The Star Trek Economy

Without Star Trek replicators in the foreseeable future, all the 3d printing and robots in the world will not give us unlimited amounts of basic materials needed. Concrete and glass might be virtually unlimited, but certain metals are definitely not. If those resource constraints lead to energy constraints, we'll have problems getting to any sort of proto-post-scarcity stage at current standards of living. AI might solve the problem, but the consequences of AI are unpredictable (singularity).

A few books on the subject worth mentioning, but not mentioned in the essay:

Doctorow - Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (fiction, set in a speculative world where the economic system is based on units of social status called whuffies; everyone is born with some, if I recall right (nope, apparently I was wrong, it's not zero-sum), and from there it's a free market).

Rifkin - The End of Work (nonfiction, takes a look at how society might function as jobs gradually disappear due to technology).

Iain Banks's Culture universe is mentioned in the further reading section, but it's completely post-scarcity on planet and orbital scales, with AIs running everything. The aforementioned books are much closer to home.

Post-scarcity economics is more the study of localised phenomena. As alluded to in the post, some things will likely always be in short supply somewhere.

[1] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income

By that reasoning, the Joule is the currency of the Federation.

a) The article already supposes that "the accounting is done in energy units", so a) is satisfied.

b) Energy isn't exactly "issued" by a government. But neither is gold, and this hasn't prevented gold from being money through most of human history.

c) Finally, energy is fungible, especially if you have replicators. 1KWh of electricity in your battery is as good as any other 1KWh of electricity.

It doesn't matter whether the people who live in the Star Trek universe actually call it "money" or not. If it walks like money and quacks like money, it is money.

And once there's technology to convert anything to and from energy relatively easily, a Joule does sound like a good candidate for a universally accepted unit of value. An alien species might not give a damn about some shiny yellow metal, but they need good ol' Joules just as much as we do.

http://www.volokh.com/posts/1190182117.shtml

The most notable is participatory economics, or parecon. This is a worthwhile attempt, I think, but to me it doesn’t quite pass the smell test of being sufficiently un-communist, what with its workers councils and lack of any sort of ruling class. All very un-American, [...]

Did the author just imply that they are in favor of having a ruling class? Then, just after that:

When you start thinking this way you start getting into the dodgy world of heterodox economics and, well, that’s a world of a lot of crackpots. Some good ideas, sure, but a lot of crackpots, and more to the point, it’s a world devoid of empirical research, which is a serious problem.

Uh yeah, go talk to a real heterodox economist, and they will explain to you how a lack of listening to real world data is actually the core problem of orthodox economics.

By the way: What's lacking in the initial brief discussion of alternative economic system is that aside from capitalism (i.e., firms are privately owned, compete in the market) and centrally planned communism (i.e., firms are state-owned and follow a central plan) there are also variants of market socialism (i.e., firms are typically state-owned and compete in the market).

communism is already a big part of our lives. When you sit at the dinner table and ask for the salt, you get it. When are at work and you ask for a code review and the person gives it to you. If the need is great enough, or the obstacles to ability are small enough, people do things.

From each according to their ability, to each according to their need. Our economy is firmly based on communist actions and the capitalists exploit this.

but the way that people talk about communism, as a centrally planned economy, shows great ignorance of both the literature and a blindedness to "already occurring communism"

Look at all the Bloggers, the Kickstarters, Youtubers, Justin Bieber at the start of his "career". Aren't they essentially taking a ton of infrastructure and a weird "diffusive" sort of income already?

Joseph Sisko's restaurant in our terms might be more like a kind of hobby rather than a serious economic enterprise. The guests might not pay anything at all, it's just that owner and guests do this because they enjoy making food and eating food, rather than eating from a replicator.

You just don't see all the shitty restaurants noone ever goes to...

Oh, yes, and that thing about people not living according to economic theories, but having societies and cultures, only a slice of which economic theories try to capture. And while I'm at it, the fact that economic theories float above the actual behavior of humans and only thinly capture what they are up to, while floating below any serious philosophy that explain why people should or do anything in the first place.

At the same time, capitalism has serious flaws, also exploited by human psychology. Capitalism rewards not just work and the investment of capital but also greed and cheating.

So, when looking for a new economic model, why not go back to psychology? Is it really true that most people don't want to work? There are some people who are content to receive a small stipend and spend their lives jut getting by without doing very much, but does that describe enough people to cause the collapse of a strong welfare society?

