The Star Trek Economy
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The Star Trek Economy
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Re: The Star Trek Economy
#2It'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.
Re: The Star Trek Economy
#3It'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.
But without a scarcity (market) economy how do you determine which is which?
Re: The Star Trek Economy
#4Very good points.
Re: The Star Trek Economy
#5It'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."
Re: The Star Trek Economy
#6An 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).
Re: The Star Trek Economy
#7I 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.
Re: The Star Trek Economy
#8What 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?
Re: The Star Trek Economy
#9Umm, 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.
Re: The Star Trek Economy
#10So, 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?
I think we probably are headed towards a post-scarcity (or low-scarcity) economy. Food costs as percentage of income in the U.S. have fallen quite a bit just in the last thirty years (http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-02-28/americas-shr...). People are already going to find that it takes less real effort to survive (http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21596529..., posted earlier to HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7235810). A different economic model seems inevitable.
Likewise, there will probably always be jobs that people don't want to do. Take oil rig work for example: hard, dangerous work, and it pays well, starting at the U.S. median wage for unskilled, inexperienced labor (http://money.cnn.com/2012/05/10/news/economy/oil_workers/) and going up from there.
As long as demand for this labor doesn't fall, if the available labor pool continues to shrink, those jobs should net greater incomes.
Maybe we'll see an economy, not quite like Star Trek's, but with a large leisure class and a well-paid class of plumbers, construction workers, mechanics, and technicians.
That would be kinda neat.