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

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, Interesting) by tftp on Sunday July 12 2015, @04:57PM

    by tftp (806) on Sunday July 12 2015, @04:57PM (#208170) Homepage

    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.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13 2015, @02:54AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13 2015, @02:54AM (#208320)

    What about a pure socialist country, like USSR

    Since when was the USSR ever socialist? State capitalism is not socialism.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13 2015, @03:01AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13 2015, @03:01AM (#208321)

    The benefits of doing nothing outweigh the benefits of being known as a good redshirt.

    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?

    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

    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.