometimes (but not always) creates value.
    - aric 12y ago
      Value has value. Labor is labor. Agreed. It's laughable to base assumptions on relating "labor" to "value." The forms of labor that generate value depend entirely on cultures, systems, laws/artificial constraints, and circumstances of an era. It's still worth noting that in a society with post-scarcity such as Star Trek:TNG, which, of course, is almost entirely a result of replicator proliferation, "labor" would have a far more visceral and noticeable correlation with "value." Which human actions would be highly valued in a fantasy where people have the means to bend matter/energy to their will, where no one is without most specialty foods and material objects of choice, where it's almost always a question of what people feel like doing on any particular day? Many episodes touched on that. Naturally, the value of a person's time sharply rises where no one need give their time. Today there are still vast differences in personalities among people that generates incredible variance in culture and pursuits irrespective of reward. Conjecture that to the maximum. There are things that give incentive to pull away from what one might not ordinarily do. There's specialty teaching; personal performances; lively forms of artistry; types of manual labor for odds and ends not conducive to androids and automation; the never-ending pursuit of happiness and/or power? What might "dirty work" be? It's like thinking of an amalgamation of the present day considerations of elite society equalized through sheer unrestricted access of the masses. I forget how land settlement on Earth works in Star Trek. No matter the economics... One might expect that most societies comprised of Earthlings will still start with the world's oldest profession and end with the world's second-oldest profession.
arethuza 12y ago
The problem I have with Star Trek is that AIs don't seem to feature nearly as extensively as I would expect them to if they actually existed, and I don't see us getting anywhere near a "post scarcity" society unless we do have that level of technology. I hope our future looks more like the Culture than the Federation. Edit: Of course, one valid criticism of the Culture is that humans are effectively the pets of the god-like AIs (the Minds) that actually run everything. However, as the Culture doesn't seem to act like most contemporary cultures in that it is quite happy to see people leave or parts of it secede if a group disagrees with a decision then I think I could probably live with being a very indulged pet.
- Afforess 12y ago
  Or a much more likely: strong AI isn't possible.
  - arethuza 12y ago
    Well, my personal view is that I can see absolutely no reason why a proper general artificial intelligence is not possible (and yes, I know about a lot of the philosophical objections) - after all, we have an example of at least one kind of entity that displays general intelligence (i.e. us) and I can see no reason why whatever mechanisms the brain uses to create general intelligence couldn't be replicated by an "artificial" system. Mind you, I think we are a long way off from actually having the theoretical or practical ability to build a true general intelligence - but I'm pretty confident we will get there eventually. Whether this development will actually turn out to be a good idea (Culture) or bad idea (Skynet) is another thing entirely.
    - logicallee 12y ago
      >Well, my personal view is that I can see absolutely no reason why a proper general artificial intelligence is not possible [...] - after all, we have an example of at least one kind of entity that displays general intelligence (i.e. us) Very correct. We even have the source code. (About 700 MB worth of it.) Of course, we have no way of running it or an approximation of it, it is for a ridiculously complicated and massive parallel physical and biochemical computer following rules that we can’t begin to comprehend at any level. But we have sequenced the entropy that goes into it – so the existence proof is trivial. (As you indicate.)
Shivetya 12y ago
Star Trek economics are just plain bull shit, any society who has the ability to create food or other items by the expenditure of only energy has no need of much else. I remember a quote, if a race could materialize star ships they would not need too and this is where Star Trek's future always struck me wrong, where is the limit to replicators? As to the point of are were on a post scarcity economy, well we might be in some Western cultures but it does indicate quite clearly that given nothing to do far too many people will excel at it, worse when they do do something it will be to eat. Society will need to adjust those who just take to find something to do with their time. It might not earn them money or much but they need an activity to avoid end up looking like an extra from Wall-e.
- MrBra 12y ago
  > if a race could materialize star ships they would not need too Sorry can you rephrase this please? I really can't get the sense of it.
  - GotAnyMegadeth 12y ago
    If a society was sufficiently advanced that they could just press a button and make a star ship at will, then they would probably be equally advanced in other areas and would not have any need for star ships.
    - 3rd3 12y ago
      Maybe people are just too romantic and nostalgic to realize their wildest dreams with holo decks, telepresence, brain implants and let AIs decide on their well being. Maybe instead of spawning self-replicating robots for space exploration they want to do it physically themselves like their ancestors explored the continents a long time ago.
      - tomjen3 12y ago
        A human level AI could kidnap you, put you into a simulation like that and you wouldn't know. Depending on what morality we put into the AIs it may choose to do so.
zo1 12y ago
I take it when they say "Star Trek", they're actually talking about the United Federation of Planets, and Starfleet... with their supposedly "unlimited" resources. Of course, they don't go into details otherwise they'd quickly realize that it's not really a post-scarcity economy. It might be a "post-scarcity" on a lot of resources that we currently find scarce, but not in the true definition. E.g. labor is scarce, property is scarce, and energy is scarce. Also, Remember they need a mined resource to power those giant warp-cores that make it seem like they have unlimited energy to "create" any resource. Much like the laws of physics constrain us from creating a perpetual motion machine, they also constrain us from having a post-scarcity economy.
- adrianN 12y ago
  The laws of physics don't really prevent us from having a post-scarcity economy. The sun puts out vast amounts of energy. If we had technology like replicators that turns energy into basically anything we like, most things are already taken care of. I don't really see how labour can be a problem either. If most production jobs are done via replicator, many people have nothing to do. And in the Star Trek universe there are holograms that are capable of performing complex tasks, certainly anything the "service industry" would require.
  - zo1 12y ago
    "most things are already taken care of." Note how you used the word "most" instead of all. I see what you're saying, but it relies on a lot of details being glossed over. We'd essentially have to live in some sort of utopian society where the universe magically auto-aligns and adjusts everything so that everything and everyone is equal, and has the exact same things. Because, as soon as something is unequal, it's scarce in one place and abundant in another. If that happens, then we've created a market for exchange, and we're back to scarcity economics again. Granted, we're getting into philosophical grounds now, but do you understand what I'm trying to say?
