The most important concept in that article is that of a gift economy. The economy provides people with their basic needs and allows them to do (just about) whatever they wish with their time. Some people will chose to produce goods in old fashioned ways, like fine wine produced by tradtional methods, and these goods would be given to others as gifts.
Such goods will always be scarce by definition, but they are all luxuries. An interesting case for this is looking at the markets that developed in POW camps during World War II and how they collapsed once the liberating armies arived with an abundance of goods.
"On 12th April, withthe arrival of elements of the 30th US. Infantry Division, the ushering in of an age ofplenty demonstrated the hypothesis that with infinite means economic organizationand activity would be redundant, as every want could be satisfied without effort." (Pg. 14 of the linked PDF)
Another thing to note is the shift in the means of production. If labor is basically unnecessary in the production of goods you get a shift in modes of production. I could see this happening in the near with the decentralized 3D printing of goods, combined with the massive energy of the sun and the shocking amounts of raw materials in the asteroids around the solar system.
This I think is a demonstration of Marx's biggest mistake. He thought the economic organization would shift without a change in the means of production. Unlike every other change in his economic theories.
Post-scarcity is a theoretical economic situation in which most goods can be produced in great abundance with minimal human labor needed, so that they become available to all very cheaply or even freely
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Post-scarcity does not require all goods/services to be infinitely abundant.
If you want to look into it more, that situation is usually called a post-scarcity economy[1]. It's talked about and depicted in a few fictionalized places, including Star Trek.
I wouldn't use Star Trek as a canon for post-scarcity economics, it's more like an inspiration. In fact we are seeing the elements of the vocational aspects already:
Look at all the Bloggers, the Kickstarters, Youtubers, Justin Bieber at the start of his "career". Aren't they essentially taking a ton of infrastructure and a weird "diffusive" sort of income already?
Joseph Sisko's restaurant in our terms might be more like a kind of hobby rather than a serious economic enterprise. The guests might not pay anything at all, it's just that owner and guests do this because they enjoy making food and eating food, rather than eating from a replicator.
You just don't see all the shitty restaurants noone ever goes to...
Trekonomics is a nice non-fiction book about the utopian ideas presented in Star Trek and especially TNG. There, they treat the replicator as more of a metaphor for post-scarcity rather than recipe (i.e. Star Trek technology is sufficient but not necessary).
I would say I'm more optimistic than you about post-scarcity. Bertrand Russell makes a case for the insanity of modern society by noting that during WWI half of British populace was sufficient to produce enough for all of Britain. Even if we allow for some margin of error in his statement, since that time productivity in the US has increased 4.5x since then.
To me the show is increasingly relevant. For example, it presents a clear answer to a popular criticism to UBI: what is to prevent everyone from staying home to play video games and leeching off society?
The optimistic answer is that once society can produce enough goods for everyone, the traditional value system of society (material wealth => proxy for contributions to society => virtue) loses meaning and will be overtaken by new ones (contributing to society => virtue).
I agree with most of your summary except the end. What if the problems in the US and around the developed world are more due to how society is organized rather than technological? I think the Star Trek value system is appealing and IMO something we ought to strive for.
I think this is a useless exercise. The economics of Star Trek won't be coherent, because it was pieced together through multiple series and some wishful thinking while retaining certain properties needed for the universe to be interesting. You can't have a TV show about drone ships flying around and beaming back exploration data via subspace.
Without Star Trek replicators in the foreseeable future, all the 3d printing and robots in the world will not give us unlimited amounts of basic materials needed. Concrete and glass might be virtually unlimited, but certain metals are definitely not. If those resource constraints lead to energy constraints, we'll have problems getting to any sort of proto-post-scarcity stage at current standards of living. AI might solve the problem, but the consequences of AI are unpredictable (singularity).
A few books on the subject worth mentioning, but not mentioned in the essay:
Doctorow - Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (fiction, set in a speculative world where the economic system is based on units of social status called whuffies; everyone is born with some, if I recall right (nope, apparently I was wrong, it's not zero-sum), and from there it's a free market).
Rifkin - The End of Work (nonfiction, takes a look at how society might function as jobs gradually disappear due to technology).
Iain Banks's Culture universe is mentioned in the further reading section, but it's completely post-scarcity on planet and orbital scales, with AIs running everything. The aforementioned books are much closer to home.
No such thing as a post-scarcity economy, even in the fictional universe of Star Trek. When you have replicators that can produce any food or clothing or small pieces of equipment you need, you end up bartering over planets, star systems, or wormholes [1].
The article forgot to mention that in the Star Trek timeline things didn't go so smoothly: a third World War eventually occurred and only the invention of warp drive and the first contact with the Vulcans turned things around.
But I think the point is another: for as much as I love Star Trek and advocate a smooth transition to a post-scarcity economy, I don't think Roddenberry and the writers that succeeded him are experts in currency, economics or even in the techologies that made that fictionary society a perfect post-scarcity economy.
There are, however, some interesting thoughts that could serve as a basis for a more deep look into the post-scarcity economics. Organizations such as the Venus Project and the Zeitgeist Movement tend to advocate it under the "resource-based economy" name and I find their views interesting, relatively to this topic.
I think there is a (relatively) easy path from here to there. Let's presume that we want to create a Star Trek post-scarcity future.
One theory I like for Star Trek economics is that they've got an extremely high basic income, the equivalent of $10M/year or so. Energy costs about the same (~10c/kwh), and is the limiting factor in replicator economics.