I think we probably are headed towards a post-scarcity (or low-scarcity) economy. Food costs as percentage of income in the U.S. have fallen quite a bit just in the last thirty years (http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-02-28/americas-shr...). People are already going to find that it takes less real effort to survive (http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21596529..., posted earlier to HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7235810). A different economic model seems inevitable.

Likewise, there will probably always be jobs that people don't want to do. Take oil rig work for example: hard, dangerous work, and it pays well, starting at the U.S. median wage for unskilled, inexperienced labor (http://money.cnn.com/2012/05/10/news/economy/oil_workers/) and going up from there.

As long as demand for this labor doesn't fall, if the available labor pool continues to shrink, those jobs should net greater incomes.

Maybe we'll see an economy, not quite like Star Trek's, but with a large leisure class and a well-paid class of plumbers, construction workers, mechanics, and technicians.

That would be kinda neat.

Honestly, capitalism would be a good system if we had just one example. Closest example is maybe Hongkong or Singapure, see http://www.heritage.org/index/ranking

You can add all sorts of political systems on top of capitalism, but it never goes away. The only thing you end up doing is hurting people.

I liked this article because it's an example of fiction learning from reality, then scientists trying to learn from fiction. There's a wonderful feedback loop at work between fiction and science that's neat to watch.

But this post-scarcity nonsense is tripe. I trade with you, not only because I need to eat or have shelter, but because you have something I want. And I have something you want. It is our _desires_ that cause the trade, nothing else. And I don't want to live in a world where humans stop wanting stuff. Sounds horribly stagnant and/or medicated.

So I liked the writing style, loved the theme, and kudos to the author for having such a good grasp of Trek lore. But from a rational-thinking standpoint, this guy ain't hitting on much. The quality of analysis itself is what's missing.

Some points in no particular order:

* In the limit of nanotechnology and fusion power we can produce anything (physical.) This forces us to confront our essential challenge which is the development of good character. All forms of government are attempts to manage human wickedness. Corollary: it very nearly doesn't matter what form of government obtains if the people in that government are virtuous.

* Permaculture (modelling agricultural systems on natural ecologies) is a non-technological mode of abundance.

* Communism: The Smurfs.

* It seems to me that the "natural" economic system varies with personal "distance". Broadly: immediate family/friends -> communistic; (Are the Amish commies? No.) neighbors -> barter / reciprocal gift-giving; strangers -> capitalism.

* If there is something to that last point then as the Internet shrinks personal distance we should expect a general trend from impersonal capitalistic forms to more personal "altruistic" forms (Gittip, etc...)

* As technology advances we are forced to become unwilling to "solve problems with bullets". If you are willing (for any reason) to commit violence you will perforce be kept from the really potent weapons. Already so-called "psych-ops" have become the cutting edge (no pun intended) of warfare: eliminate the enemy's desire to fight. It is only a matter of time before hippy-dippy shit becomes the obvious counter to hostilities by the intrinsic logic of warfare itself. ("Men Who Stare at Goats" is a documentary.)

- "we" actually have the capacity

- "we" don't have the will

I have the will but don't have the capacity. I am assuming that author also has the will. So, again, who are those "we" that don't have the will? And how is the author planning to make them to go against their will to not have the will?

A proof of post-scarcity happening presented is the amount of obesity in US. Let just pretend obesity is just a problem of having too much food, and not at all a problem of bad nutrition or genetics. The fact still remains that while there are a lot of obesity in usa, there still have a lot of hunger in other parts of the world. Could not it be just a repartition problem rather than abundance ?

There's an other sign that could lead to think we're indeed not at the edge of post-scarcity. Currently, many previously called poor countries are getting wealthier. What do we observe in previously called rich countries ? Economical crisis hitting harder and harder. That may not be a coincidence.

Careful, having the capacity to do something does not mean you should do it.

An excellent way to grow a starving population from 80MM people to 800MM people in about 80 years is to feed them (these numbers aren't made up).

Then all you have to do is just feed their children, and their children, and their children, until that population hits some type of a pivotal point where everything becomes great, they become independant, responsible, have a self-sustaining economy, government, start having only 1.4 children, etc.

The chances of it all going horribly wrong is very high, but why not balloon the population of the world, and have all those new soles competing over limited resources.