- davidw 12y ago
  As well as "human wants are unlimited, but the means to satisfy human wants are scarce".
hooande 12y ago
I read a more detailed explanation of the star trek economy. I can't find the link now [1] but it answered some of the questions raised in this post. Since I can't find it I'm not sure if it was canon or just fan theorizing, but it was interesting all the same. I understand that this is a highly nerdy topic, but it's an example of how a a Proto Post Scarcity economy could work. As I understood it, every year in the star trek universe citizens would request what they wanted and say what they were going to contribute to the economy in exchange for thaose things. ie, Captain Picard might say "I want to make improvements to my farm in france, a new personal transportation device for a relative, X number of paid for vacations and the daily luxuries of being a starfleet officer. In exchange for that, I'm willing to be a starship captain for the next year". Then an elected committee would review the request and approve it or deny it. I remember that it was noted that the committee had to be from a different area or state than the applicant. ie, a committee in Florida would review requests from Texas. Essentially it was a "That sounds fair" economy, based on judgement instead of currency. As I recall, daily needs like food, shelter, medicine were taken care of for everyone, at various levels of luxury based on what the person was expected to contribute. Starfleet officers frequently talked about credits, either when gambling or visiting a bar on a non-federation or non-participating planet. I imagine this was a sort of legal black market system that would allow people to exchange money between one another to settle debts and to spend in other cultures, not really for routine living expenses. Post scarcity does mean post money, but there still has to be a way to maintain personal ledgers (maybe the credits were a year 2364 version of bitcoins?) I think that Gene Roddenberry and other science fiction writers envision post scarcity societies for two reasons: 1) Money causes problems and 2) Economies function more efficiently without money. We all love money, but think of the harm it can cause. Crime, ruined relationships, greed and the general oppression if not outright murder and enslavement of millions of people throughout history. As we all know, whenever someone says "It's not about the money", it's about the money. A moneyless world would solve a lot of these social problems. It's not that wealth is a bad thing. It's great to be rich. But a lot of problems arise when people need money for their daily sustenance. Food, housing, clothing, entertainment. All of these things should be taken care of at a low level, with compensation from contribution providing nicer and more desirable lifestyles. And it's quite possible that getting rid of daily dependence on individual spending is the best way to supercharge an economy. We don't see the waste in modern capitalism because we're primarily concerned with our own wealth, but it's there. Think about how much is wasted on a national (or galactic) scale. The efficiency gained through improved economic function would be more than enough to pay for all the replicator time that everyone on multiple worlds would need to live well. Like many great things, the idea of post scarcity / post capitalism started in science fiction. But it doesn't have to stay there. We can start building a world where everyone has comfort and the rich have luxury. There are things we can do today to move us closer to this ideal and move people away from a system that's designed to make us all slaves to small amounts of wealth. I'm looking at you, Basic Income. [1] Why hasn't someone made a startup to solve this problem? I'm constantly thinking of things I read and potentially bookmarked years ago, but google is a black hole. I would pay for this.
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netcan 12y ago
This article has an interesting starting in an 'Age of The Essay'^ way. Start with an interesting question and see where the meandering leads. I don't think this got anywhere interesting though. "a long, complicated journey as somethings become more abundant in some places, while other things are still scarce" That's an interesting thought. We have lots of examples of things suddenly becoming 'abundant,' especially in the last few decades. If I was doing a meandering essay on this topic I'd make a list and see if there's anything insightful to be learned from these. Maybe we can find a pattern. Calories/grains are, for the wealthier half of the world are essentially abundant. Peasants were once the majority, producing and consuming grain as their primary economic activity. Today grains cost $200-$500 per ton. Median household income is in the $5k-$10k range. So half the world can have more grain than they can eat for <10% of their income. Computers have various interesting examples of similar abundance. The end result is interestingly similar in both cases. Our capacity to consume more quality is enormous. We feed grain to cattle to produce meat. It takes 5-10 grain calories to make a calorie of meat, depending on the animal. We spent processing power to create user interfaces put personal computers in every pocket. More consumption. Higher quality. This seems to follow standard economics. When goods get cheaper we consumer more, at higher quality and spend less. That concept seems to stretch pretty well. Even though calories and computing power are incredible cheap and abundant compared to their historical prices, we haven't crossed our ability to consume more of them and 'scarcity economics' doesn't break. If you go back to the industrial age or "space age" equivalents of this essay you will find fantastic parallels. "We can make so much stuff! So cheap! This will change everything!" There seems to be a common fallacy here. We look at a future of 10X efficiency and we underestimate our ability to consume more. Since we can't consume 10X more goods, we assume that we'll just work less. I think the tricky part is 'quality.' You certainly can't eat a ton of( $250) maize per day. But, you can easily spend $250 on food in a day. So, if you don't want to look stupid in 100 years, be careful about predicting free time. Here's a question I would love to hear economists opines about: why don't high earners work less. Say a Belgian lawyer makes €100,000 euros per year and a paralegal make €35,000. Why doesn't the lawyer work fewer hours? Think of working hours as money and everything they buy as a good. It appears that demand for "goods" as a whole is infinitely elastic. Make the goods half the price and homo economicus buys twice as much. Most markets are a lot more elastic than this one. Why? If we saw some clear negative correlation between earnings per hour and hours worked (either at economy or individual level) we might be able predict see the path to a start trek economy of optional employment. It might be worth going back to the beginning with this question. "Why don't people work less when they make more per hour." ^http://www.paulgraham.com/essay.html http://www.paulgraham.com/essay.html
smoyer 12y ago
"Take a mental journey for a moment with me: what if, one day, technology reaches the point that a small number of humans — say, 10 million — can produce all of the food, shelter and energy that the race needs. This doesn’t seem like insanely wishful thinking, given current trends. There’s no rational reason why the advances in robotics, factories, energy and agriculture couldn’t continue unabated for long periods of time. Of course I’m not saying they will, but rather, they could." If those $10 million people are capitalists, the price of the goods they create will rise until the rest of us become their slaves.
