I think this is a useless exercise. The economics of Star Trek won't be coherent, because it was pieced together through multiple series and some wishful thinking while retaining certain properties needed for the universe to be interesting. You can't have a TV show about drone ships flying around and beaming back exploration data via subspace.
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.
> Concrete and glass might be virtually unlimited, but certain metals are definitely not.
Automated asteroid mining basically takes care of that. Even the largest asteroids can be easily excavated right down to the core, and many of them contain a wide abundance of many metals, basically everything from Lithium to Copper to Nickel to Platinum or Iridium. With low gravity and 24/7 in situ solar power any reasonable separation technology can just be let loose and given time to work. Near Earth orbit there's more than 10 gigajoules of energy available per year per square meter from solar power, and that includes factoring in the efficiency of conversion.
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is a fascinating take on a post-scarcity economy. As I remember it, though, whuffies were not a zero-sum game to be traded like currency; they were more like followers on Twitter or likes on Facebook. Sort of institutionalized Klout [1].
James P. Hogan's "Voyage from Yesteryear" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyage_from_Yesteryear is another SciFi work where a post-scarcity economy figures prominently, including some funny scenes with new arrivals who take a while to adjust. (Hoarding behavior for a while, then they bring all the stuff back when they are comfortable with it).
I have experienced this myself in small measure when I took a job where all the snacks and beverages were free.
Another interesting SciFi exploration of economics is the Unincorporated Man (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4025200-the-unincorporat...). Everyone is incorporated at birth, and trades shares in themselves (paying dividends once they are earning) to advance in life. People who don't have majority of themselves can't make their own decisions.
I liked the idea, but didn't enjoy the book. It was frustrating to see concepts only partially explored. For example: Apparently nobody in the civilization thought of using non-voting shares.
I thought that the concept was interesting, but their implementation was really boring and lackluster. It's been a while since I read it, but I felt that they didn't explore the implications of everyone's incorporated or how we got to that state as much as they probably should have.
I couldn't even finish the second book because it didn't even have the interesting bits about people being incorporated, it was just a poorly written sci-fi war novel.
"Limes inferior" by Janusz Zajdel (1982) is also very interesting. Sci-fi in a post scarcity world where stupid are provided for, and smart are forced to work.
I've been playing with the idea of a 'karma economy': everyone starts with 1.0 karma. If someone uses a service or product you made, your karma increases by c * (user's karma), where c is some coefficient. Karma also decays over time, but never drops below 1.0. Creators of expensive (scarce) items could hold onto those items until someone with high karma wants one, thus maximizing their own karma gain.
I'm no an economist, so I have no idea if something like this would work, but it's a lot of fun to think about.
Is this similar to eh whuffies from Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom?
That sounds very similar, though I believe that giving someone whuffie is a voluntary action that you do when you like a service/product/etc that you got from them rather than being automatic and you can also decrease their whuffie if they do something you don't like.
The main hurdle facing post-scarcity economics is not actually scarcity. Rather it is the elitist class, who will do everything it can to ensure continued scarcity in order to keep their socioeconomic positions. We already see this today in a number of ways. For instance, if a commodity isn't scarce, it can be made scarce by effectively creating a monopoly (even if it doesn't appear to be a monopoly from the outside) and hording the commodity. The diamond industry is a good example of this. Another technique is using complex laws to ensure a great deal of labor and supplies are needed to comply. Tax laws are a great example of this. How many accountants would loose their jobs if taxes could be done in five minutes on the back of a napkin? Probably the worst tactic of all is simply the promotion of continued population growth. We really do NOT have enough resources on this planet to give everyone on it a modern life style. And it is imperative for populations to shrink. Until we are well on our way to the stars this is not going to change. But our current economic models crumble in the face of decreasing population. So we can only expect more scarcity in the future, not less.
If you change incentive systems in countries to make children & marriage an economic negative you get population shrinkage. Educate women, reduce infant mortality, free birth control, dual income house holds, expensive rents, etc. Almost every developed nation is reproducing at below replacement levels as a result.
Then perhaps it is time to start looking for an alternative economic system. I've been developing a framework to explore new economic systems for several years. http://babblingbrook.net
There are two pressures in society. One pushing in the direction you say and another pushing towards a post scarcity economy. Which will prevail is difficult to say, but I suspect that in the short term the status-quo definitely have an advantage, but in the long term they will most likely lose.
The reason is due to a little known theory called non equilibrium thermodynamics, which essentially states that if the reconfiguring of a system (an atom, a cell, a solar system, a hurricane, society etc...) can produce more entropy in the universe, then given the opportunity, it will do that.
A moribund restrictive society that inhibits innovation creates less entropy than one where everyone is free to innovate, investigate and have fun in ways that expend energy. This doesn't mean that this will automatically happen, in the same way that biological evolution uses chance to produce more adapted species, so do all forms emergent complexity due to non equilibrium thermodynamics (evolution is just one organising principle). Also, it needs to be possible for the system to organise in this way. Societies organising principle is its socio-economic system. We have had several in the past, such as a monarchic command economy, but today the most successful is free market democracy. There is no reason to presume that this is the best one. Free market democracy became possible due to several inventions and innovations, such as coins, the printing press and debt. Recently we have invented the internet and this makes many new systems possible.
Sorry if this is poorly written. I have just bashed it out and would like to write more, but I have to go and get my daughter from grandmas so I don't have time...
One capitalist hybrid which does not distort the market is a free market with a basic income [1], i.e. an unconditional income as a right of being a citizen. At what level - survival, comfort, or luxury - the income is set is an open question to each society. Too high and scarcity erupts in the form of inflation, too low and inequality and populism corrode the society.
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.
One capitalist hybrid which does not distort the market is a free market with a basic income
Yes, it does distort. Why work on a manufacturing line producing required and high-demand materials and equipment when instead you can be creating arts and crafts that very few people would want and adds little to the productive capacity of the economy?
People need to realize that prices are not just a pain in the butt, but they are useful pieces of economic information.
The key point to basic income, in my opinion, is that it seems like it would increase social welfare while minimally distorting prices and being cheap to administer.
So let's take this to its logical conclusion, that lots of people don't work/do "useless" jobs, but still want to buy high-demand goods. Demand gets higher, and prices for those goods go up. Does this break the economic signalling mechanism? I'd argue that it doesn't, price signals are still firmly in place. Producers of high-demand goods can afford to raise salaries and attract more workers. There is still an incentive to work.
On top of that, necessary goods with a satiation point (e.g. food and shelter) would be more resistant to these effects. You don't need more food than you can eat or more houses than you can live in. If you aren't working, you still have to mind your money and budget accordingly; it's not like everything is free.
You are missing one important factor in your analysis (which took me a long time to figure out). People with lower income spend more on consumption goods, than the higher income individuals, who spend more on investments. This is important, because the rich are investing much of their wealth in growth, whereas the poor are spending on necessities and happiness. Transferring money from the rich to the poor also transfers money from investment to consumption, which has important effects on long term economic growth.
One must remember that the US grew only 0.5% faster than the UK through the 20th century, and this led to a large difference in outcome.
There's one important question you've forgotten to ask: what exactly are the wealthy investing in the growth of? The answer, of course, is the production and sale of consumption goods, either directly or indirectly - all of their investment returns have to come from there eventually. Take that away and you'd just be left with a bunch of investors trying to make money from selling other investors ways to make money from yet more investors, in a mass of ponzis and swindles producing no real economic output.
I think there's a serious misunderstanding here. Any basic income that is high enough to be useful will also be high enough to be distortive. Any basic income which is low enough not to distort will also be low enough not to be useful.
Consider a few thought experiments. Set a basic income to $100 per month. Time 300 million americans that's only $3b per month or $36 billion per year. That's a small enough portion of the economy that it's totally doable, but not useful.
Now instead let's set it to $10k per month. That's definitely enough to pay a mortgage, cars, etc. Times 300 million folks we end up at $3 trillion a month or $36 trillion a year. GDP in 2013 was about 17 trillion so we've definitely distorted prices by a huge margin. The price of everything probably triples.
OK, you say, let's dial it back just a tad and calibrate it to the size of the economy. Let's set our target at 30% of total GDP which we would argue we can totally do since the government historically gets about 19% of GDP so growing that by 50% should be doable. Of course this means that the federal government provides no services or does nothing except for basic income; no military, no NSF, no dept of education, none of that stuff. Ignore it for now. 17 trillion time 0.3 = 5.1 trillion a year, or 425 billion a month. Divide that by 300 million people and you get $1416 per month.
That's not a TERRIBLE number, if you live in a rural area you could pay a mortgage, car payment and even buy some food for that. If you lived in a big city that might cover your rent, but probably not.
But wait, you say, there aren't 300 million adults in the US? OK let's assume it's only 200 million. That number goes up to $2125 per month and you don't get a check until you turn 18. Yeah that's better, for sure, you might even make rent in a big city. In a rural area you're doing fairly nicely.
But how do we raise this money? There's a difference between income and wealth, if you took every penny from all the Forbes 400 list you'd have $2 trillion. But actually you wouldn't because you're assuming that you can sell their assets for cash at exactly the price they're valued at right now. If you did that you might recoup 80% because it'd be a giant sell-off. But let's ignore that for a minute. Let's also say that you by the time you get down to every person whose net worth is over a million (remember, only the rich) that you've raised another 2 trillion (pie in the sky, the distribution of wealth isn't anywhere near equal remember?). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_members_of_the_Forbes_4... At that point you've got enough cash to make this whole thing run for about 10 months.
The total US income for all people in 2013 was $13 trillion. https://bber.unm.edu/econ/us-tpi.htm Take all that money and divide it up between 200 million adults and you've got $65k per person per year once you turn 18. BUT that's it. Janitor? $65k. Doctor? $65k. Lawyer? $65k. Startup founder? $65k. CEO? $65k. VC? $65k. Nobody, anywhere, ever could make more than $65k or else you don't have somewhere to take the money from. And at that point I think it might be hard to convince people to work harder, take more risks with their personal wealth, study longer, etc if NO MATTER WHAT they can't make more than $65k.