I'd suggest the writer reads his Marx and Engels, and even some Adam Smith before venturing into writing on topics like this.

That's a view that's championed, interestingly, by both the far Left (Marxist and Socialist economists) and the Right (business lobbies, various cornucopian ideologues, putatively much of the Koch-backed propogandasphere, and their Libertarian sycophants). Curious bedfellows.

I've only recently run across an essay of Garrett Hardin's (of "Tragedy of the Commons" and "Lifeboat Ethics", with whom I've long been acquainted), "The Feast of Malthus" (http://www.garretthardinsociety.org/articles_pdf/feast_of_ma...) which explores this idea further. He notes specifically:

I think that a single overarching view accounts for these and many other invectives put forward by Marxists and liberals during the past century and a half: this is the tightly held denial of limits in the supply of terrestrial resources. Friedrich Engels, Marx's collaborator and financial supporter, asserted baldly that "The productivity of the land can be infinitely increased by the application of capital, labour and science."

Much of the essay continues on to discuss population. The upshot being: you can accept unconstrained consumption (but limits on population), or unrestricted procreation, with severe restrictions on individual consumption.

There is no universal freedom.

Consider "the right to privacy", "the right to a job" or the "right to healthcare". Less than a century ago, many of these rights didn't exist. Now, some people are saying access to the Internet is a basic human right!

So here's my theory - in a society where technology advances so much that the basic needs of humans are met with the need of little human interaction, two things will occur: 1) More things will be determined as basic human rights. A certain baseline for wealth, even. 2) We will shift more and more to being a generation of artists. I believe an AI complete being that we create will never be able to replicate a fundamental understanding of being human. Books, plays, shows, art will be a human endeavor, for humans, by humans.

I believe that some sort of social capitalism will exist, where the baseline is met and those who achieve great success through art (or rarely, science), will have the opportunity to create more wealth.

As for the planned economies, well we saw how well those worked. I know, I know, the people coming up with ideas now will of course do better than THOSE people. Yet that is the typical lack of hubris politicians always show, just like ACA - of course it will be better than how those other people did it because we are so smart.

Keep telling me about the EU safety net and I will keep pointing out Greece and riots in other EU countries. Sorry but I tire of hearing about a safety net then reading how bad off some of these people are. Whats the point of a net when so many slip through or never had a chance to get caught.

Sure, China only has the second biggest economy in the world.

Also for the USSR, once the civil war ended and the American soldiers and so forth had been kicked out, and Stalin gained political control - the economy had incredible growth. While the West was mired in Depression, Russia was going gangbusters building steel works and such. European and American workers went there to work, because there was work there and not the West. American companies went there as well as they were hiring contractors while American businesses were not. Russia's economy did very well under Stalin. People talk about the stagnation during the Brezhnev years, which is true, but they ignore the booming economy from the 1920s to the 1950s/1960s.

An early Mars colony would probably resemble organizationally a family/village but as soon as you get distinct locations that produce various raw materials and are run by different communities you'd probably have to fall back to facilitate free trading. It would be interesting to observe if the growing planetary GDP tied to a deflationary cryptocurreny would lead to similar boom and bust cycles as the 1870-1920s. On a planet that's close to the Asteroid belt with its resources that might lead to fascinating trading opportunities :-)

Are there examples of menial jobs in the Star Trek universe? I would imagine by then there simply are no menial jobs. I'm not sure what menial job examples there are that can't be automated.

The jobs left over are interesting jobs. I'd imagine the motivation to do so are on par with the same motivation to get a phd. Few people get phds solely to get better job prospects, but rather do it for personal enlightenment and passion.

Also the same goes for the infinitely wealthy. If you accumulate billions of dollars and die donating those billions to charity, you weren't motivated solely to have more wealth, but something greater than that.

The economy will simply optimize all such tasks out of the system. Surfaces won't need more than the quickest of spot cleaning, people will get used to checking out their own groceries, they'll go get their own drink refills and clean off their own tables.

Let's suppose Sisko's restaurant is actually good. Now people want to eat there. There are two options: either Sisko raises the price until the number of people that can eat there matches the number of seats (supply and demand) OR there's a huge line outside the restaurant until the wait time is high enough that most people don't want to eat there anymore. Since there is no money in this hypothetical society, option #2 is the only possibility. And in fact, this is going to happen at every good restaurant in the Federation. The only restaurants without lines will be the ones that suck, and the length of the line will be exactly proportional to how desireable it is to eat there.