chiph 12y ago
I don't have any rigor behind this, but my theory is that credits are used external to the Federation. And that transactions between Federation citizens are essentially cashless. This lets the Federation trade with societies that value money (the Ferengi) yet not get all caught up in internal accounting. With replicator technology, a Star Fleet officer could produce all the gold pressed Latinum he wants. But that would obviously have bad effects on the Ferengi economy, so there's a moral rule in place (perhaps enforced with limits in the replicator code) not to do that.
- abc123xyz 12y ago
  In Star Trek the replicators were never able to make Latinum, hence probably why its so valuable to Ferengi
- jiggy2011 12y ago
  But then who gets to decide on that limit? Does the limit differ between people , i.e can senior officers print more currency because they might have more need for it? Is there a person who is in charge of tracking the Ferengi economy and deciding how much Latinum is ethical to produce based on inflation? Is there a board of people who decide? Do any Ferengi get a place on that board? What about people who do not have access to a replicator , can they access Latinum via somebody elses replicator without causing that person to go over the limit?
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  > With replicator technology, a Star Fleet officer could produce all the gold pressed Latinum he wants. The whole basis for latinum's value as a medium of exchange is the fact that it has some kind of technobabble immunity to replication so, no, they couldn't. (Latinum isn't the only thing which has this kind of problem -- IIRC, as also antimatter, dilithium, certain radioactives, and, well, basically anything that needed to be scarce in at least one episode where they didn't want to invoke the non-availability of the replicators has a similar issue; of course, given that replicators and transporters notionally work on the same principles, but most replicator-immune things have been transported in the series, there is a pretty deep technobabble consistency problem here, but that's a recurring problem in Trek.)
Uncompetative 12y ago
I think we will get there, but on a much longer timeframe.
ChuckMcM 12y ago
When I read this the last time it came up, I suspected that the author was walking around the edges of the Basic Income hypothesis. Theory being you can be "poor" forever (income provided for basic shelter, food, and medical attention. And anything else you want you have to work for. The basic tenant being that everyone is funded into a reasonably safe life, even people who are working. Being paid a salary is 'bonus' on top of the basic allotment. At which point you can eliminate minimum wage and labor unions. The question of course is whether or not anyone would do some of the jobs we cannot currently outsource to robots.
- hellrich 12y ago
  This would probably depend on the offered payment, prestige and entertainment (in the sense of mental/interpersonal reward).
- Schwolop 12y ago
  That's why I felt it ought to be reposted; it's a neat intersection of HN interests, and skirting on the borders of the basic income discussion that's been growing here over the past few months/years. (BTW - you mean "basic tenet" not "tenant"...)
- guimarin 12y ago
  It's funny you ask whether someone will do the jobs we cannot outsource to robots. I saw an old man bend over and pick up a piece of trash the other day while walking to work. I have also calculated that about 90% of the software I use on a daily basis is OSS. Your question has actually already been answered. People do jobs they are not compensated for all the time. And for things that must get done, you can raise salaries until they get done.
jpollock 12y ago
There are other post-scarcity economies, some of which are discussed more in depth than Star Trek. The first one that comes to mind is Cory Doctorow's "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom"[1], which uses whuffie[2]. [1] http://craphound.com/down/download.php http://craphound.com/down/download.php [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whuffie http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whuffie
Titanbase 12y ago
Star Trek: The Next Generation's episode "The Neutral Zone" covers this topic pretty well. I highly recommend it. "The challenge, Mr. Offenhouse, is to improve yourself... to enrich yourself. Enjoy it." - Picard, describing life on 24th century Earth
edwldh3qe239jh9 12y ago
"I’ll listen to them again when our schools are decent and our life span starts increasing again magically." Stopped reading right there. If you need straw men, you aren't worth reading.
wtbob 12y ago
> In reality,the market already basically dictates this, for who can claim that a Wall Street banker works more than a teacher? Ummm, I daresay that just about any Wall Street banker works significantly more, has to comprehend significantly more data points, exerts significantly more mental effort and is (probably) significantly more stressed than a teacher. I will cheerfully admit that one's mental image of a Wall Street banker works less than one's mental image of a teacher. And he puts way too much effort into justifying the internal contradictions of a poorly-written, third-rate science fantasy show.
mikkeluk 12y ago
I always assumed Federation members had their bills paid by the Federation. ie. Quark sells 100 bars of latinum worth of drinks in a week to Federation staff, the Federation's accounting/remittance department sends over 100 bars of latinum to Quark (digitally of course).
Astrosocialist 12y ago
I'm surprised nobody has linked Matthew Yglesias' excellent response: "The Star Trek Economy: (Mostly) Post-Scarcity (Mostly) Socialism". http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/11/18/star_trek_economy_federation_is_only_mostly_post_scarcity.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/11/18/star_trek_eco... The most important concept in that article is that of a gift economy. The economy provides people with their basic needs and allows them to do (just about) whatever they wish with their time. Some people will chose to produce goods in old fashioned ways, like fine wine produced by tradtional methods, and these goods would be given to others as gifts. Such goods will always be scarce by definition, but they are all luxuries. An interesting case for this is looking at the markets that developed in POW camps during World War II and how they collapsed once the liberating armies arived with an abundance of goods. "On 12th April, withthe arrival of elements of the 30th US. Infantry Division, the ushering in of an age ofplenty demonstrated the hypothesis that with infinite means economic organizationand activity would be redundant, as every want could be satisfied without effort." (Pg. 14 of the linked PDF) http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~hfoad/e111su08/Radford.pdf http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~hfoad/e111su08/Radford.pdf Another thing to note is the shift in the means of production. If labor is basically unnecessary in the production of goods you get a shift in modes of production. I could see this happening in the near with the decentralized 3D printing of goods, combined with the massive energy of the sun and the shocking amounts of raw materials in the asteroids around the solar system. This I think is a demonstration of Marx's biggest mistake. He thought the economic organization would shift without a change in the means of production. Unlike every other change in his economic theories.
BasDirks 12y ago
That bar up top that appears when you scroll up; I want to squash it like a fly, and I don't even squash flies. /meta