If you want to allow people to make more, that's OK. But for every person that makes $75k under this scheme you've got to find someone to only give $55k and to convince them that it's right, or dial the basic income back to $55k and start giving only select bonuses.
Of course, remember that all this ignores the idea that we still have to provide all those federal functions that we're currently providing.
You misunderstand Basic income as providing equal wealth to everyone... That is not the goal. The point is to provide the bare minimum amount of money required for someone to survive. You would base the amount of money each person gets on the cost of living where they live, just like how wages very from place to place today. The amount of Basic income wouldn't be the same everywhere.
Basic Income isn't socialism, people would still work, they just wouldn't work as much. Since the Basic income only takes care of your basic needs if you want to buy a new tech toy you will have to go to work and get the money to pay for it. Since your basic needs are already taken care of, businesses won't have to provide a "living wage", there would either be a very low minimum wage or no minimum wage at all so a much smaller percentage of a businesses's revenue would go towards paying employees meaning more profit. Hopefully along with basic income we would also adopt universal healthcare that would further take finical burden off of businesses.
> You misunderstand Basic income as providing equal wealth to everyone...
I can see how you might think that, but I disagree. What I am trying to do is show that the idea that a basic income can provide without distorting prices isn't grounded in reality.
What is the bare minimum amount of money required for someone to survive? And who defines what "surviving" is? If you're married with six kids (four currently of the right age for private school) your "bare minimum" might be $25k/mo. No that's not legit? What is? Does the "bare minimum" require that you get only a small 1 bedroom to yourself? Or an efficiency? Or maybe you should be required to live with roommates to bring your rent cost down? Do you get more money if you have kids, or less? What happens if you get married or divorced?
If you live somewhere where the cost of living is high you get more money; how do you ensure people actually live where they say they do? What would prevent me and 100 of my closest friends from all saying we live in a shithole in NYC while we use that money to buy all kinds of good lives for ourselves in more rural areas? The cost of living differential is probably at least 2x and maybe higher, so there's a lot of incentive to abuse the system.
So the businesses have more profits, but higher taxes right? The money for a basic income doesn't just magically appear does it? Where does the money come from to pay it?
The point of the article was that this applies to a nearly post scarcity society. For example, suppose we lived in an Asimov style world where autonomous robots could produce enough food, clothing and housing to sustain everyone on Earth even if Every Single Person decided to never work again. In such a society, the basic income can be determined by what the robots can produce. I think it's interesting to think about what could be possible in a future society, as opposed to just the fact that this probably won't work today.
Yeah that's cool too, but where does the $100 trillion to build all the robots come from? Robots ain't cheap and it's not like it's all software license fees either, you need to actually pay people (or robots) to dig ore out of the ground and to use energy to transform it into metal and then form those ingots into usable shapes and then transform those usable shapes into robot frames and then attach electrical or hydraulic actuators and pumps and put controlling circuitry in there and then you still have to have the control system. So far all that stuff is owned privately and I don't foresee the people who've spent millions or billions of dollars of private capital to make all that exist suddenly say "hey it's cool, we're giving all this stuff away for the greater good!"
Well, if the robots can produce ten times more then the amount needed to sustain everyone, then the government can tax the robots productivity at 10% to achieve the same thing.
You're going to say that that's theft at gunpoint probably, and I'm going to say I don't have any moral problem with that. Taxes have existed since human beings first banded together to form large groups and they aren't going away anytime soon.
So is this just going to turn into another stupid libertarian argument about how all taxes are evil? Because I'm pretty sure that debate has been settled in every single successful civilization since the dawn of time.. Taxes won.
Lastly, I think your viewpoint is pretty evil honestly. So there is a robotic surplus sufficient to feed the world multiple times over in this scenario and people still starve because fuck you I own the robots and I'm only going to help myself? If that's the world there will be a revolution and I'll be on the side of the dirty hippies.
>You're going to say that that's theft at gunpoint probably, and I'm going to say I don't have any moral problem with that.
No I'm not going to argue that it's theft at gunpoint, actually. But thanks for trying to paint me into a corner.
What I am saying is that the world is complicated and just because the robots can make enough stuff or grow enough food in a theoretical sense doesn't mean that utopia is suddenly achieved.
>Lastly, I think your viewpoint is pretty evil honestly. So there is a robotic surplus sufficient to feed the world multiple times over in this scenario and people still starve because fuck you I own the robots and I'm only going to help myself? If that's the world there will be a revolution and I'll be on the side of the dirty hippies.
You don't even know what my viewpoint is so I don't see how you can characterize it as evil! I can't believe how quickly this turned into "you must be a dirty libertarian so fuck you!"
I don't particularly LIKE taxes and a world where taxes magically didn't have to exist but I still got to use roads and schools and fire departments and police and stuff, I'd be OK with that. But since none of those people work for free, I accept taxes as necessary even if not my favorite.
> then the government can tax the robots productivity at 10% to achieve the same thing.
OK what you just said there is that the government is going to take all the useful output of the robots and leave the owners with no useful output. If the robots can produce 10x whats needed and the government takes the first 1x then what the owners of the robots do with the other 9x? Nobody needs the other 9x, so by definition they couldn't sell it.
Disagree with me? OK great, I want to sell you a million liters of air at 1ATM for $0.001 per liter. Wait, you already have more than enough air? And everyone else does too? Fuck who is going to buy this air so that I can make good on my investment?!?!
If the robots were going to be taxed at 10% of productivity you'd basically see the total robot workforce get reduced by 90%. If you spend a billion dollars on a factory you need to get your money back and if you can't sell the excess capacity then you're going broke.
The best scenario I can think of is that the robots become so cheap that eventually everyone becomes largely self-sufficient. But even then you'll still have problems because of land ownership; if you can make everything you need just so long as you have access to land then the price of land will go way, way up.
Maybe once you get to space everyone can have as much of whatever that they need and we can achieve rough approximations of utopia but maybe not. Maybe once we get to space everyone wants their own 500 ft luxury spaceliner and there's not enough raw materials to go around.
I think part of the problem is that human desires are basically unlimited. Maybe not everyone has infinite ability to consume, but the human race, collectively, could consume nearly infinite amounts of anything. So any attempt to imagine "well what happens in the future when we can easily satisfy everyone's current desires" accidentally ignores the idea that in the future people will probably have desires that are bigger than they are today.
There was a time when many people shared a large single room house in Europe in the middle ages. Then someone invented the fireplace and the nobility gave themselves their own rooms. Eventually it became common for everyone to have their own room. Then, everyone has their own house/condo/apartment though sometimes shared between several generations. Now in the US it's quite common for a single person of 25 to have their own 1BD apartment or even a whole house. 500 years ago you'd have to have been filthy rich to have that. Today it's possible for someone with a high school diploma and knowledge of a skilled trade to afford it.
500 years from today I agree that meeting everyone's current demands will probably be a joke and the robots will be able to do it all. But what new desires will human beings have that we can't even imagine right now? I'm not saying that a Star Trek economy could never exist, but that I don't foresee it happening do to the fact that human nature will probably be the same.
I apologize for characterizing you a certain way. The viewpoint I was "painting you into a corner" on is unfortunately imo super common on HN.
I think you have a contradiction in your viewpoint though. On one hand you say that human desires are unlimited, and on the other hand you say that if you tax robot productivity by 10% that means that the owners can't sell the other 90%. How is it possible that nobody needs the other 90% if human wants are unlimited?
What I'm saying is that basic human needs are NOT unlimited. A human being is an animal that needs a certain amount of food, clothing, and shelter to stay alive. And furthermore, in the world we live in today, not every human being gets all the food, clothing and shelter necessary to survive. That's an empirical physical fact of reality. What I'm proposing is that the 10% surplus would be sufficient to provide for these needs, NOT for everything that anyone's heart could desire. Now it's possible that in a Star Trek future, the robots could even produce 100x what every human being needs to stay alive. In that case, you could give every human being 10x what they need and still have a 90% surplus. And because as you pointed out, human wants are unlimited, the owners of the robots will still be able to sell the 90% surplus.
BTW, I don't actually believe this is practical to implement today. So I wouldn't advocate this level of massive redistribution. However, in a hypothetical super productive future society, I might.
P.S. If you want to hear my reason why this society ISNT as good as it sounds (which has nothing to do with taxes or the morality of redistribution) see my post here:
Thanks for arguing like an adult. It's greatly appreciated.
I do agree that I have a contradiction in my argument; you're spot on. I'm going to chalk that up to not fully explaining things.
The first gallon of water per day I REALLY NEED to drink. The next I'd really, really like to have to brush my teeth and wash a bit. The next 5 gallons I still really want for washing and cooking. The next 20 are for bathing and laundry. The next hundred don't do me anywhere near as much good and eventually the utility I get from an additional gallon of water goes below the $0.01 per gallon that I pay my utility, so I don't use more.
This kind of decreasing marginal value happens everywhere in the economy. For a lot of things (like energy) the demand is nearly flat but for large portions of the economy the demand is highly nonlinear. In other words, doubling the price might reduce consumption by 80% or more.
In those situations if you take the first marginally very valuable portion of the production away from the factory owners they have to raise prices on the rest to recoup their losses. But the increased prices bring volume down, which could potentially increase prices again.
I am sure that there are some situations where the 10% surplus really would be enough to provide for everyone's basic needs (however the hell you define that) and not totally fuck over the factory/robot owners. But there will also be large swaths of the economy where you can't.
I do think taxes are fundamentally immoral because I can't get past the theft-like nature of "pay the taxes or you'll go to jail" but I'm pragmatic and understand that taxes are better than a completely uneducated populace. And honestly I'd be much happier with a world where taxes were only 10% in total rather than the 20%-40% that they are now. I just don't think you can feed, clothe, shelter, etc the whole world on 10% of total production. It would be great and I'd love to live in that world but I really feel like there's something that would prevent it; I can't put my finger on it but I'm pretty sure it's there.