Some stuff is really expensive, like land and human labour. Replicator-made material goods are incredibly cheap, unless you need an huge amount -- you couldn't afford to buy a copy of the Enterprise.
Obviously you don't need to work, and most don't. A few are VR addicted, but most are just dilettantes, they spend their time doing hobbies, art and travel, much like the able bodied retired population in the western world. A large minority get "real" jobs, but mainly for purpose and prestige. And some do it to get rich -- they want to buy a planet or a starship or something.
The nice thing about this theory is that the path is quite clear: start with a very small (possibly inadequate) basic income, and increase it regularly as circumstances permit.
Even Star Trek TNG didn't have a true post-scarcity economy.
At least 5 things were key parameters in their economy and were scarce:
- dilithium crystals, which were used to power ships, and thus also powered the replicators
- Enterprise class ships were definitely scarce/precious
- labour
- land, especially on Earth
- hand-made goods
STTNG didn't have a money economy. That doesn't mean they were post-scarcity.
The closest analogy on today's Earth would be the unmetered water connections that some towns have. Just because the water isn't metered doesn't mean that the water supply is unlimited.
Star Trek economics are just plain bull shit, any society who has the ability to create food or other items by the expenditure of only energy has no need of much else. I remember a quote, if a race could materialize star ships they would not need too and this is where Star Trek's future always struck me wrong, where is the limit to replicators?
As to the point of are were on a post scarcity economy, well we might be in some Western cultures but it does indicate quite clearly that given nothing to do far too many people will excel at it, worse when they do do something it will be to eat. Society will need to adjust those who just take to find something to do with their time. It might not earn them money or much but they need an activity to avoid end up looking like an extra from Wall-e.
Star Trek economy is for worlds without scarcity. Given we have scarcity, we allocate finite resources to things we want. If someone does something a lot of people want, they get more money.
Some people get money in other ways (e.g. working in government and being extremely lucky in the stock market) but that seems different.
Star Trek is very explicitly a post-scarcity society. There was an episode of Next Generation where they revive some Earthlings who had successfully frozen themselves in the 20th century.
One was a businessman who was excited to see how much the stock portfolio he had put together as a long term trust had fared. Picard had to gently explain to him wealth and money were no longer a thing.
Yes, that's my point. In economics a scarce resource is a limited resource. Defining post-scarcity as an abundance of goods is a bad definition, unless the goods are truly unlimited. Neither us nor 24th century Star Trek has post-scarcity. Star Trek TNG has a post-capitalist, non-monetary economy, but it's not post-scarcity.
The article actually acknowledges that point, stating that the Star Trek universe (and the Federation within it) is not really a post-scarcity society. There are lots of examples on the show indicating that scarcity, resource-allocation problems, and supply/demand crises still exist.
There are other post-scarcity economies, some of which are discussed more in depth than Star Trek. The first one that comes to mind is Cory Doctorow's "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom"[1], which uses whuffie[2].
In the US today a bushel of wheat (60 pounds) is worth $7.50 and contains about a month's worth of calories, for about half an hour worth of the average American's labour. Chinese factories produce widgets for pennies.
Under that definiton either both the 24th and the 22nd centuries are post-scarcity or neither are.
Trekonomics writer Manu Saadia has a much better definition:
"Post-scarcity is not so much a matter of material wealth or natural bounty, but an organizational option for society".
Fundamentally they can't, but that's not what the concept is aiming at. What we can do is to drop costs of things people need (or want) in their daily lives to the point that supply/demand basically stops working for them on an aggregate scale. If we do this to the point that any person can live a full life and participate in the society at large without having to exchange labour for resources or worrying about their wealth, then we achieve "post-scarcity".
Even in Star Trek, there were scarce things that needed to be allocated. Not everyone got their own starship. But we consider this fictional economy a post-scarcity one, because food, clothing, shelter, healthcare and entertainment were basically free for everyone.
Star Trek never really explains its economy. Why does Picard's family own a vineyard[1]? Presumably other people would like to have that. Why does starfleet headquarters get to be in the middle of SF. Don't they know that real-estate is expensive?
Even in post-scarcity world of things, there are non-divisible goods, like land, access to people (think, concert) and so on. So some form of allocation of resources would need to happen. Money is one way to do that. Others exist too like lottery, or government ownership are options too.
I'm all for post-scarcity, and think we can go a long way toward just having things be allocated and free, but you'll never get away from the miserable business of allocating scarce resources.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/11/18/star_trek_eco...
The most important concept in that article is that of a gift economy. The economy provides people with their basic needs and allows them to do (just about) whatever they wish with their time. Some people will chose to produce goods in old fashioned ways, like fine wine produced by tradtional methods, and these goods would be given to others as gifts.
Such goods will always be scarce by definition, but they are all luxuries. An interesting case for this is looking at the markets that developed in POW camps during World War II and how they collapsed once the liberating armies arived with an abundance of goods.
"On 12th April, withthe arrival of elements of the 30th US. Infantry Division, the ushering in of an age ofplenty demonstrated the hypothesis that with infinite means economic organizationand activity would be redundant, as every want could be satisfied without effort." (Pg. 14 of the linked PDF)
http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~hfoad/e111su08/Radford.pdf
Another thing to note is the shift in the means of production. If labor is basically unnecessary in the production of goods you get a shift in modes of production. I could see this happening in the near with the decentralized 3D printing of goods, combined with the massive energy of the sun and the shocking amounts of raw materials in the asteroids around the solar system.
This I think is a demonstration of Marx's biggest mistake. He thought the economic organization would shift without a change in the means of production. Unlike every other change in his economic theories.
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