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A Star Trek Economic System May Be Closer Than You Think

posted by cmn32480 on Sunday July 12 2015, @11:25AM   Printer-friendly
from the eject-the-core dept.

HughPickens.com writes:

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."

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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by bradley13 on Sunday July 12 2015, @01:26PM

    by bradley13 (3053) on Sunday July 12 2015, @01:26PM (#208133) Homepage Journal

    Even today, it's rarely about the money. The big pieces that float to the top are all about power. Whether it's the playground bully, the abusive cop or the corrupt politican: what they seek is power over other people.

    Star Trek presents a lovely vision of the future, and it's true enough that money may eventually no longer exist in the way we think of it today. But how to you change human nature?

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    Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
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  • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 12 2015, @03:46PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 12 2015, @03:46PM (#208158)

    Money is very boring when you have it...

  • (Score: 1) by Murdoc on Monday July 13 2015, @11:22PM

    by Murdoc (2518) on Monday July 13 2015, @11:22PM (#208684)
    You don't need to change human nature. What you need to do is change the game, not the player. Bad people (greedy and/or power hungry) succeed in our society because our society rewards those behaviours, with wealth and power. Change the victory conditions of the game so that they are no longer rewarded. In a society of abundance as is proposed here, eliminating money and anything like it and replacing it with a system of distribution rather than exchange gets rid of rewards for the greedy. To do the same for power, take away that power. Eliminate political government completely so that no person has the ability to legally push around others. Then the worst you'd have is small-scale bullies trying to do this illegally, and there are other ways of dealing with those, but you'd already gotten rid of the worst of it. Of course, I think that this would only really be possible in a society of abundance as we are already talking about, although some may disagree on that point. This has already been all worked out decades ago. You can check it all out here [technocracy.ca] if you like.