Well we're debating a totally hypothetical situation. The premise to begin with is that we're talking about a far future post scarcity society. If you want to say that's implausible, sure, I might agree with you, but that's not the issue.
As far as the theft like nature of taxes, we'll just have to agree to disagree. The concept of theft in and of itself only exists in the context of a society where laws exist and are enforced. That society can only exist with taxes. In the jungle, there's only what you can carry and what you can protect, and what stronger people want to take from you. But I can't say more without understanding where you get your morality from. If you get your understanding of morality from religion for example, most major religions justify allowing the government or head of state to use force to sustain that government.
P.S. As far as the marginal value of goods; yes I think you are right in that if you took 10% of each good (like fresh water) and distributed it that way it would probably cause huge economic problems. My guess is that any workable way of implementing this tax would be more complex and progressive, much like our current tax system doesn't tax everything equally. For example, luxuries would probably be taxed more, and basic necessities such as water would probably be taxed less. I have no idea what the details of such a system would be, it would probably take a lot of thought to work out what would make sense.
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.
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.
> Why work on a manufacturing line producing required and high-demand materials and equipment
We're rapidly reaching the point where 'manufacturing' will be what farming is today.
Farming employes (iirc) 3% of the US population. Yet they feed _everyone_. No one _has_ to be a farmer: people _choose_ farming.
Automation allows fewer people to make more stuff. People will choose to labor in a factory for the same reason they choose farm work: it's challenging, fun, and an interesting way to make a living.
The problem is that for certain goods, the demand becomes completely inelastic for individuals: water, food, shelter, security. The starving are not, and cannot be, rational economic actors. Slightly redenominating prices would be a small price to pay for millions of new, actually rational economic actors.
> If it were, the credit would be too much like money because a) accounting is done in it, b) it is issued by a governing body (like a fiat currency) and c) it is fungible, i.e. you can already buy things with it and if you could buy things with it AND a and b were true, it would pretty much be a currency.
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.
The Joule is basically the currency of the Federation. While most of the time in the Federation people don't use currency and get what they need/want, in Voyager because there suddenly was scarcity again they implemented replicator rationing.
I wasn't the biggest fan of Voyager, I saw episodes here and there so maybe someone can explain this idea to me. I saw a few of the episodes where they described the rationing of replicator usage due to some shortage of something. I never understood this as the replicators are described as transforming a base material into near anything a person asks for which required energy to perform this task.
The ship was the source of the energy and canon suggests that as long as the systems were working properly there was an over-abundance of energy available for use. Granted it wouldn't be a good idea to ask for a cup of tea while the ship had full shields engaged with constant phasers firing during a battle. But during normal warp hops there shouldn't be a problem. If the power system was having problems then it stands to reason that going to warp wouldn't work as it required an immense amount of energy to accomplish. Which is the reason for the massive power system in the first place.
It couldn't be a shortage of base material because just about anything could be used and the ships took advantage of a massive recycling effort that almost everything discarded was transformed back into the base material that was stored on the ship. It would be easy to replace if need be so it had to be an energy shortage of some type.
I always felt the replicator rationing was just a writer's way to excuse Neelix suddenly becoming a cook on the ship for additional storylines. It didn't make sense to me. So, what was the rationale behind the replicator rationing? Did it even make sense?
To be fair, I had lots of problems with Voyager which is apparently why I never cared for it. I probably just couldn't get into the spirit of things to enjoy the show as envisioned.
- not sure about the over-abundance of energy. I remember several episodes where energy shortage was a plot point. It's also possible that assembling matter atom-by-atom takes a non-trivial amount of energy compared to warp travel.
- I also thought the replicators did have certain limitations - eg. you can't replicate living beings. If the "resolution" was limited at the atomic level, you would still need a certain amount of hydrogen and oxygen to replicate water.
I agree, energy problems were plot points, but they were often connected to equipment malfunctions as well.
If replicators were a non-trivial amount of energy as compared to warp drive they wouldn't allow such frivolous use of it constantly on the ship, every hour of every day.
Replicators can replicate nearly anything except very specific complex materials. The limitations they have is in the amount of energy required to create the object and whatever items they are restricted from creating. So the replicators in rooms only have access to enough energy to create typical items you might need your room. Although I believe they can create weapons as well but that would be restricted if your restricted to your quarters due to misconduct. If you require bigger and/or more complex items there are one or more locations on the ship that function as "shops" were you can obtain such items. Plus there's a theory that hasn't been shown anywhere that I'm aware of is that there are large replicators on ships that are capable of creating parts for the ship which would make sense. Star ships would be created with very large part replicators located at orbiting ship yards. Not large enough replicator nor energy source to just create an entire ship from a replicator.
You could replicate a living being because that's the same technology used in the transporters. Beaming down to a planet and back means they replicated you twice. It's just that I would imagine there would sever restrictions on replicating living things for various reasons (ethically, legally, and for safety) and is only allowed via transporters with trained personnel. There could be a discussion over what the "characters" inside the holodeck actually are as they are most likely created with the same technology and have been shown to become self-aware. There have been suggestions that these "characters" are in fact real people but as far as I know they never directly addressed exactly what they are in terms of "living beings" or not. Other suggestions from the show suggest they could be projections and contact with them is handled via clever uses of shield technology but I'd like to know how they simulate the feeling of warm skin with shields. It would mean Riker is always kissing moving force fields, which I wouldn't put past him.
To be fair, Voyager completely destroyed its own credibility as an interesting story to establish the post-scarcity angle. If you count all the shuttles and torpedoes they lost throughout the series and the continual damage and repair to the ship, it's obvious that one tiny ship must somehow have the capability to produce nearly unlimited output, because otherwise they wouldn't have a ship left after seven years.
Not really. Over the course of the show they show a plausible number of crewmen (can't remember the exact number, but it was around the size of the stated crew count for the In Intrepid class).
Also, only a tiny number of people died in the first episode (I think only seven), and somehow it was almost the entire command staff, which seems really implausible.
One thing that always bothered me about The Federation was how they treated certain worlds and members.
Recall the TNG episode Journey's End where the Enterprise is sent to remove what amounted to some 'Space Native Americans' from a planet the Federation had given to Cardassians in a treaty. The inhabitants in question were members of the Federation (with all the rights that was supposed to confer) but they were (going to be) forced off the planet. The only way they could stay on their planet was to give in to the treaty and make themselves inhabitants of what was then a Cardassian planet (and arguably Cardassian property).
Then there is the TNG movie Insurrection. Where a group of settlers who are not Federation citizens were going to be transported off of their planet against their will. But Picard decides that they deserve to stay on the planet so the Enterprise destroys the Federation/alien ships that were sent to do the relocation (among other things and aliens).
So why is it the Federation wont fight for actual Federation members, but they will fight for some random civilization because of 'reasons'?
Ok I'm done with my Star Trek rant and feel like a terrible nerd now. Thank you for letting me vent and for the link. Nerd gland expressed.
Edit: For a laugh Google the Red Letter Media Harry Plinket review of Insurrection which goes deeper into this.
To be fair, the planet in Journey's End wasn't a full member but a colony world, which means they don't have the same rights as a full member. Plus, I think they just settled on that planet which would mean the planet isn't under Federation jurisdiction, just the citizenry (provided they're Fed citizens).
Additionally, the Cardies have either a similar or better military compared to the Federation, and the treaty helped prevent full out war (that later showed up, but in the form of the Dominion War). Giving up a few planets with small populations doesn't seem all that bad for stopping what could've been the largest war in the quadrant.
As for Insurrection, it's commonly accepted that Dougherty was working alone, without the support of the rest of Starfleet or the Federation. It's not implausible, considering he was an admiral and could very easily order ships places without much questioning.
The Son'a are nowhere near as advanced as the Cardassians, the Federation could easily take them if they tried to start something.
It was never firmly established that the Cardassians alone were a match for the Federation (much less so if the Klingons were involved). If they were, Captain Jellico's aggressive negotiations in "Chain of Command" wouldn't have worked. It's more a question of the Federation bending over backwards to avoid conflict.
In Insurrection, it's established that the rejuvenating radiation from the planet made the crew feel more youthful and fighty.
To be fair, some of the writers did a great job of creating brilliant episodes, despite the setting. My favorites are the DS9 episodes focused on Garak, many of which remind me of Phillip K Dick short stories, in that they make the viewer question the true motives (and natures) of all the characters, combined with inconclusive facts.
Oh yes! More than a few episodes from all eras are quite fun to watch.
But the universe, as a whole, disappoints.
I don't know if Paramount would have let them, but if the writer's for TNG (and DS9, and so on) had been free to ignore the canon from the preceding shows the entire thing would be much better.
"Same idea", they could have said "But we're not going to be constrained by what came before. Accept it on it's own terms."
tl;dr the Federation is a not a political union, its a human-dominated protection racket. Non-human worlds pay Earth for protection and Earth maintains a post-scarcity economy from living off the proceeds of tribute. In this context, the Prime Directive ensures ambitious captains don't takeover planets that are likely to be a net drain on resources.
That was entirely worth the time to read. Very interesting take on it and it also shows how damaged I am by online forums thinking it read like a perfect troll.
An interesting read, but there is one paragraph in particular that sounds a bit like an elaborate troll. Take a look at this:
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).
1) No trolling, just sarcasm. Not a comment on my personal beliefs, more along the lines of "wouldn't wash with a bunch of American TV writers during the cold war." I hope it's pretty clear that someone who wrote this isn't so into a "ruling class"!
2) Okay that one might have been a bit of a troll. There is some good heteroeconomics out there. Including, this, I hope. ;) But yeah. The goal here was to paint a way to the future without getting bogged down in that world.