119 points by Schwolop 12y ago

Whenever people discuss "Star Trek Economics," they seem to limit their discussion to the apparent economics of, and within, the Federation -- and specifically, within Starfleet. This is problematic for two reasons. The first is that the Federation is but one of many interstellar powers within its galaxy, and that's putting aside any of the thousands of unaligned or independent worlds and smaller coalitions. Many of these societies, even some of the Federation constituent societies, appear to use their own currencies or means of exchange. Take the Ferengi as the most extreme example. They are basically an anarcho-capitalist society, bordering on kleptocracy. Money is important to the Ferengi, to put it mildly. So how does the Federation conduct trade with the Ferengi government? On a more microeconomic level, what happens when Bashir and O'Brien order a couple rounds at Quark's? Who picks up their tab? Clearly Quark pays for his own supplies, and charges hefty markups, and he's always seen fretting about the difference. I have a hard time believing that Federation officers can just consume his (clearly limited) resources without contributing to his profit margins. And if they pay him in Federation Credits, what good are they to a non-member of the Federation? If they are not currency -- if they are more like scrip, or rations, or promissory notes good for X units of energy, or what have you -- then this creates a serious problem for Quark. Presumably, the value of Federation credits is relatively fixed and/or tied to some other unit or commodity. It is not a fiat currency. So why in the world would Quark accept credits, when he'd strongly prefer latinum? And how does one go about exchanging one for the other? For that matter, what would the Federation make of someone who decided to exchange all of his credits, even if he could, for gold-pressed latinum? If credits are not money, then perhaps they are something along the lines of notes or bonds, floated by the Federation government. In which case, Bashir and O'Brien pay for their drinks in the equivalent of US treasury bills, or perhaps in fractional shares of a Federation sovereign wealth fund. Or perhaps they are energy rations of some sort, in which case, Quark needs energy as much as any other business, and so he's happy to accept it (and to charge as many energy-units as he sees fit for his food, drinks, and games of chance). The second problem has more to do with using Starfleet as the lens through which we draw conclusions about Federation society. If I were to show some alien society a documentary about the United States, set primarily on a US aircraft carrier, with ~90% of the situations and characters taking place in a military context, my alien viewers would draw some very interesting inferences about the US (or, more broadly, all of human society). They'd think we were a rigidly hierarchical society. They'd think we have a handful of basic professions, and that nobody really cares too much about personal property. They'd wonder how everyone gets by, and how resources are allocated, and they'd probably assume it's through a quasi-socialist system of rationing and stipends. The microcosm of the US military is different from the macrocosm of US society, and especially different from that of the entire world. It's sort of a mini society within a larger society, operating under its own rules and organizing principles. Similarly, we should suspect that life in Starfleet is probably different, in some meaningful ways, from ordinary life in the Federation. And life in the Federation is different from life in the Klingon Empire, or in the Cardassian Union, etc. None of this is to discount the deep and insightful thinking on the part of this article's author. Nevertheless, I think we should consider the limitations of the framework through which the shows allow us to view the Star Trek universe. We get our fair share of glimpses into the outside-Starfleet world, but we should still be mindful of the observational lens through which we catch those glimpses.

