Warp coils and photon torpedoes aside, have you ever thought of the weird fact that there's no money in Star Trek? Or how people get stuff done in real life when they can just ... erhm, enjoy what the holodeck can offer?
Our very own John who blog at The Zeray Gazette has, and he's given it some serious thoughts:
... my usual interpretation of the economics of Star Trek: they were unrealistic, as they eliminated the first law of economics -- scarcity. Thanks to the replicator, there is virtually no need to manufacture anything. Although there were a few objects, such as latinum or yamok sauce, that could not be replicated, there was essentially nothing that your replicator could not provide for you -- including more replicators.
Come to think of it - how would a money-less economics of the future a la Star Trek work? Who'll do the scut work?
i'm a dork.
there IS no "scut work". everything is designed to clean itself and work indefinitely.
Rent will be less because the walls can be replicated, but there still has to be labor unless the replicators are big enough to cough up a whole house (and then who transports and sets up the replicator? And does it run on electricity? Then the electric bill is part of the fee for the house).
So when you buy a house, you're buying land, which will not be free, and you're buying the bill for the replicated house. If you're renting, you're paying the landlord for owning the land and paying the replicator bill. Bills, as parts break with time, and have to be replaced; and labor has to install the replacements, unless you're redoing the whole house every time someone makes a ding in a wall.
Once you've still got the mortgage, you've got bills. If you won a lottery of say $34,000, would you quit your job?
And the tonier the neighborhood (ie the more limited the resource you desire), the higher the rent will be. It'll still cost a fortune (relatively) to live in Manhattan, even if the walls and art can be replicated. Come to think of it, you wouldn't buy replicated art if you were that high-status. It would be like putting up a framed cheap reproduction- hmm.
Replicators use energy and energy isn't free.
Also from the Deep Space Nine episode "In the Cards":
Jake: "I'm Human, I don't have any money."
Nog: "It's not my fault that your species decided to abandon currency-based economics in favor of some philosophy of self-enhancement."
Jake: "Hey, watch it. There's nothing wrong with our philosophy. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity."
Nog: "What does that mean?"
Jake: "It means we don't need money!"
After Earth made contact with alien life, society shifted from a monetary based economy to a resource based economy. At the time it was easy to do because the world had been stricken by several massive wars over the last 70 years, that devastated the worlds economy and populations.
The article assumes that the change in economics came with the advent of replicators, but it actually preceded the replicator, by 300 years, give or take. It really makes me wonder if the author is more than a passing viewer of Star Trek.
It's difficult for us, people who have lived our entire lives thinking that money was a requirement of society, to think about doing away with it. We think about who will be garbage men, and street sweepers if there's no pay. Or what would drive a person to devote their time to becoming a doctor if they weren't going to make a fortune with their training. The simple answer is that most people in our society wouldn't do any of that stuff, without a financial reward. But that's because deep down most people are selfish, greedy individuals who focus on what they can better for themselves rather than being concerned how they can be a part of a society striving to better itself.
As to the scut work, that is handled by automated systems of robots.
There's a futurist from Florida, Jacque Fresco, who has been advocating the shift to a resource based economy for years. We're already equipped to provide for every person on the planet, the scarcity we face is in nearly every case artificial and used to playing with pricing and profit margins. One thing preventing it is the pathological need for people to acquire wealth, and that's a sickness that we may never overcome. Also although most of us claim we want equality for everyone, humans have an inherent need to separate into a class structure, in a society without money, financial inequality would be replaced by much more unpleasant class stratifications. And that is something I would really hate to see.
Even though I long to see a society where everyone is provided for, where anyone wishing to go to college can, where money is no longer the only reason most people work, where artificial scarcity is not a constant menace, where banks don't control governments, where millions aren't killed over resources, where no one is homeless or hungry; I've sadly come to the realization that it isn't going to happen in my lifetime, humanity has too far to go before it can be without its money.
Fortunately, Roddenberry's vision was made a little more palatable to modern audiences, but they still had to work out the differences between his Federation utopia and the rest of the universe.
It didn't always work, and we ended up with DS9 - utopia clashing with dystopia. Did they pay for stuff, or didn't they? Who knows? wooooo....
I've pondered the question of what motivates the crewmen myself. Captain is one thing but it's still a job like all others. Duty assignments require you to be at a certain place at a certain time performing a certain task. That's work in anybody's book.
Jake wants to buy his father a real, authentic 1951 Willie Mays baseball card. But his society is "far too advanced" to use money anymore. So instead of a single cash (or latinum) transaction, Jake has to waste DAYS of his life engaging in elaborate barter schemes.
BARTER. When confronted by scarcity, the best the poor citizens of the HIGHLY ADVANCED Federation can do is resort to economic practices used by civilizations existing in PREHISTORY.
And forget about the scarcity problem -- what about the misallocation problem? Given the subject, let's use William Shatner as an example. The man's an actor, a sci-fi writer, and a LEGENDARY singer . How should he allocate his time, talents and efforts?
In a cash economy, he knows that society values his acting skills quite highly, his writing skills somewhat, and his singing skills -- well, very little. He knows that he'll probably starve if he spends his life trying to cut albums. Society provides him with the incentives to devote his life to acting and writing.
Contrast that result with the results under Roddenberry's moneyless utopia. Even if William Shatner were a 100% altruist, how would he know how to spend his time to maximize the benefit to society? He might very well err and torture us all with more of his albums. And that's the sort of mistake that would happen ALL THE TIME in the Federation of a ST:NG universe.
Before money, the so called "scut work" got done because it was recognised that it needed doing. I imagine that Star Fleet personnel would also recognise that, if they didn't crawl around inside a Jeffries Tube, something would stop working, the ship would break, and somebody could die.