I thought you were trolling when you cited parecon as an example of heterodox economics that was actually good. "Democratically" achieved job rotation to ensure everyone does an equal share of "empowering" and "disempowering" work? Really?
The way people talk about socialism and communism in the west show the sad state of our education system.
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"
>When you sit at the dinner table and ask for the salt, you get it.
Actually, it's you who has a fundamental misunderstanding of communism, and yes, this probably shows the sad state of our education system. Communism is not cooperation. Sitting down to dinner with family, is not Communism. Working on a project with your friend is not Communism. Donating money, time or skills is not Communism. Communism is a particular way of allocating scare resources (which also implies a particular government structure). Capitalism is another. Communism has been shown in practice to be a devastating, corrupt and wasteful system. It doesn't work in theory either because it creates huge incentives to cheat and lie (because if you don't inflate your need, your neighbor will and he'll get more - after all you have to prove your need before you get yours). I have more, but I think I made my point.
> Communism is a particular way of allocating scare resources (which also implies a particular government structure).
Such as salt at the table, or time spent at a company. You haven't actually explained what he got wrong about communism; you're just basely asserting a negation.
He defined Communsim as any positive interaction between people, and implicitly any negative interaction as capitlist subversion. Where does one even begin to explain why that's wrong? Communism is a socio-political theory. It's a way of defining a governing structure of our society Furthermore we live in a world of scarcity, so it also defines a way of distributing scarce resources amongst the population. As a counter-example, every example he gave, is perfectly allowable in a Capitalist society. Under Capitalism, people cooperate, and work together all the time. Sometimes there's a profit motive (e.g. a typical manufacturer may have hundreds of suppliers), and sometimes there isn't. With respect of the latter, Communists usually trot out Open-Source Software as a inherently Communist movement. Except that OSS exists comfortably in a Capitalist society, because Capitalism has no problem with people freely donating their time and skills towards any type of endeavour they choose. Your time belongs to you, do as you fit with it.
> He defined Communsim as any positive interaction between people, and implicitly any negative interaction as capitlist subversion.
No, he didn't.
> Communism is a socio-political theory.
No, it isn't. It's an economic system where the means of production is commonly owned. This has socio-political consequences, and socio-political requirements, but is not itself a socio-political system. Democracy is a socio-political system. Capitalism is not. Monarchy is a socio-political system. Communism is not. Meritocracy is a socio-political system. Distributism is not.
> As a counter-example, every example he gave, is perfectly allowable in a Capitalist society.
He never said otherwise. That was his entire point.
> Except that OSS exists comfortably in a Capitalist society, because Capitalism has no problem with people freely donating their time and skills towards any type of endeavour they choose.
Or you could acknowledge his actual point, which is that communism and capitalism are able to, and do, coexist.
The similarities between how people act within a firm (where a 'firm' is basically any sort of corporation, partnership, or similar economic entity) and within an ideal communist society are not a coincidence: a communist society is essentially just one very large firm.
But I think it shows a gross misunderstanding of both capitalism and communism to say something like "Our economy is firmly based on communist actions and the capitalists exploit this". It's not. Both concepts are very modern inventions, and the psychology of how people act within a firm (regardless of its size) is based on how people act within family units and bands: based on working towards shared goals and loose sense of reciprocity.
It's not a coincidence that money is not normally used between family members: people don't normally buy things off their family, but receive them as gifts/favours and then are expected to give similar value gifts/favours in the future (a gift economy). That's the psychology that the firm re-uses, and it predates both capitalism and communism.
Communists are those that recognize this basic psychology and promote it. The term is new, but as you have stated, and I agree, the psychology isn't. Nothing wrong with using a modern term to describe past actions. Imagine using the term "mind" or "will" to describe actions used by ancient Egyptians. Or the term "incentive" to describe cave men hunting.
I agree that the article went downhill, as he implied communism requires a centrally planned anything. It just proves the author has not read enough to understand the basic tenant of a communist-like economic system.
I wouldn't use Star Trek as a canon for post-scarcity economics, it's more like an inspiration. In fact we are seeing the elements of the vocational aspects already:
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...
Umm, documentary fallacy much? That and pretending like hundreds of scripts written by dozens of hands somehow cohere.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.)
If there is some day in the future where wars/battles are fought because the people involved were doing what they love which is LARPing... I'd be a very happy and amused person.
That is a beautiful, beautiful thought and plot device for a Sci-Fi book. Thank you for placing that into my mind.
So basically the fleet is EVE, the LARP. With all that entails: breathless accounts of massive, important battles, which are completely incoherent to people outside the culture of the fleet.
> Because Jean Luc Picard is a Federation citizen, and he wouldn't be happy as other than a starship captain.
There are strong hints in Iain M Banks' Culture series that a significant portion of the mission of Contact and Special Circumstances is giving humans with a pathological need for conflict and excitement something to do to keep them happy.
I got that impression most strongly in The Player of Games. (Minor spoiler alert.) The Minds could have sent an avatar or SC agent to destroy The Empire of Azad, but they figured, "Hey, this Gurgeh guy is bored and he's pretty good at strategy games. Let's kill two birds with one stone."
Good take, but the Enterprises have save the Federation from destruction on multiple occasions. With out them the Federation would have been assimilated, enslaved by the Klingons, destroyed by meglomanic advanced alien AIs...
You know how high school football players think football is Really Important? Of course it is. Great sack, your team just won the championship, and the girls went wild about your heroic accomplishments. It was a terrible tragedy earlier in the year when that one kid died of a concussion, but that only underscores how Really Important football is.
In-universe evidence: despite being in a reality with infinite numbers of capricious demigods, Earth isn't dead yet. This is because Earthlings are essentially capricious demigods by the standards of more primitive cultures, but we really enjoy slumming it.
I'm really enjoying patio11's really irreverant take on the subject, but it's not really necessary that their work be completely useless to support the thesis. Self-actualized people may perform useful work as well.
But it's also possible that robots have saved the Federation as many times as human-captained ships. I'd rather believe this than that it's because of the spirit-killing Section 31 being sneaky assholes behind everyone's back.
There are many enemies in the universe so Star Fleet is important. To name a few there are The Borg, The Makers, The Cardassians, The Romulans, And even the Klingons who are federation members.
War-like cultures would still exist even if the Federation believes they themselves have moved beyond that type of thing.
There are many enemies in the universe so Star Fleet is important.
Yes, but they're not enemies like Nazi Germany was an enemy, or like Al Qaeda was an enemy, or even like Bonnie and Clyde were enemies. They're enemies like a hornet's nest is an enemy. (If you're really cynical, they're enemies like the Protoss are an enemy, seen from the perspective of an American playing Starcraft. They exist to make your universe more fun.)
Think of how far ahead of the Klingon Empire the Federation is. They routinely have a single man with delusions of grandeur outwit the entire Klingon race and nobody thinks this is odd. We know that in the logic of the Trek universe if it's the entire Klingon High Command personally at the helm of 100 warbirds versus Wesley Crusher and his high school science project that Wesley is destined to win, right? You don't even need to see the universe from the outside to come to that conclusion. Ask a Ferengi to handicap that contest. He'd tell you "Rules of Acquisition #47: never, ever, ever bet against the humans. There's no profit in it. Ever."
Think of some power multiplier, X, for demonstrating the geometric mean between civilization's level of ability to effect their wishes on the cosmos. Multiplying the Aztecs by Xs gets you the colonial Spaniards. Multiplying the Spaniards by X gets you the US. Multiplying the US by X gets you the lowest starship captain ever depicted in the series. Multiplying them by X gets you to the Klingons. The Federation is still several powers of X beyond them.
This implies that the Federation could probably wipe out everybody else with a for loop, and probably consider that low-intensity conflict resolution. But that wouldn't be fun. Why hit the Borg with the Lance of Judgment when there are still so many stories to tell about how Picard proved that passion and ingenuity beat raw technological dominance? The Federation loves such stories as only a technological superpower can.
Totally agreed! With the exception of The Founders there isn't much competition out there besides The Q. But the Federation needs to have LARPers to LARP with the rest of the civs right? :D
> War-like cultures would still exist even if the Federation believes they themselves have moved beyond that type of thing.
An alternate take compatible with patio11's irreverent theory: war-like cultures exist only in the sense that some cultures have different LARP preferences.
Supporting evidence: how did the Klingon Empire (who are not actually part of the Federation) make it through their nuclear age without blowing up their planet? How do they continue to keep pace technologically with other species? They steal a lot of technology, e.g. they never invented the warp drive themselves, but that would only get them so far and wouldn't keep them competitive with the Federation.
Patio11's oddball theory of Star Trek as a documentary about a future LARP may not be correct, but it explains away these kinds of questions better than any "real" theory that I've seen!
> Also I thought the Klingons were part of the Federation at one point during DS9 era? Or perhaps that was just an alliance...
There was indeed a military alliance between the Federation and Klingon Empire against the Dominion. A friend of mine (uncharitably) referred to the war against the Dominion arc as the writers, "exploring what Star Trek could be... if it was more like Babylon 5."
And then we discovered that it was all really just Ronald Moore preparing for what eventually became Battlestar Galactica. Weird pseudo-religious nonsense included.
And then the Borg show up... The analogy breaks down because the Federation is still resource constrained. Why bother with planets if you can build Dyson spheres? Because they can't, they still need to find new planets and colonize.
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?
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.
So, economic models are more or less based on, or at least constrained by, human psychology, right? Communism and socialism don't work because peoples' brains aren't wired to do lots of work for little or no or unequal reward. This isn't restricted to just people, either, it's been observed in monkeys (http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/09/0917_030917_..., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKhAd0Tyny0 -- it's a short video and pretty hilarious, worth a watch).
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?
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.
If we can implement following two rules of living, we can move in the direction of achieving post-scarcity economy:
1) Cap every individual at a maximum he can earn for private use – if he earns beyond this, it'll redistributed amongst the society (as basic income). The cap could be say $500000/$1000000, which is high enough to encourage a part of the population to create wealth and enjoy it. At the same time, it disincentivises individuals to create infinite wealth which causes monopoly and consequently concentration of power.