personlurking 12y ago
As someone finally watching DS9 for the first time, how does it work when Quark thumb-scans/charges Odo for 8 slips of latinum (in exchange for the baby changeling) in 'The Begotten' episode? A few questions arise: Who does Odo work for? Who pays him? Does he use money (he doesn't seem to in any other episode)? How does Quark get the latinum?
- smorrow 12y ago
  I don't know, except that he's wearing a Bajoran uniform. I don't know if you noticed, but it's the same as the one Major Kira wears except in colour, like different-coloured Starfleet uniforms. Rom wears a Bajoran uniform too when at work.
- bane 12y ago
  Odo works for the Bajorans, who are not Federation members (for most of the series at least), though they are under the military protection of the Federation.
- pavel_lishin 12y ago
  Odo is not a member of Starfleet, he's (now) employed by the Bajoran government - Deep Space Nine is (now) a Bajoran installation, with the Federation administrating it until the Bajoran government basically gets its shit together after the occupation.
- drdeadringer 12y ago
  > how does it work when Quark thumb-scans/charges Odo I find it funny that a scheming Quark would bother thumb-printing a shape-shifter. It's only Odo's honor that prevents him from saying, "Oh, no, that's not my fingerprint. Let me show you my current set..."
  - personlurking 12y ago
    Also a bit funny is the Founders all look like Odo, or rather his "father", the scientist who experimented on him when he was "young".

Schwolop 12y ago

(was posted six months ago, but fell off the radar.)

tempestn 12y ago
You might be getting downvotes from people who think this comment is a dupe complaint, not realizing you're the OP.
- Schwolop 12y ago
  If so, they're getting outweighed by the upvotes on the post itself, so I'm not bothered... :-)

dnautics 12y ago

"The key here, to me, is to start thinking about how economics would work when we decouple labor from reward." Economics has always had a weak association between labor and reward.... That's where I stopped reading.

darkmighty 12y ago
I think he means something like "Economic value of a certain function largely decoupled from reward" -- otherwise you couldn't contemplate the possibility of not working at all and having a high baseline reward. You'd have gotten the spirit if you read the rest.
- dnautics 12y ago
  your comment makes even less sense. Economic value is coupled to reward, but value != labor. It's actually Marxist (and to a lesser degree classical Smithian) theories that conflate value with labor. There are plenty of economic theories that generally disregard the relationship between labor and value, except the causal relationship that labor sometimes (but not always) creates value.
  - aric 12y ago
    Value has value. Labor is labor. Agreed. It's laughable to base assumptions on relating "labor" to "value." The forms of labor that generate value depend entirely on cultures, systems, laws/artificial constraints, and circumstances of an era. It's still worth noting that in a society with post-scarcity such as Star Trek:TNG, which, of course, is almost entirely a result of replicator proliferation, "labor" would have a far more visceral and noticeable correlation with "value." Which human actions would be highly valued in a fantasy where people have the means to bend matter/energy to their will, where no one is without most specialty foods and material objects of choice, where it's almost always a question of what people feel like doing on any particular day? Many episodes touched on that. Naturally, the value of a person's time sharply rises where no one need give their time. Today there are still vast differences in personalities among people that generates incredible variance in culture and pursuits irrespective of reward. Conjecture that to the maximum. There are things that give incentive to pull away from what one might not ordinarily do. There's specialty teaching; personal performances; lively forms of artistry; types of manual labor for odds and ends not conducive to androids and automation; the never-ending pursuit of happiness and/or power? What might "dirty work" be? It's like thinking of an amalgamation of the present day considerations of elite society equalized through sheer unrestricted access of the masses. I forget how land settlement on Earth works in Star Trek. No matter the economics... One might expect that most societies comprised of Earthlings will still start with the world's oldest profession and end with the world's second-oldest profession.

arethuza 12y ago

The problem I have with Star Trek is that AIs don't seem to feature nearly as extensively as I would expect them to if they actually existed, and I don't see us getting anywhere near a "post scarcity" society unless we do have that level of technology. I hope our future looks more like the Culture than the Federation. Edit: Of course, one valid criticism of the Culture is that humans are effectively the pets of the god-like AIs (the Minds) that actually run everything. However, as the Culture doesn't seem to act like most contemporary cultures in that it is quite happy to see people leave or parts of it secede if a group disagrees with a decision then I think I could probably live with being a very indulged pet.

