A Utopian Star Trek Society - Making Economics Redundant
June 8th, 2008
photo: izarbeltza
The society of Star Trek invented by Gene Roddenberry is sometimes held up by fans as something we should strive towards. In the Star Trek universe, they don’t use money: people strive towards bettering themselves and humanity. Doesn’t that sound like communism to you?
If we tried to apply these principles in our world today, it certainly wouldn’t work. That’s been demonstrated in communism. Money is a much better way to carry out transactions than bartering: with bartering there needs to be a double-coincidence of wants. A baker may barter a few loaves of bread in exchange for a haircut with a hairdresser. Now, the baker only needs his hair cut once every month or two. Between haircuts, the hairdresser has nothing to barter and thus cannot have any bread on the table.
As for striving towards bettering ourselves and humanity? It doesn’t work in communism: communism gives people incentives to do as little as possible as they aren’t individually rewarded. Free-market economics (or capitalism) works simply because it gives people individual incentives to work and perform better: wages for workers, profits for companies and dividends for shareholders. Economics uses the fact that people act in their own self-interest to lead to an optimal outcome for society. I’d argue that economics is the single most important invention ever: one which paved the way for science, technology and pretty much every single aspect of life we experience today.
I was watching Visions of the Future on the BBC the other day and it did lead me to wonder whether we might be on the verge of this Star Trek age where we might be able to do without money. There are two bits of technology which I believe would allow this to happen.
photo: mugley
First of all, nuclear fusion. Nuclear fusion promises to be an abundant source of energy which is inexhaustible. Limitless and pollution-free, nuclear fusion could render the assumption of scarcity in economics out of date (that society doesn’t have enough resources to meet human wants). With an infinite amount of energy, we could do anything: mitigate global warming, travel to other planets, whatever we like.
Secondly, molecular assemblers or “replicators” as they are known in Star Trek. The development of replicators depends on further research into nanotechnology but the promise is that they can produce more or less anything at the touch of a button by constructing objects atom by atom. The only limitations would be the amount of energy required to replicate the objects and knowing what we want to produce with them.
Many scientists believe that nuclear fusion and molecular assemblers are both viable technologies and may only be about 50 years away.
In a world with limitless energy and the means to create anything that we wanted, nothing is scarce. We could immediately create anything that we want in order to fulfill our wants and needs. And it’s that fact which would render economics redundant. If everything costs nothing to make, why would you need money?
photo: fdecomite
So what would be the effect of such technologies on society? Wealth is more or less meaningless and there is no reason for money to exist, so there will be no such things as city stock traders or economists. In fact, anyone working in the primary and secondary sectors would be made redundant by replicators. The important people in such a society would be the scientists and engineers: in a world where we aren’t limited by resources, we are only limited by our ideas. Scientists and engineers are the people who will come up with those new ideas.
At first glance, the utopian society as described in ‘Star Trek’ can seem like a communist society which would never function in the real world. I believe that today we are beginning to see the glimpses of technology which would bring society into a new age where we are no longer constrained by resources, scarcity and economics. The only constraints would be our ideas and dreams. Gene Roddenberry’s dream of our futuristic society might not seem so farfetched afterall.
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I just wanted to single-out one line for comment since I’m passing by rather fast:
`Now, the baker only needs his hair cut once every month or two. Between haircuts, the hairdresser has nothing to barter and thus cannot have any bread on the table.’
This is not a complete argument against the principle, though. If the payment were “a month’s worth of bread”, the hairdresser would be fine. But the system is not so small. When you add more bakers and/or more hairdressers, the problem becomes quite complex. When you add other species (say, grocers and aircraft pilots) as well, it becomes ludicrously complex and it seems far from obvious to me that such a system would necessarily be unstable.
However, by the same token, money would probably *have* to be invented as an *expedient* common ground to save people remembering N! such weird facts as “grocer A thinks a flight to Moscow is worth 3 cabbages”, etc.
“The important people in such a society would be the scientists and engineers”
No, the important people in such a society would be the “creators”: the artists, the inventors, the performers, in other words, people who produce not material property, but intellectual property.
Also, I believe that such a system would cause unimaginable (literally) changes to our social and cultural systems.