If I think about it, it actually encourages more competition as people can replicate other successes while noone has had tangible incentive to crush all its competitors. But humans have a tendancy to show that they are better. Yes, in such a system, they can satisfy it by actually teaching others to create the same businesses they've got success with thereby creating social capital in the name of popularity.
2) Remove inheritance. Inheritance is one of the reasons why people continue to accumilate more and more. In a post-scarcity society, everyone is borne equal in terms of wealth and must work to create more wealth (with a cap) starting from adulthood.
1) Most wealthy people have their money in their ventures - not directly available for private use, like cash in a bank account. I don't see how a cap would help in this case, as they can spin off multiple ventures, all still controlled by them. It would help to keep the economy going, but not by much.
2) People will find ways to hide their wealth - taking away their money when they die is an obvious threat to them and their children. It may work in the long term with the right control and incentives, but corruption (i.e. bypassing the law) will be extremely high in the beginning.
In fact by concentrating strict monopolies on political, military, judicial and economic power in a narrow party elite, it pretty much guarantees it will be rewarded. I realize Communism and Socialism as abstract principles don't require this, but that seems to be the way it works out as they have been put into practice historically by actual Communists and Socialists.
There's nothing about capitalism that demands that monopolies of any kind should or must be allowed. This is a subject of much debate of course, since there is no single authority about what Capitalism is. It's not really an ideology in that sense. However if we take Adam Smith as playing the role for Capitalism that Marx plays for Communism, Smith was very much aware the markets must be very carefully regulated in order to protect the common good. Unfortunately Marx was, shall we say, considerably more utopian about how Communism would inevitably emerge and self-regulate itself.
"There's nothing about capitalism that demands that monopolies of any kind should or must be allowed."
It depends on what you mean by capitalism. If by capitalism, you mean a market-based economy, like that adam smith guy, then yeah, we should have anti-trust laws to guard against private anti-competitive behavior. If you mean lack of government interference at all costs (which is more a political program than an economic program, really), then no, monopolies and/or cartels will actually be the end state of many industries if you don't have laws preventing that behavior.
Also the concentration of power, corruption, and depredations against individuals (gulags etc) were predicted as an outcome of socialism and communism by Benjamin Tucker, a contemporary (and critic) of Marx.
There is no such implied statement. Capitalism is not the logical opposite to socialism and communism. Assuming that what is true for one is automatically false for the other is a logical fallacy.
In context of the rest of the parent post, it is listed as a characteristic of capitalism but omitted from socialism and communism, which is a clear implication it is not a characteristic common to all three.
Not only hard to believe but wrong. Redistribution is at the heart of communism ( From each according to his ability, to each according to his need). This creates a huge incentives to cheat and lie in order to get a little bit more.
Greed attempts to attain maximal reward, but this does not mean the reward is achieved. Greed is neither necessary or sufficient to achieve extraordinary outcomes.
Rational greed exploits whatever system you have though. A rationally greedy capitalist will do startups or work on Wall Street or something; a rationally greedy communist will gain political power. In a world of magical egalitarianism rational greed will increase the size of the pie for everyone; if you allow society to break egalitarianism purely to incentivize this kind of behavior you have become John Rawls.
> when looking for a new economic model, why not go back to psychology?
Excellent point.
> Is it really true that most people don't want to work?
Most if not all people, unless hobbled by various ailments, are not only content to perform almost daily light work, but basically require it for their own well-being. Think how gardening keeps you healthy well into old age. Think how the boredom of total inaction destroys people.
Also, a minority of people will always be driven to perform intense, prolonged, excruciating work for sheer fame. Another minority would do the same out of pure passion for the subject matter. These two groups have a large common portion, but are not identical.
Maybe we should look at the environment where we evolved as a species, and try and model a similar thing for the trans-scarcity period, and for the post-scarcity era afterwards. Whatever environment was ideal for Stone Age people, in terms of amount of work and reward (only as a psychological metaphor, of course, I am not proposing a return to material sticks and stones, duh), should fit like a glove.
I'm guessing cavemen did some amount of near-daily, light labor, to gather fruits and vegetables, and perhaps had bouts of intense effort more rarely for greater rewards (kill an antelope, defeat the neighbors in a war). There probably always was a minority who was obsessively chipping away at some obscure project all day long (the stone carvers making the Moai, the shaman observing Nature and talking with spirits).
If we could model something like that, but on top of high technology, it should work pretty well. We are, after all, evolved to live like that.
> there will probably always be jobs that people don't want to do.
This is why PSE (post-scarcity econ) is only truly feasible after huge advancements in AI and robotics. Let the robots clean the toilets.
> Most if not all people, unless hobbled by various ailments, are not only content to perform almost daily light work, but basically require it for their own well-being. Think how gardening keeps you healthy well into old age. Think how the boredom of total inaction destroys people.
If I could devote my hours to manual gardening and the betterment of an area of land while still maintaining my standard of living I would be very content with my life.
'"Work then without disputing," said Martin; "it is the only way to render life supportable."
The little society, one and all, entered into this laudable design and set themselves to exert their different talents. The little piece of ground yielded them a plentiful crop. Cunegund indeed was very ugly, but she became an excellent hand at pastrywork: Pacquette embroidered; the old woman had the care of the linen. There was none, down to Brother Giroflee, but did some service; he was a very good carpenter, and became an honest man. Pangloss used now and then to say to Candide:
"There is a concatenation of all events in the best of possible worlds; for, in short, had you not been kicked out of a fine castle for the love of Miss Cunegund; had you not been put into the Inquisition; had you not traveled over America on foot; had you not run the Baron through the body; and had you not lost all your sheep, which you brought from the good country of El Dorado, you would not have been here to eat preserved citrons and pistachio nuts."
"Excellently observed," answered Candide; "but let us cultivate our garden."'
The effect discussed is only present if you can see the other person get the unequal reward. And it is not tolerated well at all, I've seen highly paid engineers quit when they find out other engineers are paid slightly more.
> I think we probably are headed towards a post-scarcity (or low-scarcity) economy.
I think this prediction is naive, irresponsible, and dangerous.
We are headed toward one of the most tragic shortages in human history: energy. It is possible that within some of our lifetimes, we will see the breakdown of industrialization itself unless we do something about it, right now and in a very big way.
Despite an explosion of personal electronics, U.S. domestic energy usage has leveled off in recent years, even as renewable energy usage continues to increase. Almost all consumer technology has developed a new focus on energy efficiency over the last decade+. I realize the U.S. doesn't represent the whole world, but some other countries are even further along in the development of renewable energy sources, while other countries will be forced by increasing energy costs to follow suit.
And, notably, the first published concerns about peak oil being "right around the corner" were in the 1920s.
That's not to say there isn't cause to be concerned, but I'm cautiously optimistic about the future of energy.
I'm neither naive nor irresponsible, and I'm only occasionally dangerous. :-)
If a job someone doesn't want to do pays well enough, it becomes a job someone wants to do.
See: Working in $expensiveCity, banker, lawyer, jobs requiring lots of travel, etc.
If the lack of available workers pushes the pay up, more people consider the previously undesirable job desirable again and start learning the requisite skills if applicable, increasing the candidate pool and pushing pay back down - in this way, jobs find equilibrium.
There's a tradeoff. For example, even people making low 6 figures are unlikely to ever own a house in (a decent part of) London unless they inherit it or win the lottery. A medium to small city is more economical for cost of living, with a decent proportion of the pay and lower costs of living.
If you are young you might not care about buying a house, and care about hanging out with friends and doing things instead. Cities attract young people who don't mind renting, suburbs attract families who care more about buying their own houses.
Part of that is true, I guess - I'm temporarily renting, but family is definitely not in my future plans. Suburbs don't appeal to me, especially as I like going out, but neither does a prohibitively expensive city where I'll never do better than a flat.
What is 'work', anymore? In context of capitalism/communism (and the old industrial economy), 'work' had basically meant a 'worker' getting paid to do some tangible, quantifiable task. E.g. I pay you $5 to move those 100 widgets. Or, maybe you get a loaf of bread if you move those 100 widgets.
But, in terms of the modern, knowledge economy, work means something different. I don't need someone to move widgets. What I need is more content, better design, more aesthetics, more culture, more entertainment, more research and development. None of these are quantifiable or fungible.
Work today should be viewed more like a potential to produce some value. In the startup world, we give lots of money to lots of companies, with the understanding that most will fail. We hope that a few will succeed and produce a new products or services that will work. But, we don't know. We have to spread the money around to get those results.
I have a sister who makes probably a few thousand a year. She's a very high-IQ person, who just happened to take some wrong turns in life. She's gifted and very crafty and creative. But, 95% of her time is taken up by the logistics of life - trying to pay the bills, keep the water running, etc. I would much rather have her be able to focus on creating things and inventing. But, as her brother, I'm not willing to fund her completely, because even with her innate creativity and intelligence, I'm unsure what will result. It's too much risk, for this one individual.
But, on the other hand, everyday, the majority of the value that I get is from things that are 'free': product reviews, blog articles, questions answered on IRC, people posting cat videos. There is a shit ton of work being done, but it's not quantifiable. How much is it worth for someone to read a book and edit a wikipedia page? We're certainly not willing to pay people to do that type of work. But, in aggregate, it's incredibly valuable.
Anyway, my thought is that if we can give people basic freedom from the inane logistics of life, they will free themselves up to do other things. Very few people will do nothing. I can't even imagine nothing. Even the stereotypical images of bums drinking 40oz out of bags - it's not nothing. They're creating something - new words, new art, conversation that ripples. Maybe they go to the library and post their thoughts online - that turn into other ideas. But, of the hours a day that they do things, we can't quantify that value.
Labeling things as capitalism/communism, left/right doesn't seem to do much to help the problem. We should all agree that we're past the 20th century, past the 19th century. We need new ways of thinking about these issues.
