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The Star Trek Economy

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Re: The Star Trek Economy

#221

Post by mempko »

a-priori wrote: post #131
mempko wrote: post #94

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…

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. (Aside: The core problem with communism is that a nation much larger than the optimal firm size. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socially_optimal_fi…

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.

Re: The Star Trek Economy

#222

Post by MrMan »

whatevsbro wrote: post #214
toomuchtodo wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Quote from the article: 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…

Post-individualism, posts like these will look pretty childish. Human societies do exist, and have existed. We not just just individuals.

Re: The Star Trek Economy

#223

Post by whatevsbro »

MrMan wrote: post #222
whatevsbro wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quote from the article: 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…

Post-individualism, posts like these will look pretty childish. Human societies do exist, and have existed. We not just just individuals.

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.

Re: The Star Trek Economy

#224

Post by makomk »

nickff wrote: post #156
AngrySkillzz wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

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 transf…

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.

Re: The Star Trek Economy

#225

Post by landryraccoon »

msandford wrote: post #219
landryraccoon wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 hyd…

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.

Re: The Star Trek Economy

#226

Post by stormbrew »

EliAndrewC wrote: post #201
ItendToDisagree wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh agreed on all counts. Was just pointing out you need to have at least a like minded set of people to 'do battle' with the other LARPers! Also I thought the Klingons were part of the Federation at one point during DS9 era? Or perhaps that was just an alliance...

> 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.

Re: The Star Trek Economy

#227

Post by M2Ys4U »

philwelch wrote: post #173
nickff wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Greed by definition leads to maximal reward." 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.

Unfortunately, Perfectly rational actors rarely, if ever, exist.

Re: The Star Trek Economy

#228

Post by jotm »

BugBrother wrote: post #215
jotm wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: The Star Trek Economy

#229

Post by BugBrother »

jotm wrote: post #228
BugBrother wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Ah, yes. It seems this plague might be spread more by EU membership than it is cured. Not a positive future for Europe... :-(

Re: The Star Trek Economy

#230

Post by dkuntz2 »

TheCoelacanth wrote: post #145
philwelch wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They also seem to be able to produce an unlimited supply of red-shirt crewmen.

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.

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