Afforess 12y ago
Or a much more likely: strong AI isn't possible.
- arethuza 12y ago
  Well, my personal view is that I can see absolutely no reason why a proper general artificial intelligence is not possible (and yes, I know about a lot of the philosophical objections) - after all, we have an example of at least one kind of entity that displays general intelligence (i.e. us) and I can see no reason why whatever mechanisms the brain uses to create general intelligence couldn't be replicated by an "artificial" system. Mind you, I think we are a long way off from actually having the theoretical or practical ability to build a true general intelligence - but I'm pretty confident we will get there eventually. Whether this development will actually turn out to be a good idea (Culture) or bad idea (Skynet) is another thing entirely.
  - logicallee 12y ago
    >Well, my personal view is that I can see absolutely no reason why a proper general artificial intelligence is not possible [...] - after all, we have an example of at least one kind of entity that displays general intelligence (i.e. us) Very correct. We even have the source code. (About 700 MB worth of it.) Of course, we have no way of running it or an approximation of it, it is for a ridiculously complicated and massive parallel physical and biochemical computer following rules that we can’t begin to comprehend at any level. But we have sequenced the entropy that goes into it – so the existence proof is trivial. (As you indicate.)

Shivetya 12y ago

Star Trek economics are just plain bull shit, any society who has the ability to create food or other items by the expenditure of only energy has no need of much else. I remember a quote, if a race could materialize star ships they would not need too and this is where Star Trek's future always struck me wrong, where is the limit to replicators? As to the point of are were on a post scarcity economy, well we might be in some Western cultures but it does indicate quite clearly that given nothing to do far too many people will excel at it, worse when they do do something it will be to eat. Society will need to adjust those who just take to find something to do with their time. It might not earn them money or much but they need an activity to avoid end up looking like an extra from Wall-e.

MrBra 12y ago
> if a race could materialize star ships they would not need too Sorry can you rephrase this please? I really can't get the sense of it.
- GotAnyMegadeth 12y ago
  If a society was sufficiently advanced that they could just press a button and make a star ship at will, then they would probably be equally advanced in other areas and would not have any need for star ships.
  - 3rd3 12y ago
    Maybe people are just too romantic and nostalgic to realize their wildest dreams with holo decks, telepresence, brain implants and let AIs decide on their well being. Maybe instead of spawning self-replicating robots for space exploration they want to do it physically themselves like their ancestors explored the continents a long time ago.
    - tomjen3 12y ago
      A human level AI could kidnap you, put you into a simulation like that and you wouldn't know. Depending on what morality we put into the AIs it may choose to do so.

zo1 12y ago

I take it when they say "Star Trek", they're actually talking about the United Federation of Planets, and Starfleet... with their supposedly "unlimited" resources. Of course, they don't go into details otherwise they'd quickly realize that it's not really a post-scarcity economy. It might be a "post-scarcity" on a lot of resources that we currently find scarce, but not in the true definition. E.g. labor is scarce, property is scarce, and energy is scarce. Also, Remember they need a mined resource to power those giant warp-cores that make it seem like they have unlimited energy to "create" any resource. Much like the laws of physics constrain us from creating a perpetual motion machine, they also constrain us from having a post-scarcity economy.

adrianN 12y ago
The laws of physics don't really prevent us from having a post-scarcity economy. The sun puts out vast amounts of energy. If we had technology like replicators that turns energy into basically anything we like, most things are already taken care of. I don't really see how labour can be a problem either. If most production jobs are done via replicator, many people have nothing to do. And in the Star Trek universe there are holograms that are capable of performing complex tasks, certainly anything the "service industry" would require.
- zo1 12y ago
  "most things are already taken care of." Note how you used the word "most" instead of all. I see what you're saying, but it relies on a lot of details being glossed over. We'd essentially have to live in some sort of utopian society where the universe magically auto-aligns and adjusts everything so that everything and everyone is equal, and has the exact same things. Because, as soon as something is unequal, it's scarce in one place and abundant in another. If that happens, then we've created a market for exchange, and we're back to scarcity economics again. Granted, we're getting into philosophical grounds now, but do you understand what I'm trying to say?
davidw 12y ago
As well as "human wants are unlimited, but the means to satisfy human wants are scarce".

hooande 12y ago

I read a more detailed explanation of the star trek economy. I can't find the link now [1] but it answered some of the questions raised in this post. Since I can't find it I'm not sure if it was canon or just fan theorizing, but it was interesting all the same. I understand that this is a highly nerdy topic, but it's an example of how a a Proto Post Scarcity economy could work. As I understood it, every year in the star trek universe citizens would request what they wanted and say what they were going to contribute to the economy in exchange for thaose things. ie, Captain Picard might say "I want to make improvements to my farm in france, a new personal transportation device for a relative, X number of paid for vacations and the daily luxuries of being a starfleet officer. In exchange for that, I'm willing to be a starship captain for the next year". Then an elected committee would review the request and approve it or deny it. I remember that it was noted that the committee had to be from a different area or state than the applicant. ie, a committee in Florida would review requests from Texas. Essentially it was a "That sounds fair" economy, based on judgement instead of currency. As I recall, daily needs like food, shelter, medicine were taken care of for everyone, at various levels of luxury based on what the person was expected to contribute. Starfleet officers frequently talked about credits, either when gambling or visiting a bar on a non-federation or non-participating planet. I imagine this was a sort of legal black market system that would allow people to exchange money between one another to settle debts and to spend in other cultures, not really for routine living expenses. Post scarcity does mean post money, but there still has to be a way to maintain personal ledgers (maybe the credits were a year 2364 version of bitcoins?) I think that Gene Roddenberry and other science fiction writers envision post scarcity societies for two reasons: 1) Money causes problems and 2) Economies function more efficiently without money. We all love money, but think of the harm it can cause. Crime, ruined relationships, greed and the general oppression if not outright murder and enslavement of millions of people throughout history. As we all know, whenever someone says "It's not about the money", it's about the money. A moneyless world would solve a lot of these social problems. It's not that wealth is a bad thing. It's great to be rich. But a lot of problems arise when people need money for their daily sustenance. Food, housing, clothing, entertainment. All of these things should be taken care of at a low level, with compensation from contribution providing nicer and more desirable lifestyles. And it's quite possible that getting rid of daily dependence on individual spending is the best way to supercharge an economy. We don't see the waste in modern capitalism because we're primarily concerned with our own wealth, but it's there. Think about how much is wasted on a national (or galactic) scale. The efficiency gained through improved economic function would be more than enough to pay for all the replicator time that everyone on multiple worlds would need to live well. Like many great things, the idea of post scarcity / post capitalism started in science fiction. But it doesn't have to stay there. We can start building a world where everyone has comfort and the rich have luxury. There are things we can do today to move us closer to this ideal and move people away from a system that's designed to make us all slaves to small amounts of wealth. I'm looking at you, Basic Income. [1] Why hasn't someone made a startup to solve this problem? I'm constantly thinking of things I read and potentially bookmarked years ago, but google is a black hole. I would pay for this.