We need a system where people who have been born with the competitive gene, and who want to conquer and acquire trophies, are free to compete and be rewarded for it. But, we should also recognize that most people don't have that gene, and that it can't be taught easily. But, those other people should be given some basic income to allow them to explore the infinite space of Human knowledge and creativity.
There are two incredibly strong forces that are running up against each other: the deflationary nature of science & technology (better, faster, cheaper) and the inflationary nature of the global banking system.
If we examine the things that have benefited from the deflationary nature of science & technology -- the internet, phones/tablets/PCs, everyone is incredibly wealthy today. The typical high school student now has access as much or more knowledge and computational power than the most powerful people 20 or 30 years ago. The power is so immense yet at the same time imperceptible to most. An iPhone? A place to play Candy Crush.
The few who figure it out immediately drop everything they are doing and start a technology company (I did.)
However, when we examine areas that are greatly influenced by inflationary pressures things look really bad. Healthcare basically means if you have a family you need to spend $1000 a month on something that you will only use in a dire emergency because you'll pay thousands of dollars out of your pocket before it kicks in. Education, I don't even have to mention.
Real estate is the other big area. Real estate is a finite resource. Even if there is unlimited resources and energy there is not unlimited land. The areas that are most influenced by the global banking system appear to have the most extreme divergence in real estate costs -- London, NYC, SF/Silicon Valley, Hong Kong, etc. The upper end of the prices in there areas are in complete fantasy land to everyone else.
Technology start ups sit right in the middle of all of this. Incredible deflationary gains thanks to science and technology, insane pricing thanks to a global banking system flush with cash -- for now at a rate that has been subsidizing borrowers at the cost of savers.
The good news is that if you run a start up, even if there is a global slowdown economically, science & technology deflation will carry you along. Just don't borrow a lot of money.
You raise an interesting point on 'work'. The value of work is increasingly less atomic in context of a knowledge economy. Ideas, research, art, sports--these are typically either completely ignored or wildly successful. Marginal differences in 'work' and effort are inconsequential. This is unfortunate because like you've noted, many skilled people will never get what they deserve in winner take all markets on the off chance their choices do not work out. The incremental differences between the top 0.01% and 0.02% are negligible but often lead to disparate rewards.
I disagree with your arguments that we lack a system for competition. Markets do (did) a pretty job of deciding whether an idea or invention is truly valuable. The problem is that most markets are relatively zero-sum, and people are dictated by myopic concerns like bills, quarterly earnings, etc. What this means is that ideas tend to cluster along similar branches as players react to one another rather than engaging in truly 'free-form' exploration of ideas. Basic income will help in this respect, however for every ambitious dreamer there is a gluttonous, entitled individual who blows his money on himself and contributes very little. Coming from a econ/finance background, I can tell you that people can be very selfish in contrast to the comparatively idealistic tech and research community. Unfortunately, current economic systems are obsessed with the stability of quantifiable targets such as inflation, unemployment, etc; i.e. we have a system that promotes incremental growth rather than a system that is more likely to experience creativity/innovation shocks.
It's very important to realize that Karl Marx coined the term "capitalism." Pooling resources to pursue a profitable venture is not an "ism", it's just something that inevitably happens.
It's also not a social system. A free enterprise economy is intimately bound up with cultural values.
> Anyway, my thought is that if we can give people basic freedom from the inane logistics of life, they will free themselves up to do other things. Very few people will do nothing. I can't even imagine nothing.
You need to realize that all money has to come from somewhere. If you're some 3rd-party observer and want to hand money out to some people, you'll have to take it from others, and you have no business doing that, nor does anyone else. We're all trained to think about economics from a central planning perspective. People drone on and on about what should be done to an economy, or how whatever should be arranged, when in reality, it's all about people interacting and engaging in voluntary exchanges and investments and so on.
Capitalism is just people pursuing their personal gain, which is something they'll do regardless of what kind of "system" you'd like to place upon them. It's important to realize that Capitalism itself, as I've just described it, is not a system. It's not a model for economic behaviour that's imposed on people, it's what people do in any case.
Scarcity is a fact of nature and life. This planet's resources are scarce - there's just a certain, finite amount of them out there, and that's it. Our time as human beings is scarce too, there's no way around that (for now). It's pointless to wax poetic about "post-scarcity" and what should be done about it. If we get there, we get there. But until then, we'll have to work within the confines of scarcity and that's fine. We're all responsible for our own well-being, we're all pursuing our personal goals all the time, and there's nothing wrong with that. That's just how we're biologically wired to behave.
The only problem with economies in the world is coercion, ie. other people intentionally affecting your choices in the market, compelling you to do something else than you'd otherwise do. Perhaps the most massive example of this is fiat currency. Without taxes being collected in dollars and euros etc, no one would use those currencies.
Well that was bluntly said. I'm not sure it's accurate though, and besides, I was just talking about the nature of economies and Capitalism, which is certainly relevant to an article talking about, well, economies.
But if you see a problem with what I said, perhaps you'd like to tell me what it is?
The problem is, the whole part of the article was post-scarcity. You identify that earth resources are scarce. What if they're not? What if all of our energy is renewable? What if we close the loop for mined materials so we recycle in-system and no longer consume additional materials from the earth? If we're wired around scarce resources, we will need to adapt when scarcity no longer occurs.
Today's Atlas would say, "Give me enough energy and mass, and I'll move the universe." With enough energy, anything is possible.
there are plenty of reasons to believe that we may be at the beginnings of a post scarcity economy. We have a surplus, no doubt. Of course, we still have legions of people in the world that are starving, and even people still here at home. But we actually have the capacity to feed them, to feed everyone, even now, even if we don’t have the will. It’s not a matter of scarcity; it’s a matter of the organization of labor and capital.
The problem here is that there is no "we" that can implement this unrealistic plan of arranging for an easy living for everyone. We're all just individuals and pursuing our personal gain, as I mentioned. That much is constant, because it's how we're biologically wired to operate. So, there is no "collective we" that could decide how to run a society, but that's exactly what he's suggesting.
Of course, the only entity that makes collective decisions is the government. But the government only has one way to affect an economy: coercion. In essence, this guy is suggesting that governments should force some people to provide for other people. It's just another version of "welfare", but any kind of welfare system is about using force and coercion to re-allocate resources, because otherwise resources would just get "allocated" through voluntary exchanges. In reality, it makes no sense to talk about some specific "allocation" of resources, because the only way you can even try to achieve that is through coercion again. Coercion is immoral and forbidden though, so you have no business trying to effect any specific allocation of resources.
In addition, there's a gross mistake at the root of all this: the idea that you know how resources should be allocated. We're already covered that without coercion, resources will just end up where ever they may, and that's just the end result of countless people pursuing their personal gain, making the exchanges they want to, and so on. You are only your own personal self, and you don't know what kind of exchanges other people should go through - it's all subjective.
In summary, people talking about "post-scarcity" or a "resource-based economy" (Zeitgeist) and how those should be arranged, are basically engaging in central planning, and they either realize it would require massive amounts of coercion or they do not. In the first case, they're just plain evil, and in the second, they're clueless. Either way, what they want is impossible.
Post-brainwashing, posts like these will look astute. I'm not saying individuals don't need to co-operate in countless ways, but collective thinking is misguided, because we actually are just individuals.
We're all programmed to think in collective terms, because that helps governments maintain their power.
This was a reply, but devolved into a dump of my current thoughts on economics. As I'm no economist it is likely muddled, naive, nonsense.
The UK newspapers regularly have articles about the increased use of food banks. I haven't looked into it at all so can't comment on details such as how much is genuine need versus playing the game, or the rate of increase, etc. Combined with wage deflation or stagnation, food inflation from devalued currency counteracts the expected low prices of low-scarcity. It seems that given how much people dick around with the systems, a low-scarcity economy is a theoretical concept, too simplistic to exist in a complex environment, buffeted by politicians, economists, bankers, etc. I have no economics education, so I'm likely talking rubbish, please correct.
On the matter of capitalism, I've come to the conclusion that it is fundamentally corrupt. The entire thing is a capital feedback loop. Not in the self-regulating sense ascribed to free markets. The more capital you have, the more capital you are able to accrue. And capital is power. The old saying, the rich get richer, is not just the superficial, flippant comment it might appear, flung around in the pub - it describes a core characteristic of capitalism. The amassing of capital does enable progress with big projects, but at the cost of having a system with a blatant foundational design flaw. People talk about bubbles as if they're a flaw in the system, but they're not - they're a characteristic of capitalism, which would be better named bubblism. I'm not commenting on whether capitalism is good or bad, or the pros and cons, rather I guess I'm surprised at all the discussion of the peripheral issues, but not of the foundational design, syntax instead of architecture. I'm not suggesting there's a better alternative, again, just surprised that it seems, from my layperson point of view, that there are so many people doing so much around the elephant in the room. It's standing there dumping over and over, and people clean the floor, spray the air freshener, but never touch the elephant. Yes, there are people in favour of other systems - they've come up with little. Distilling capitalism to this feedback clumping flaw, and I consider such exponential imbalance in a deliberate system to be a flaw, is it really so difficult to design a foundation that avoids that? Tax is a response to the flawed system, it doesn't address the design of the system.
Edit: I always read some comments before I read the article, to see if the article is worth reading, which is fine, but I should probably read the article before I start commenting!
>"The more capital you have, the more capital you are able to accrue. And capital is power. The old saying, the rich get richer, is not just the superficial, flippant comment it might appear, flung around in the pub - it describes a core characteristic of capitalism."
