Comment by SCHiM | Hacker News Reader

Comment by SCHiM | Hacker News Reader

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Yes, I agree that a human can (even with massive cuts to minimum wage, and/or subsidies to companies) never catch up to automated workers.

Not only should we not try because we can't win on economic grounds (I think). It'll probably force the people that must compete into inhumane working conditions for negligent compensation before we admit that we lost. Banning automation is also not ethical. Because increased efficiency also indirectly translates into increased quality of life, and directly translates into better health care and lower mortality rates.

You're probably right about the basic income, though I wish we could skip that part. My personal crystal boll says that we'll end up with a system more aching to that in the star trek universe anyway. Where _things_ are free, instead of giving people free money.

Star Trek never really explains its economy. Why does Picard's family own a vineyard[1]? Presumably other people would like to have that. Why does starfleet headquarters get to be in the middle of SF. Don't they know that real-estate is expensive?

Even in post-scarcity world of things, there are non-divisible goods, like land, access to people (think, concert) and so on. So some form of allocation of resources would need to happen. Money is one way to do that. Others exist too like lottery, or government ownership are options too.

I'm all for post-scarcity, and think we can go a long way toward just having things be allocated and free, but you'll never get away from the miserable business of allocating scarce resources.

[1] http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Chateau_Picard

> My personal crystal boll says that we'll end up with a system more aching to that in the star trek universe anyway.

The economics of Star Trek are the incoherent and inconsistent mass of contradictions that one would expect of a system in the background of fiction where the focus is elsewhere and no one was doing detail socio-economic worldbuilding in constructing the setting.

I mean, on the most basic economic element: the Federation both explicitly does not have money, and explicitly has a defined unit of money (the Federation credit) to which there are several references to its use in trade.

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