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netcan 12y ago

This article has an interesting starting in an 'Age of The Essay'^ way. Start with an interesting question and see where the meandering leads. I don't think this got anywhere interesting though. "a long, complicated journey as somethings become more abundant in some places, while other things are still scarce" That's an interesting thought. We have lots of examples of things suddenly becoming 'abundant,' especially in the last few decades. If I was doing a meandering essay on this topic I'd make a list and see if there's anything insightful to be learned from these. Maybe we can find a pattern. Calories/grains are, for the wealthier half of the world are essentially abundant. Peasants were once the majority, producing and consuming grain as their primary economic activity. Today grains cost $200-$500 per ton. Median household income is in the $5k-$10k range. So half the world can have more grain than they can eat for <10% of their income. Computers have various interesting examples of similar abundance. The end result is interestingly similar in both cases. Our capacity to consume more quality is enormous. We feed grain to cattle to produce meat. It takes 5-10 grain calories to make a calorie of meat, depending on the animal. We spent processing power to create user interfaces put personal computers in every pocket. More consumption. Higher quality. This seems to follow standard economics. When goods get cheaper we consumer more, at higher quality and spend less. That concept seems to stretch pretty well. Even though calories and computing power are incredible cheap and abundant compared to their historical prices, we haven't crossed our ability to consume more of them and 'scarcity economics' doesn't break. If you go back to the industrial age or "space age" equivalents of this essay you will find fantastic parallels. "We can make so much stuff! So cheap! This will change everything!" There seems to be a common fallacy here. We look at a future of 10X efficiency and we underestimate our ability to consume more. Since we can't consume 10X more goods, we assume that we'll just work less. I think the tricky part is 'quality.' You certainly can't eat a ton of( $250) maize per day. But, you can easily spend $250 on food in a day. So, if you don't want to look stupid in 100 years, be careful about predicting free time. Here's a question I would love to hear economists opines about: why don't high earners work less. Say a Belgian lawyer makes €100,000 euros per year and a paralegal make €35,000. Why doesn't the lawyer work fewer hours? Think of working hours as money and everything they buy as a good. It appears that demand for "goods" as a whole is infinitely elastic. Make the goods half the price and homo economicus buys twice as much. Most markets are a lot more elastic than this one. Why? If we saw some clear negative correlation between earnings per hour and hours worked (either at economy or individual level) we might be able predict see the path to a start trek economy of optional employment. It might be worth going back to the beginning with this question. "Why don't people work less when they make more per hour." ^http://www.paulgraham.com/essay.html http://www.paulgraham.com/essay.html

smoyer 12y ago

"Take a mental journey for a moment with me: what if, one day, technology reaches the point that a small number of humans — say, 10 million — can produce all of the food, shelter and energy that the race needs. This doesn’t seem like insanely wishful thinking, given current trends. There’s no rational reason why the advances in robotics, factories, energy and agriculture couldn’t continue unabated for long periods of time. Of course I’m not saying they will, but rather, they could." If those $10 million people are capitalists, the price of the goods they create will rise until the rest of us become their slaves.

chiph 12y ago

I don't have any rigor behind this, but my theory is that credits are used external to the Federation. And that transactions between Federation citizens are essentially cashless. This lets the Federation trade with societies that value money (the Ferengi) yet not get all caught up in internal accounting. With replicator technology, a Star Fleet officer could produce all the gold pressed Latinum he wants. But that would obviously have bad effects on the Ferengi economy, so there's a moral rule in place (perhaps enforced with limits in the replicator code) not to do that.