This is an interesting idea, but has been shown to be false. One example is that the average company on the S&P 500 lasts for less than 20 years, and this is dropping.[1] Another example can be seen by simply looking at all the richest families in the USA in 1900, and seeing which of them is still a famous dynasty; there are a number of studies on this, but it seems like family wealth does not usually last more than 3-4 generations. Even the Annheiser-Busch family, who created the still-popular Budweiser brand, have lost their empire after six generations of hard work.[2] Or look at a list of the "robber barons", and see how many of the family names correspond to the list of richest people on earth.[3]
For your point about Anheuser-Busch, I'm not familiar enough with all that went down, so hopefully you can clarify if I'm wrong. Since the company was bought out (vs going out of business), doesn't that mean the Anheuser-Busch family (which I'm presuming had a large number of shares) would still have their wealth?
Anheuser-Busch is a very interesting case, I would refer you to Julie Macintosh's book "Dethroning the King", or one of her excellent presentations.[1]
The Wikipedia page on Augustus Busch IV states the following:
>"Press reports indicated that the Busch family ownership of the company had greatly dwindled over the years with Busch's father owning only 1.2 percent of the shares at the time of the takeover. In total the Busch family owned only 4 percent of the company"[2]
I think it is fair to say the the Busch family were able to preserve some of their wealth, but their status has declined drastically over time, and will likely continue to do so. I must admit that the story about this family is subjective, and anecdotal.
You describe life in the rich west. It's not looking as rosy for most people.
It'll be interesting to see how the perception of capitalsm's problems shifts as we wade towards the deeper end of the climate crisis. Will human suffering invoke more actionable empathy when it's in the form of agricultural collapse vs current income inequality problems?
>> [ capitalism's] current income inequality problems
I will assume you talk about the income inequality between nations. That is, in most cases, not solvable by other countries.
To make a country (without military conflicts) better is not rocket science. You get infrastructure and education to work well in addition to limiting corruption. The corruption part is probably enough, since non-corrupt politicians will fix the rest.
After that, a generation or two later you have a South Korea. Estonia is getting there.
For examples of this, see East Europe inside the EU after 1991. The main failures with corruption are Romania and Bulgaria, which also have horrible economic inequality. The politicians even steal the money for roads!
The point is, income inequality is not a problem of economics. The problem is that packs of thieves have stolen a country/government and sucks the lifeblood out of it.
First you say that this problem can't be helped by other countries and then you discuss the EU's eastward expansion... which is largeely about Western European countries getting together and lifting up ex-Soviet countries.
The terms under which those countries were allowed into the EU were largely about building strong anti-corruption measures and improving transparency in government.
Supernational institutions like the EU and UN can do great things like this.
>>Supernational institutions like the EU and UN can do great things like this.
Well, give me some examples where corruption of a political system was solved by external organisations?
(And NOT in a military way.)
(The main benefit East Europe got was a pressure to conform with EU criteria to get into the trade union. That solved quite a lot, by paying the political leadership to solve their problems... This can only be done once. But Romania and Bulgaria got into EU without fulfilling those criteria, probably by bribing for the EU votes (as I understand it, a few large companies were sold cheap to French, Belgian etc companies). So corruption worked for them... not even here, with a big carrot, was it solved by the EU!)
Edit: I might add that the UN is infamously corrupt and many functions are taken over by dictators, working for their combined interests. (If you're Swedish, you won't read about that in your local media.) Hardly able to help anyone with corruption...
Even Greece and Italy (with all of their history), still turned to corruption to benefit from the EU. Can't solve this problem by throwing more money at it from the outside.
Uhm, are you really claiming those two countries weren't corrupt before the EU?! Afaik, both are classic cases of the Mediterranean client-patron culture? (At least the south of Italy.)
My original point was that to make a country a nice place today is not rocket science, the failures either seems to be an ongoing conflict -- or corruption.
Afaik the methods to stop corruption isn't that hard to design, the hard part is to get a political class to implement them. To do it from outside is impossible without an invasion, you have to get the population to pressure the criminal thieves (a.k.a. politicians).
(I guess 'fulafel' is a naive Swede who grew up believing his own media, like I did. That is why I bother with this.)
Disclaimer: No political science education, just a hobby to read to try to understand the world,
I meant that they were corrupt, they hid everything from the EU, took their money without fixing much of anything, then the truth came out and shit hit the fan.
I think it will work out fine if the members stick through for enough time. Kinda like the United States - the states have almost gone to war several times after the Civil War...
Post-scarcity economics sounds to me like post-human anthropology or post-matter physics, i.e. economics is by definition science on "managing" scarcity. No scarcity, no trade, no economics.
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
The reason we have overlays on capitalistic systems seems to me to be because capitalism values the masses [people] at approaching zero, except where slavery/soylent green/organ harvesting and such is allowed.
Scenario: Humanland has a dearth of population who're not adding culturally or through labour to their pure capitalist economy - if they kill them and use them for animal feed they will both add resources and reduce outputs. Under capitalism, why not?
Capitalism starts with financial wealth and aims to increase it through competition.
Communism starts with human society and aims to support its needs through cooperation.
The later always seems to be far more reasonable to me. You intimate [I think this is what you're saying] that there has never been a capitalist economy and that this would be best - absolute market freedom - I'd like to see a communist society that didn't degrade in to a dictatorship.
In recent historical economic systems it seems this pithy aphorism is apposite:
Capitalism isn't a model that we try on, like we would try on a new set of pants. Capitalism is just trading stuff. Capitalism drove the accumulation of things easily tradeable, which then, by convention, we started calling money.
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.
I've been saying for years now that Star Trek forms the best commonly-known model for what future "economics" will be like. It's really awesome to read a well-thought-out treatment of that idea.
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.)
What are those "we" the author keeps talking about?
- "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?
I assume this is a 'thought piece' - it is designed to foster discussion. I don't think the author is suggesting a force against any will. The 'we' refers to his understanding of the collective '?consciousness?' subjectively observed in his surroundings.
Probably he means "we" as a generous substitution for "the unwashed and politically unenlightened proliteriat who compose the vast majority of humans".
I also have the will, and we definitely have the capacity right now.
Think of it this way: have you ever wanted to go to the store to buy food, and the store has been out of food? Have you ever been to the computer store to buy a computer and the store has been out of computers? Have you ever been to the doctor's (as scheduled) and the office has been out of medicine? What about housing?
We're already past the technological-industrial barriers required for post-scarcity, just not post-work (yet). What doesn't exist is the general public's will to make this a reality, even though it would certainly benefit them.
I like the exercise and the thoughts developed, but all of it is based on the fact that a post-scarcity state is happening. This is very XIXth century like : "science will abolish work !".
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.
Scarcity is rooted in social rank, it is a (by) product of psychology, and politics, not strictly speaking economics. Someone has to have the corner office, date the homecoming queen, and be the ranking executive. This is true outside of markets...just look at...firms. That's the unfortunate dead-end of this type of thought experiment. Although, I otherwise applaud its focus on interesting phenomenon. Because in many ways the ~premise is likely true: we can feed, cloth and shelter the world with only a small subset of working primates doing the "work". What we can't do...is give everyone the best house in the neighborhood, the choicest cuts of meats, and the most attractive partners. But that latter bit of ~scarcity is true...logically. Empirically it is an observation independent of the the proposed explanatory variable (economic system X^). Its not the x^, but the physics of life that creates scarcity. At least when sociological factors are considered.[1]
Edit: [1] See, for example, the notion of 'hedonic adaptation'.
Evidence of this also exists as ~shadow 'fairness' principles, in non-human primates, and also observable in domesticated canines.
> What we can't do...is give everyone the best house in the neighborhood
I think that we can, because land is plentiful, and construction can soon be automated. True, not everyone will be able to live in city centres, but given that most people come to the cities only for work, if there is no need to work, many would probably prefer to live in villages and close to nature.
the guy whose house is next to a beautiful lake, or a nice beach will look the best compared with everyone else. It's true that there will be someone who's gotten the best.
> But we actually have the capacity to feed them, to feed everyone, even now, even if we don’t have the will.
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.
So all we have to do to prevent the population booms by feeding the poor of the world is to provide them education, housing, clean water, healthcare, a good government, and about 12 other things (while praying hard to make sure they don't get dependant on that outside help)?
And then after the initial exponential population run-up (which happens anyways), it will all level out in the end (with lower birth-rates).
Seems kind of like the counter-argument is avoiding the issue at hand by re-framing it in terms of future birth-rates (instead of accepting the immediate reality).
Human greed pretty much takes over. Social pressures won't work because people will always want to "keep up with the jones" or show off what they have done. The only way you could have post scarcity is if everything and anything in the living reality could be created, which of course is just highly improbable if not impossible due to the emotional nature of our species as well as differences in individual needs and wants (I.e. Not everyone can fall in love and be married or be just as popular or be just as good I sports). Personally, I don't think there is a reason we can't have a better welfare system, I just don't think we should care about those who do not contribute to society. If all people in Star Trek are now in it for the bettering of the human race than that would mean not a single person is thinking of themselves, which much like greed, is a natural human state of mind. Do we know what/who is going to better society, no we don't. However, with capitalism people democratically choose what does and doesn't. To have government subsidize specific items/ideas we leave capitalism and start having a centrally governed panel who picks the winners, or at least subsidizes them. Let the free hand of capitalism decide who can contribute the most to society and let the people also decide who much they should be rewarded. If anything it's not economics that needs to be changed, rather the human psychology that needs to be reformed.
The problem emerges though where there is absolutely nothing of value left, or at least minimum living standard value, left for a large group of people to do.
No mater how willing these people are there is going to be very little movement up as all the positions of value are covered.
I liked the overarching idea, however the author proves himself ignorant of the basic economic ideas and concepts. The main keys of communism-socialism are the redistribution of the surplus value and the control of the means of production. Even private ownership of the land is not a requirement, even more so in a highly developed society, where land is no longer a resource highly sought to produce.
I'd suggest the writer reads his Marx and Engels, and even some Adam Smith before venturing into writing on topics like this.
I just wanted to chime in that his link that says We have capitalism, of course, the proverbial worst model except for every other one actually points to http://wais.stanford.edu/Democracy/democracy_DemocracyAndChu... which is about democracy. Democracy and Capitalism are not the same thing. That is all.