That would cause irreversible ‘damages’ to any value of any material product, it’d be like rapid hyperdeflation of money for every single economy in the world, which would cause irreversible change to society as we know it - and it’d be extremely interesting. Value would shift from being in materials to being in ideas, there is still a need for money. Films and information exist regardless of the material cost, the value of them would not be the useful value of the material but the useful value of the information.
This is somewhat different from communism or marxism as things like luxuries don’t properly exist there, but that everything has a basic labour cost. Rather than adding to the economy and taking as fit, you’d add nothing and take as fit (if you’re working with making materials of course). Society has changed so much that basic Marxist economic policy does not work.
Good observation Tim! Also, the hairdresser would only need a certain amount of bread. So once he’s cut someones hair and got his months worth of bread, he won’t cut the hair of any other bakers.
I do wonder if we still need money in this scenario. My thoughts are that the only reason people need to charge for art or information today is because they too need to eat and to be able to purchase scarce goods. If they don’t need to do that, I see no reason why they would need to charge for their art or intellectual property.
Intellectual property or ideas are inherently free and non-rivalrous: the fact that somebody else has some knowledge doesn’t stop you from having it as well. Chances are people will pursue film and art because they enjoy doing it and will share it with the rest of society because they want to have as big an audience as possible. After all, if value shifts from materials to ideas, you want your ideas to be seen as far and wide as possible.
One of the main constraints will be finding a safe, clean powersource that can replaced all current technologies. It will be interesting to see if in the future zero point energy ends up being a viable source of energy.
I read a complete lack of faith in human beings. To dream of a world without money is not communism but an ideal that shifts power from a corrupt few to a truly expressive and free race. A new focus on Learning, Art and Science, a discovery of our true selves and the universe. If children are not brought up with the programming of the current corrupt system they may decide to cut hair of their own free will?
Its only fear that holds us back, i have faith there are enough decent people to hold the peace and make it work, free energy is already out there just suppressed.
Peace to everyone.
People wouldn’t chose to work with boring and straining jobs if there didn’t have to. With nuclear fusion reactors and replicators, somebody or something has to do the boring and straining jobs for that technology as well. In an large society without currency and where people doesn’t know each other there will bee no cooperation, helping, giving credits for example. Everybody want to be an scientist or an culture worker but no one wants to do the necessary things. communism is an stateless structure with no military or government, there wouldn’t be any federation, president or star fleet. There will yet be people with more resources than other. As far as I know that goes against the communistic manifestation, why work when you can have fun. Maybe you will have the pleasure of being flying with an state of the art star ship if you chose to do the cleaning on board.
hmmm, after reading the article im still having a couple of thoughts that i cant dismiss..
A-
as we are on this globe with around 6 bilion ppl and the everage household consists out of lets say 4 persons…. that would mean that we need 1.5 bilion “replicators” to suply 1 for each home on earth to provide for clothes and food and goods etc. and as we have seen with todays common items such as tv’s, radio’s, cars etc. these items a lot of ppl take now for granted, are still not available after an everage of lets say 70 yrs to a vast majority of ppl here on earth… so these “replicators” will probably also be unavailable to a large majority on earth if they become accessable in the future! So for atleast 70 yrs the inventors will make a huge profit from it…. and probably only in the wealthy economys/country’s….. still an money based econemy in my vew…
B-
The same principle goes for the nuclear fusion energy.. becouse the costs of building the first few plants will be huge and the investors want their money back and with profits… and to break that chain of money circle i dont see it happen…
c-
to close with a nice thought… for example: if i reproduce a disign pair of jeans from a top designer on my replicator, i guess i would have to pay some sort of sucsession rights… afterall im copying a brand product…!! hahahahahah
answering Franzzznl.
A- If the rich gets replicators the poor can have our food.
B- With an ecological economic the nuclear fusion energy will bee financed by externality cost and benefits ex: fines, taxes, subsidize and credits. The world will hopefully in our future become an socialistic reformation capitalism based on ecological economic instead of economic growth.
C- Al originators material can be financed by taxes based on all democratic elections. If you wanna replicate something out of the ordinary you simply have to pay for it.