abc123xyz 12y ago
In Star Trek the replicators were never able to make Latinum, hence probably why its so valuable to Ferengi
jiggy2011 12y ago
But then who gets to decide on that limit? Does the limit differ between people , i.e can senior officers print more currency because they might have more need for it? Is there a person who is in charge of tracking the Ferengi economy and deciding how much Latinum is ethical to produce based on inflation? Is there a board of people who decide? Do any Ferengi get a place on that board? What about people who do not have access to a replicator , can they access Latinum via somebody elses replicator without causing that person to go over the limit?
dragonwriter 12y ago
> With replicator technology, a Star Fleet officer could produce all the gold pressed Latinum he wants. The whole basis for latinum's value as a medium of exchange is the fact that it has some kind of technobabble immunity to replication so, no, they couldn't. (Latinum isn't the only thing which has this kind of problem -- IIRC, as also antimatter, dilithium, certain radioactives, and, well, basically anything that needed to be scarce in at least one episode where they didn't want to invoke the non-availability of the replicators has a similar issue; of course, given that replicators and transporters notionally work on the same principles, but most replicator-immune things have been transported in the series, there is a pretty deep technobabble consistency problem here, but that's a recurring problem in Trek.)

Uncompetative 12y ago

I think we will get there, but on a much longer timeframe.

ChuckMcM 12y ago

When I read this the last time it came up, I suspected that the author was walking around the edges of the Basic Income hypothesis. Theory being you can be "poor" forever (income provided for basic shelter, food, and medical attention. And anything else you want you have to work for. The basic tenant being that everyone is funded into a reasonably safe life, even people who are working. Being paid a salary is 'bonus' on top of the basic allotment. At which point you can eliminate minimum wage and labor unions. The question of course is whether or not anyone would do some of the jobs we cannot currently outsource to robots.

hellrich 12y ago
This would probably depend on the offered payment, prestige and entertainment (in the sense of mental/interpersonal reward).
Schwolop 12y ago
That's why I felt it ought to be reposted; it's a neat intersection of HN interests, and skirting on the borders of the basic income discussion that's been growing here over the past few months/years. (BTW - you mean "basic tenet" not "tenant"...)
guimarin 12y ago
It's funny you ask whether someone will do the jobs we cannot outsource to robots. I saw an old man bend over and pick up a piece of trash the other day while walking to work. I have also calculated that about 90% of the software I use on a daily basis is OSS. Your question has actually already been answered. People do jobs they are not compensated for all the time. And for things that must get done, you can raise salaries until they get done.

jpollock 12y ago

There are other post-scarcity economies, some of which are discussed more in depth than Star Trek. The first one that comes to mind is Cory Doctorow's "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom"[1], which uses whuffie[2]. [1] http://craphound.com/down/download.php http://craphound.com/down/download.php [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whuffie http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whuffie

Titanbase 12y ago

Star Trek: The Next Generation's episode "The Neutral Zone" covers this topic pretty well. I highly recommend it. "The challenge, Mr. Offenhouse, is to improve yourself... to enrich yourself. Enjoy it." - Picard, describing life on 24th century Earth

edwldh3qe239jh9 12y ago

"I’ll listen to them again when our schools are decent and our life span starts increasing again magically." Stopped reading right there. If you need straw men, you aren't worth reading.

wtbob 12y ago

> In reality,the market already basically dictates this, for who can claim that a Wall Street banker works more than a teacher? Ummm, I daresay that just about any Wall Street banker works significantly more, has to comprehend significantly more data points, exerts significantly more mental effort and is (probably) significantly more stressed than a teacher. I will cheerfully admit that one's mental image of a Wall Street banker works less than one's mental image of a teacher. And he puts way too much effort into justifying the internal contradictions of a poorly-written, third-rate science fantasy show.

mikkeluk 12y ago

I always assumed Federation members had their bills paid by the Federation. ie. Quark sells 100 bars of latinum worth of drinks in a week to Federation staff, the Federation's accounting/remittance department sends over 100 bars of latinum to Quark (digitally of course).

Astrosocialist 12y ago

I'm surprised nobody has linked Matthew Yglesias' excellent response: "The Star Trek Economy: (Mostly) Post-Scarcity (Mostly) Socialism". http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/11/18/star_trek_economy_federation_is_only_mostly_post_scarcity.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/11/18/star_trek_eco... The most important concept in that article is that of a gift economy. The economy provides people with their basic needs and allows them to do (just about) whatever they wish with their time. Some people will chose to produce goods in old fashioned ways, like fine wine produced by tradtional methods, and these goods would be given to others as gifts. Such goods will always be scarce by definition, but they are all luxuries. An interesting case for this is looking at the markets that developed in POW camps during World War II and how they collapsed once the liberating armies arived with an abundance of goods. "On 12th April, withthe arrival of elements of the 30th US. Infantry Division, the ushering in of an age ofplenty demonstrated the hypothesis that with infinite means economic organizationand activity would be redundant, as every want could be satisfied without effort." (Pg. 14 of the linked PDF) http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~hfoad/e111su08/Radford.pdf http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~hfoad/e111su08/Radford.pdf Another thing to note is the shift in the means of production. If labor is basically unnecessary in the production of goods you get a shift in modes of production. I could see this happening in the near with the decentralized 3D printing of goods, combined with the massive energy of the sun and the shocking amounts of raw materials in the asteroids around the solar system. This I think is a demonstration of Marx's biggest mistake. He thought the economic organization would shift without a change in the means of production. Unlike every other change in his economic theories.

BasDirks 12y ago

That bar up top that appears when you scroll up; I want to squash it like a fly, and I don't even squash flies. /meta