The fundamental problem with any post-scarcity economy is that it presumes a world in which resources aren't fundamentally constrained. It's been argued that this is in fact one of the limitations of orthodox / neoclassical economics, in that it assumes that unlimited growth it possible.
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.
I think the logical conclusion in post-scarcity economy is that more things will be determined as a basic human right.
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.
The major problems with capitalism in Western economies is that the government regulations corrupt the process and create artificial scarcity. There are lot of areas where competition does not exist because regulatory hurdles prevent or discourage it. Politicians on both sides of the Atlantic, if not everywhere, game the system. The put in rules/roadblocks to help out favored groups which in turn damages the system.
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.
The article forgot to mention that in the Star Trek timeline things didn't go so smoothly: a third World War eventually occurred and only the invention of warp drive and the first contact with the Vulcans turned things around.
But I think the point is another: for as much as I love Star Trek and advocate a smooth transition to a post-scarcity economy, I don't think Roddenberry and the writers that succeeded him are experts in currency, economics or even in the techologies that made that fictionary society a perfect post-scarcity economy.
There are, however, some interesting thoughts that could serve as a basis for a more deep look into the post-scarcity economics. Organizations such as the Venus Project and the Zeitgeist Movement tend to advocate it under the "resource-based economy" name and I find their views interesting, relatively to this topic.
> we have the centrally planned systems of Communism and Marxism, not particularly effective, as it turns out.
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.
It would be interesting to see how a complete planetary financial/economic system would look like that was built on top of the blockchain: http://marscoin.org
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 :-)
>The big challenge here is how does society get someone to do the menial jobs that cannot be done in an automated manner.
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.
I dont remember seeing any robots (other than Data) on Star Trek. How do you propose to fix broken replicator? or a toilet? Best case scenario is you throw whole thing away and put a new one - now someone has to unbolt the old unit, get the new one out of storage, push it through half of the ship and mount it.
I don't consider being a mechanic to be a menial job necessarily. I was thinking more about boring jobs where you do the exact same thing over and over again, like working fast food or factory work.
A mechanic has to solve new problems all the time making it more interesting and fulfilling.
On the Starfleet side of things, menial tasks are delegated to the lowest ranking members of the crew.
The civilian side of things tended to be based on apprenticeship, which works similarly.
There was a Star Trek episode where Picard sees an alternate future where he ended up with low rank. He was desperate to get back to the interesting higher-rank jobs
I think the author overlooked a much more elegant solution to the problem of menial labor. People simply don't do it, except when they want to, and rely on automated / robotic solutions to do it for them. At some point, it will get far easier and cheaper to design and implement robotic maids than it will to convince a human to do anything resembling a good job at something people are bound to shit on him for.
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.
If every item in the grocery store had an RFID type tag your whole cart could be scanned instantly. Load the items right into bags as you shop and you're good to go, no check out required.
It would making performing inventory checks a lot easier too.
Here's a problem with the post scarcity economy. There will be long lines everywhere.
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,
> nobody has ever been able to show how it is possible to run a "steady-state" economy
This is a non-argument. Before money was created, nobody had been able to show that a non-barter economy would work. Or capitalism for that matter. The fact that nobody has so far has figured out a way to make it work doesn't mean anything. The only thing of interest would be conclusive proof that it's impossible.
I'm fairly sure that at some point we need to move over to some sort of steady-state economy due to the scarcity problem [1]. I'm also fairly sure that the transition will happen in small steps and people will only notice afterwards. Some pieces are already being discussed and some have been tried, such as currencies with negative interest, basic income, ...
[1] The only other option being mass extinction. That's a bit meh, I don't feel like being part of that. I'll rather choose Star Trek :)
There is a pretty well accepted definition of money: It's an object or record that's accepted as a form of payment, often with very little value in itself. Early forms of money included shells, for example. Coins are an evolution, printed bank notes as well.
The precursor to money is barter: I trade 5 goats for one cow, that I can then trade for a horse. The money equivalent is that I sell 5 goats for 10 money that I can use to buy the horse.
Debt is related to property and certainly related to money, since debts are nowadays kept track of in terms of money, but debt is not the precursor to money and certainly debt is not a requirement for a money-based system. It's like saying "before money was created, there were the sun, the moon and the stars".
"and certainly debt is not a requirement for a money-based system."
This is kind of true. You could run a trade based economy on pre 1750 level with' lets say gold or silver or sea shells as "money". But you CANT RUN A INDUSTRIAL CAPITALISTIC society without debt. At least nobody has ever been able to show that this is possible. We need growth, we need more energy. I am afraid this will not end well. Read the links I posted in this thread.
Steady state means stopping all research, just in case you discover something that upsets the applecart. More accurate to say that no modern economy can be run without trying to grow, whether it succeeds or not.
> A capitalistic system can not be run without growth
I disagree. You are told we need to grow by X% p.a. and we need an inflation of Y% p.a. and we need to weaken our currencies to boost exports bla bla.
It is possible to show that this is BS if you thought it through.
BTW, I'd call "them" by their name if I knew it.
BTW2, "Economics in one Lesson" was my eye opener, it was written in 1946 but it reads at if is was written yesterday.
It is very easy. If you speak German I actually could send you an excellent PDF.
Debt is a law like gravity. You can have it explained by Ludwig von Mises. It is a reward for risk and saving. Discounted cash flow is actually the opposite and the reason why a cash creating asset, let's stay farmland, still has a finite price but theoretical unlimited future income.
To serve debt you have to create more in the future. Do you know how all our debt will be paid back? With more debt. Once the expected return is 0 then there is no reason to give credit anymore. Every capitalistic system relies on these unfortunate facts.
I like Mises a lot,even if I think his idea of money is plain wrong. But it was Keynes who always saw the end coming. He also gives some ideas in "The death of the rentier".
The BS part was meant w.r.t. the theories because, unlike theirs, your opinion is not forced upon the people, so sorry if I left room for the misunderstanding.
I disagree in particular to the "to serve debt you have to create more" because creating more debt is incompatible with a capitalistic system because someone has to take the other side of the trade (the creditor).
A rational creditor wouldn't loan more debt and this is why the PIIGS don't get money on the bond market anymore. Therefore the CBs have to "print" the money or take it from somewhere else (ESM, OMT, QE ...) but none of these measures is voluntary but instead forced.
Therefore we have no capitalistic system but planned economy which was the original point.
Debt can also reduced via default. And this happens regularly with many companies and is ok. What is not ok is when these defaults get deferred, for instance, because a defaulting entity has the monopoly on creation of legal tender.
"to serve debt you have to create more"
This is actually a well known fact.
"creating more debt is incompatible with a capitalistic system"
Wrong. It is the basis of the capitalistic system.
"because someone has to take the other side of the trade'
Yes. All debts have corresponding claims.
"A rational creditor wouldn't loan more debt and this is why the PIIGS don't get money on the bond market anymore."
The game may have come to an end already. The only thing that delays a "jubilee" is the state as the lender of last resort. It is the last thing that will fail but it will fail. A "jubilee" is only a mid-term solution. The underlying problems (limited energy, exponential growing interest, debt based economy) may not be solved. We are running into a trap at a very fast speed. Even things like thorium reactors or fusion can only delay the sun set.
"Therefore the CBs have to "print" the money or take it"
It does not make a difference for the problems if you use FIAT money or an asset based currency.
" from somewhere else (ESM, OMT, QE ...) but none of these measures is voluntary but instead forced."
You may think a gold based currency may prevent this problems. We may only have collapsed faster (small collapse, "jubilee", not the big collapse).
"Therefore we have no capitalistic system but planned"
yes we do have one. And we had a very good time with it. Unfortunately capitalism needs growth. And only madman and economists believe in infinite growth in a finite world.
I'm not well versed in Star Trek, but it seems to me there is at least one limited resource: jobs as captains of star ship Enterprise, for instance.
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.
The fundamental take-away here is that old systems die, whether proponents of the old system believe it's possible or not. I think parallels can be drawn between a lot of articles written by people so deeply embedded in the status quo they literally can't fathom their pet concept might go away at some point in the future. And sure enough, this one is written by a venture capitalist.
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.
You don't need to speculate because there already is a model for post-scarcity economics in the form of free and open source software. The free software economy is more like an economy of attention or allegiance. It has sometimes been called a "doocracy" in that those folks who do things tend to get the most attention.
My reading of history tells me the human hunger for wealth and power (what some call greed) would easily adjust to any increase in prosperity, no matter how large.
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.
I've recently gone public with a an economic system I've been developing that can bridge the gap between a free market and a post scarcity economy. http://babblingbrook.net
Don't give adjust the basic income for people with children and suddenly there is a huge disincentive to having kids. Play with the numbers until the population growth or shrinking balances out.
Yes there will be scarcity as long as there is demand for more. More of the basics like space and food/energy. If we stop reproducing and/or consuming to the point of scarcity by choice - then we will no longer have scarcity. It's not an impossible scenario. It has happened to some cultures.
this is pointless. star trek describes no real society and ther are conyinuity holes everywhere from multiple series, writers and directors. a nice dream but in no way deployable.
A fiat currency backstops its value at least with the issuing government's willingness to accept it for payment of taxes.
What is wrong with current monetary regimes? Sounds like you are suggesting a return to fixed/commodity money regimes which have failed many times over.
As you suggest , fiat currency issuers backstop the value of their currency via taxation. But its not their willingness to accept the backstops it, its the power to impose mandatory taxes on the population that gives value to the currency.
Warren Mosler -one of the founders of Modern Monetary Theory-
has a great allegory to describe how it all works: ( I paraphrase) A group of people are in a room and I have business cards in my pocket. I have a gun in my hand and no one else does and I am standing in front of the only exit. Now I decree, in order to exit the room it will cost you 1 business card. Suddenly, the business cards have value and folks in the room will provide me goods and services in exchange for payment in business cards.
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.