Now you could say that there are tons of restaurants as good as Siskos. But unless human beings have radically changed and there are NO FOODIES whatsoever, there will be some restaurants that are better than others, and a significant fraction of people will prefer the better ones. And the absolute quality of the restaurants relative to today doesn't matter AT ALL - all that matters is that some are better than others. The only plausible reason for Siskos to not have a line is that it is at best an average place to eat. (I shudder to imagine how long the lines must be for the best restaurant in the Federation on Valentine's Day! I think a black market based on Latinum would emerge based just on that).

So, one thing that the article doesn't realize is that the absolute amount of resources available is fairly tangential to the issue of money. The issue really is that people have differing preferences. Even in a society where nobody starves because you can produce an infinite amount of food, some people will want to eat at a nicer place. "Nicer" is always relative to what is commonly available so no matter how good the restaurants are, unless they are all equally good, there will be higher demand for the better ones.

See, you don't get around this problem by making more of everything. Suppose the Macdonalds of the future is the quality of a three star michelin restaurant today. Some people will want to eat at the magical 4 star michelin restaurants, but there won't be enough of them to go around. So there will be a line, or a cost.

And sorry to break the news to you: A capitalistic system can not be run without growth and nobody has ever been able to show how it is possible to run a "steady-state" economy,

The end is near. Enjoy the ride!

Another resource that will probably always be limited: attractive mates. I think that is a good example to think about when you think about Utopia. Of course plastic surgery will be free, too, as well as psychotherapy, so perhaps we all can be perfect mates, too.

Of course, a post-scarcity world is inherently incomprehensible to people who are economists, in much the same way a rational world motivated by ethics is incomprehensible to a religious person. The first sign of this is vocabulary, they'll insist on a "post scarcity economy" or a "religion of science" respectively. While it's probably true that there will always be aspects of supply and demand, and it's likely also true that people will always believe in certain ideas, it's really questionable if these terms as they're being used still mean anything.

These word choices are a subconscious expression of the perceived impossibility of an idea. For example, a world with (almost) no manual labor. Or a world where things are so abundant that for practical purposes of daily life there is no shortage of supply.

When looking at Star Trek it's first and foremost important to keep in mind that these are stories intended to entertain. As such it's moot to try and incorporate every episode of every show into some kind of big common canon. The issue is not whether "Federation Credits" (must) exist, the trick here is to look at the broader concept presented.

There are scientific indications that the general idea of the Star Trek "economy" is valid. When a civilization gets access to advanced robotics, the ability to mine entire star systems for resources, and advanced 3d printers, it generates a setting that pretty much speaks for itself. The interesting aspect here is that this state of affairs is very likely in the cards for humanity's future.

Of course, there are extremely strong aspects of our society still prominent in Star Trek. This is grossly unrealistic, but probably necessary for storytelling purposes. For example, DS9 was really out of touch with the in-universe realities of manufacturing and labor, but it made for some pretty awesome stories.

I believe in the future we have a choice to make when it comes to scarcity, and the battle lines are already drawn today. People who are invested in the status quo will not only tell everyone it's impossible but they will go to great lengths in keeping scarcity alive. Artificial scarcity perpetrated by big powerful players is already a big staple in today's system, and that's only going to get more audacious with growing technical capabilities. I think a good argument could be made that this will lead to horrific social and economic pathologies, and it probably already has.

The big reason the alternatives are scary to a lot of people is not just because they fear a loss of traditional values and social cohesion. It's scary to them because this kind of future is inherently experimental and so far doesn't seem to yield itself to planning from on-high. This means there will most likely be a huge loss of power and influence in the turmoils ahead and it's going to be very difficult to port existing power structures to that new kind of society.

Whether this fundamental transformation is even stoppable in the long run is an open question. There are certainly scenarios imaginable where we just stagnate instead of moving on. It's also not inconceivable that the human civilization might fracture and split up into different groups pursuing their own trajectories - and at least one of them might elect to keep scarcity alive indefinitely.

Also, interesting link from there on The Culture, another of my favourite scifi universes: http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm

And some materials would still be scarce. They could not replicate dilithium, it had to be mined. So like oil is today, such materials would become the new next of power.

Um...