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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: 2) by Phoenix666 on Sunday July 12 2015, @04:33PM
I don't know if it's exactly that dire. Under current economic behaviors, yes. Slash-and-burn capitalism is running out of things to slash and burn, fast. But there are other ways to produce and consume, and there are other technologies and substitutes around the bend that will significantly affect supply curves.
It's not hard to see some of them, taken singly, doing that. Take 3D printing. Combine that with a RecycleBot and you can throw the broken dishes in and have the printer print you out new ones. No trip to Walmart necessary, no exchange of specie required. Yes, there is a ways to go yet before we get there, but you can see that place from here.
Then there's graphene and carbon nanotubes. They are such marvelous materials that it's not hard to see them replacing huge swathes of what we currently use very finite resources to do. Graphene can replace copper in our electronics. Carbon nanotubes can replace steel. Those are already huge, but it's not even scratching the surface. I doubt anyone would seriously argue we're going to run out of carbon anytime soon.
Then there's alternative energy, which gets better by leaps and bounds every year now that serious people are putting serious dollars and serious thinking into it. Not too long from now people will scarcely remember a time when they needed the delivery van to shovel coal down the chute to the boiler, or to inject liquid dinosaur into their vehicle. If you have the energy you need, you can produce what you need, yourself. Granted, if you want to build your own Atlas rocket you'll probably need to collaborate in some fashion with a couple more people, but most people don't need to own an Atlas rocket.
Land is a limited resource and there's no getting around that. But people are still not evenly distributed across that land. Take China, for example, the world's most populous country. Over 1 billion people. It's also the 3rd largest country in area. But most of those 1 billion people live on something like 15% of that territory, the easily arable part. Huge tracts of the place, such as the Tulufan desert in the Northwest (Uighur territory), Inner Mongolia, the tribal Southwest (the beautiful limestone hills you always see pictures of), and the Tibetan plateau across Tibet and Qinghai, are quite sparsely populated. If all of China were to be as densely settled as the parts where the Han Chinese live (the ethnicity you think of as "Chinese"), that country would have something more along the lines of 5 billion people. Then there's Russia. 125 million people left there now, occupying the world's largest country in terms of area.
Even if every square mile of land on Earth should come to be as packed as Mexico City, there's always sea-steading and the ocean.
It's not to say those are desireable things, but it seems that we're are not that close to the absolute Malthusian limit as might be supposed.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by TheLink on Sunday July 12 2015, @05:59PM
It's not to say those are desireable things, but it seems that we're are not that close to the absolute Malthusian limit as might be supposed.
Wasn't talking about close to "absolute Malthusian limit", was talking about the story's claim that Star Trek post-scarcity is closer than you think.
You could print plates and 3D printers but where will you get "post-scarcity" food to fill those plates for the 3 billion living on less than USD2/day? Don't forget the solar panels + batteries+raw materials so that they can enjoy a post-scarcity life-style. How many discarded milk jugs will you have for the 3 billion if the middle-class in USA start shoving their milk jugs into their own RecycleBots? Seems to me the middle-class will just end up with more toys and many of the 3 billion may end up with even less (when the home 3d printers get really good, a fair number of factories in China are going to get shutdown, and FoxConn is replacing workers with robots anyway).
I doubt the US folk will think that living the way the majority of the Chinese is Star Trek post-scarcity. And the direction the USA has been heading ain't that rosy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM [youtube.com]
Many of European countries are probably in a better position to transition to a system where you'd still get food and shelter even if the robots make you completely redundant. In contrast huge numbers of US people didn't and still don't even want to pay for the healthcare for others, despite already paying in far more expensive and inefficient ways! (ER, crime, prison health care, loss in productivity). So they ended up with the monstrosity nicknamed Obama-care (it's inefficient and stupid for people to even have to register and choose in the first place - everyone should be covered by a default plan that's not too crappy).
If you get a Star Trek like system it'll be over very very very many dead bodies ;).
(Score: 1) by charon on Sunday July 12 2015, @11:14PM
This looks like the future envisioned in William Gibson's The Peripheral. In between our time and the future time there was (will have been?) a series of weather disasters, plagues, crop failures, etc. But at the same time scientific progress never stopped, creating solutions and technology to weather the bad times. After a century the living population is only a fraction of ours, but the lucky few live the post-scarcity life of our dreams.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Sunday July 12 2015, @09:13PM
Or... to blow your neighbour to bits, the fucking bastard listens "Isn't it ironic" a tad too loud.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford