As I understood it, every year in the star trek universe citizens would request what they wanted and say what they were going to contribute to the economy in exchange for thaose things. ie, Captain Picard might say "I want to make improvements to my farm in france, a new personal transportation device for a relative, X number of paid for vacations and the daily luxuries of being a starfleet officer. In exchange for that, I'm willing to be a starship captain for the next year". Then an elected committee would review the request and approve it or deny it. I remember that it was noted that the committee had to be from a different area or state than the applicant. ie, a committee in Florida would review requests from Texas. Essentially it was a "That sounds fair" economy, based on judgement instead of currency.

As I recall, daily needs like food, shelter, medicine were taken care of for everyone, at various levels of luxury based on what the person was expected to contribute. Starfleet officers frequently talked about credits, either when gambling or visiting a bar on a non-federation or non-participating planet. I imagine this was a sort of legal black market system that would allow people to exchange money between one another to settle debts and to spend in other cultures, not really for routine living expenses. Post scarcity does mean post money, but there still has to be a way to maintain personal ledgers (maybe the credits were a year 2364 version of bitcoins?)

I think that Gene Roddenberry and other science fiction writers envision post scarcity societies for two reasons: 1) Money causes problems and 2) Economies function more efficiently without money.

We all love money, but think of the harm it can cause. Crime, ruined relationships, greed and the general oppression if not outright murder and enslavement of millions of people throughout history. As we all know, whenever someone says "It's not about the money", it's about the money. A moneyless world would solve a lot of these social problems. It's not that wealth is a bad thing. It's great to be rich. But a lot of problems arise when people need money for their daily sustenance. Food, housing, clothing, entertainment. All of these things should be taken care of at a low level, with compensation from contribution providing nicer and more desirable lifestyles. And it's quite possible that getting rid of daily dependence on individual spending is the best way to supercharge an economy. We don't see the waste in modern capitalism because we're primarily concerned with our own wealth, but it's there. Think about how much is wasted on a national (or galactic) scale. The efficiency gained through improved economic function would be more than enough to pay for all the replicator time that everyone on multiple worlds would need to live well.

Like many great things, the idea of post scarcity / post capitalism started in science fiction. But it doesn't have to stay there. We can start building a world where everyone has comfort and the rich have luxury. There are things we can do today to move us closer to this ideal and move people away from a system that's designed to make us all slaves to small amounts of wealth. I'm looking at you, Basic Income.

[1] Why hasn't someone made a startup to solve this problem? I'm constantly thinking of things I read and potentially bookmarked years ago, but google is a black hole. I would pay for this.

Ian M. Banks does a good bit on this in one of the Culture books (Look to Windward, I think) where the Culture "reinvents money" in the form of IOUs over access to a particularly popular live event.

I did have a problem with the retconning where the Federation was never even partially capitalist at all, because The Original Series is full of allusions to the fact that it is: An immortal being (Flynt) who buys his planet outright, miners who make more profits once they start working with the Horta, etc., etc.

My own theory is that the goods that are still scarce are utterly trivial, like Beanie Babies or Pogs circa 2018. Everything that you might reasonably want or need is completely free within the Federation; a handful of eccentrics might covet a rare painting or an antique, but the vast majority of people would see their preoccupation as absurd. A lay person might admire a rare painting, but they would see no reason to steal it.

I also think that Federation culture plays a significant role. It's clear that greed of any kind is seen as primitive and antisocial by the overwhelming majority of Federation citizens. We could draw parallels with the Amish or Mennonites - you can't have status goods in a society where displays of wealth actively lower your social status. The Federation is not just a post-scarcity economy, but a post-scarcity culture.

We could think of the time investment in things like holosuite programs as being loosely equivalent to the philanthropic activities of the very wealthy circa 2018, conferring no material benefit but a substantial degree of social capital. Designing a hit holosuite program might not earn you any money, but it would get you an invite to the Federation equivalent of TED. Joseph Sisko charges nothing for meals at his creole restaurant, but earns the respect of his neighbours.

This is a fascinating article speculating on the mechanics of the Federation economy:

https://medium.com/@RickWebb/the-economics-of-star-trek-29ba...

This doesn't make a whole lot of sense in the Star Trek universe, but there are other works of science fiction that explore this idea in a more plausible fashion. Iain M. Banks has written a number of novels about a post-scarcity civilisation called the Culture, which also lacks any sort of a financial system.

(Honestly, they totally hand-wave why you can't just replicate latinum)

Abolishing money does not need to exist only in a commune format; currency is a mode of exchange that exists because there is a natural scarcity of resources. Currency allows us all a medium to acquire what we want; usually as a result of personal investment of some source.

Star Trek, while imaginary, is a technological utopia and I would argue that we are not that far off from the beginning of that type of society. Since we're on HN i'll assume you're familiar with Kurzweil's Law of Accelerating Returns and the consistent and predictable exponential tech growth. As we make advances in energy, nanotech, robotics, and genetics the problems that plague society today won't be relevant to the people of tomorrow. If we aren't working towards Utopian society as a collective then the fault is ours, because working towards anything else is just a failure of imagination.

Of course this assumes the political will and foresight to address the challenges and growing pains that come along with the transition.

This lets the Federation trade with societies that value money (the Ferengi) yet not get all caught up in internal accounting.

With replicator technology, a Star Fleet officer could produce all the gold pressed Latinum he wants. But that would obviously have bad effects on the Ferengi economy, so there's a moral rule in place (perhaps enforced with limits in the replicator code) not to do that.

When we talk about vast interstellar empires of thousands of starships travelling faster than light, we really should think about the vast expense of that. No doubt, the amount of energy required to build and maintain a fleet of such things would be tremendous, therefore it would be expensive. Consider this, the vast energies required for even a single ship to approach c (I believe I read someplace it would take the mass of Saturn to drive a resonable size ship to those speeds), now multiply that by any notional fleet. We have no modern notion of how to even convert that much mass (and drag it around).

In other words, sci-fi economy:modern economy::sci-fi energies:modern energies

Sci-fi economics could be truly fascinating as a sub-genre, but I don't know of any texts that do a decent job of it.

Social relationships are still important the higher you go in finance - it’s much easier to get a $100 million loan for a new building with a strong relationship with a banker than as a stranger, regardless of collateral.

I think a pre-commercial time where people didn’t care about money is a fiction.

I would like the article better if it mentioned the difference between money as a store of value (my risk if I have a lot of it) versus as a medium of transactions (risk is limited to the amount in my wallet) versus inherent worth (tradable item). The first case needs belief in some form of backing. The second doesn't.

And of course we should mention using leaves as money by the Golgafrinchan people of Ark Fleet Ship B.

None of these are barter. All of these are more like money...

That's a story that's often told, but it doesn't seem to actually be true. An examination of the historical and anthropological record shows that barter systems only exist in societies that formerly had money, but no longer do (for example, because the empire that was backing the currency collapsed). In societies that never had money, you see a variety of things, mostly formal gift economies, but sometimes things like tracking and cancellation of debts not denominated in a single unit.

If you'd like to learn more about this, read "Debt, the first 5,000 years", by the late anthropologist David Graeber.

That question could be asked about almost everyone in Middle Earth given how little discussion there is of it. The only explicit mention of a price that I can remember is the twelve silver pennies that are paid to Bill Ferny for his pony (and an additional eighteen paid by Butterbur to Merry as compensation for the lost animals). One would assume that money is used in the Shire, but it is never mentioned--for example, we never see anyone actually paying for drinks at the Green Dragon. Everywhere else items just appear and there is no discussion of any of the behind the scenes processes that produce them or how those processes work.