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Anna North writes in the NY Times about Star Trek's "post-economic" system, in which money no longer exists and anything you want can be made in a replicator, essentially for free. According to Manu Saadia, the author of "Trekonomics," a forthcoming book about the economics of the Star Trek universe, when everything is free, objects will no longer be status symbols. Success will be measured in achievements, not in money: "Instead of working to become more wealthy, you work to increase your reputation," says Saadia. "You work to increase your prestige. You want to be the best captain or the best scientist in the entire galaxy. And many other people are working to do that, as well. It's very meritocratic"
In a time of rising inequality and stagnating wages, a world where everyone's needs are met and people only work if they feel like it seems pretty far away but a post-scarcity economy is actually far more within reach than the technological advances for which Star Trek is better known. If productivity growth continues, Saadia believes there will be much more wealth to go around in a few hundred years' time. In general, society might look more like present-day New Zealand, which he sees as less work-obsessed than the United States: "You work to live rather than the other way round." Wealthy retirees today also already live an essentially post-money existence, "traveling and exploring and deepening their understanding of the world and being generally happy." According to Saadia we're beginning to get a few hints of what the post-money, reputation-based economy might look like. "If you look at things like Instagram, Vine, places where people put a huge amount of work into basically just gaining a certain amount of reputation, it's fascinating to see. Or even Wikipedia, for that matter. The Internet has begun to give us a hint of how much people will work, for no money, just for reputation."
Original Submission
(Score: 3, Insightful) by AlHunt on Sunday July 12 2015, @01:18PM
Wealth will always concentrate in the hands of the few. Until Greed breeds itself out of the human psyche, there will always be wealthy / middle class / poor.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by c0lo on Sunday July 12 2015, @01:33PM
Really? E.g., looking how the things go, US doesn't believe the middle class is necessary.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Interesting) by tftp on Sunday July 12 2015, @04:57PM
The middle class will shrink, but it will remain. The society of the future will need engineers and scientists and high-end technicians and human doctors who will serve the masters. The masters themselves will be above them; their power will be inherited from the previous generation's factories, resources, rights, politics.
The poor will be formed from ex-workers who are no longer necessary. Scarcity of goods will be replaced with scarcity of work. Even today I can often read: "A street sweeper whose job is replaced by the Roomba T-1000 can always learn to become a roboticist." First, there is no demand for so many roboticists. Second, not every street sweeper can grok programming of quantum processors.
As the poor will have nothing to do, and will be fed just enough to live, crime will rise among them. This is already happening, and you don't even need to point fingers at certain illegal immigrants in SF - it happens everywhere; in some groups the incidence of crime is even higher. This will separate the poor into their own mini-societies, with laws and police that are custom made to handle those situations. Such a separation also exists today, and is known as "inner cities" or ghettos. Further development of the society will deepen these differences; in the end it will look like the tiered world that is described in The currents of space [wikipedia.org]. If social elevators exist and work, such a society will be very effective in selecting best of the best for promotion to the middle or upper classes. The rest will be left to their own devices.
That scenario is assuming the post-capitalist process, where the capitalist society takes another step. What about a pure socialist country, like USSR, were it still in existence? It would get its own set of problems. Humans are not built to seek work, like ants. An average human, if left alone, will eat, sleep and have sex. Someone said that they will be competing for being the best in some area? Why would that be? The benefits of doing nothing outweigh the benefits of being known as a good redshirt. Sure, some people (maybe up to 20%!) will choose the work because it is interesting to them personally. But even those will not choose to be cleaners of sewers. Glamorous jobs will be taken first, and the rest will remain unclaimed. As socialists cannot accept existence of the lower class, a bunch of people will end up not working but consuming as much as those who work - and that will poison the value of work. This problem does not exist in the post-capitalist scenario because distribution of goods is controlled and intentionally rationed. A robot may be cheap or free, but the Earth's resources are finite, and the energy is finite, so each poor man cannot have 100 palaces built for himself. Socialism will have to face the same rationing - either coming from within the people (self-limiting) or externally, in form of "resource tokens" - which we know today as money. In other words, money cannot be eliminated until absolutely everything becomes free without limitation. Even in Farmer's World of Tiers the Lords can use ancient machinery, but they cannot make more of it - which leads to wars for those resources.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13 2015, @02:54AM
Since when was the USSR ever socialist? State capitalism is not socialism.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13 2015, @03:01AM
When you don't have to slave away just to keep from starving to death, working (ie, having hobbies) is its own benefit. Seriously, who wants to sit around doing nothing all the time, except people who are slaving away 60+ hours per week at a dead-end job or 2 and still can't even afford the bare minimum basic costs and never have the chance to do anything except be a good slave because their life is literally on the line?
Citation needed. Prove to me that this isn't just what you wish to be true, without any evidential basis, because it suits your beliefs and the agenda you want to push, because without some kind of proof thats all it is.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday July 13 2015, @12:30AM
looking how the things go, US doesn't believe the middle class is necessary.
The US just isn't competing that well against the Third World and wealth from labor has declined versus wealth from capital. No beliefs about the middle class are needed.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday July 13 2015, @03:55AM
So, US capital does no longer need both US middle-class and the poor one, because they aren't poor enough to compete with others even more poor than them?
Mmmm... I wonder who will pay for whatever the US capital chooses to finance?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday July 13 2015, @03:36PM
So, US capital does no longer need both US middle-class and the poor one, because they aren't poor enough to compete with others even more poor than them?
No, I think it's more that US labor has priced itself out of the market.
Mmmm... I wonder who will pay for whatever the US capital chooses to finance?
Look at who has robust, growing economies. I'd say China and India for starters.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13 2015, @03:48PM
You claim it is greed that concentrates wealth... I rather thing it is actually stupidity. Yes STUPIDITY. Why? Because stupid people will spend their money unwisely until they no longer have any. Plain and simple only way to make sure stupid people do not spend their money on lottery, get-rich schemes, "recreational use" etc is to simply make sure they have none. This of course happens organically, it is not overtly engineered. Smart people can of course find a way to maximize getting money out of the stupid people, but it is mostly not that nefarious. Smart people simply do not part so easily with their money, retaining it and building wealth.
Yes maybe my "evidence" is endless anecdotes about people I know or have met who somehow let it slip how they blew a lot of money on crap while they have huge credit card bills and while living paycheck to paycheck, but at some point it just clicked. Giving $10k to a person $7k in debt will likely result in them buying $10k worth of crap or vacations, and 0 debt reduction. Next month they will pile more debt into their credit card because they can afford to pay the minimum balance.
Now pray that I am wrong, because while breeding greed out of the maybe 10% or so of the population that is greedy is an achievable goal, breeding the stupid out of the 80% that are stupid is impossible.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 14 2015, @12:32AM
If saving money was all it took to get out of poverty, nobody would be poor.