With my tongue.
Think of it like our buddy the working canines out there. Herding dogs. True they get paid in kibble, but its more than that, that drives them to try harder. They desire approval.
Maybe it works something like that?
I ramble on about it on my website:
http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3al.html#consequences
Someone mentioned rent and land values, land is only scarce if you can't leave the planet, millions of humans have migrated to the stars. Cityscapes are far more massive than they are now, and without the need to commute land that is currently uninhabited, could very well have been reclaimed and made into massive housing centers.
no doubt.
The Trek universe has never been terribly consistent regarding details, but has generally striven for a positive view of "the future," one in which the characters work to resolve problems. Money was rarely if ever discussed on TOS (aside from alien currencies). In Star Trek II (Wrath of Khan) we do see a janitor vacuuming a corridor at Starfleet Academy. In Star Treks III and VI we also see kitchen staff wiping down tables and preparing food. So "grub work" probably still exists. (The reason for these details is directorial choice. Nicholas Meyer [II & VI] liked to include familiar touches like books, eyeglasses, old-fashioned furniture.) One could argue that humans still need to do all these chores on Star Trek, and therefore money may still be the incentive. However, one could also simply draw a comparison with modern life & technology: The Roomba sure saves one a lot of vacuuming, but has trouble with corners and shag carpeting. Windshield wipers are great, but one still must squeegee the wildshield by hand on occasion. You can subsist on fast food, but nothing beats a home-cooked meal. So we may perhaps assume that in Star Trek, everyone on a starship has a chore list and probably puts in a couple of hours a week picking up a few dust-bunnies the Roomba missed. Also, some people really LOVE to cook.
Besides, gakh is best served live. (And revenge is a dish best served cold.)
Star Trek IV - Not meaning to be less than gentlemanly, Kirk nevertheless sticks the marine biologist with the restaurant bill. "Don't tell me you don't use money in the 23rd Century!" "Well, we don't."
ST:TNG, pilot episode - We see Dr. Crusher buying some linen with some form of credit. My guess is that some form of money does exist, but seems to be unnecessary on Earth, in Starfleet, and possibly on all Federation worlds. This would make sense, but was never elaborated on. (A modern parallel would be the Euro, accepted all over Europe; Poland still uses zloty but did join the EU a few years ago.) Kirk probably also had credit for making purchases on a few participating worlds that still used money. But as any time-traveler quickly finds out, money from the future is not accepted in the past. (Unless it's made of "valuable" minerals. Klaatu's diamonds from "The Day the Earth Stood Still" are an example of this exception.) Kirk could not have paid for his spaghetti & Chianti, because in the 20th Century his account did not exist.
I've often had to explain to people during economic discussions that we often forget that money is really worth what "we" agree it will be worth. (Problems arise when balances change, people get greedy, and everyone starts imagining that money is more solvent than it really is.) A global currency unit might be a bad thing, or a very good thing. It might even be a step toward a money-less economy.
This, however, would require fully-automated trash collecting & recycling. And we'll all need to be taught from birth that one's happiness does NOT require another's misery (the root cause of greed). Otherwise, as HollywoodBob put it, society will get stratified all over again.
Oh - and re: vonSkippy: They do poo in Star Trek. Check out the blueprints for the Enterprise, and you'll see the commode fixtures in the crew quarters' bathrooms. They just never appeared on the show, like the Brady Bunch.
Shatner's record, "Has Been", produced by Ben Folds is exquisite. Wouldn't accuse Shatner of pretending to be a singer, though. Spoken word combined with music and guest performances.
That was on the episode called "The Gamesters of Triskelion", and 'quatloos' were never defined by the little glowing brain-beings that used them in wagering.
Judging by the look of the humanoid Thralls, I'd say quatloos had to do with mascara, hairspray, and artificial bearskins.
Didn't know he'd done another album.
But his first one (1968) was ranked #45 on a list of the 50 worst albums ever made.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Transformed_Man
Granted, he doesn't say cold hard cash, but there is clearly a scarcity / supply and demand system at play here.
http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/aprilfool/P50/
yes it is communism, sorta
right now you work get paid to pay rent
future you work as one to create a better universe
taking care of each other.
someone works on the pooh
others work on building houses and ships
other supplying electricty
there is still supply and demand but it someone job to make it so.
UTOPIA.
on a side note dead people and pooh is what makes the replicators work.
can not create something from nothing.
Unless they came up with a low cost energy source. Like Solar Energy, Cold Fusion or Antimatter . Besides its a sci-fi show.
Then there will always be disparities in talent. You can see this in every episode by the mere fact of the ships hierarchy. Why is Jean-Luc a Captain and some random dude just a lieutenant? Because Picard is better than that other dude. He's smarter, more ambitious, a better ass-kisser, maybe simply more lucky. Whatever, the point is there will always be people who have less talent and luck than others. Hence you will have poverty. Maybe it won't be the abject poverty we see in some places of our time, but there will always be people who have less. For example: look at a poor person in America, compared to sub-Saharan Africa. A poor American likely lives in a small apartment, with few frills, bad heat and no AC, but there is little chance of dying from exposure. They can always go to an emergency room if they are ill, although quality of care is suspect. They will also have access to abundant amounts of cheap food, albeit very bad for you. An impoverished sub-Saharan African, meanwhile, likely has no shelter, little to no access to ANY kind of medical care, and is in a constant state of malnutrition. Being poor in America is a helluva lot better than being poor in sub-Saharan Africa, but poverty still exists in America. 24th century poverty might seem pretty sweet to us, but poverty will still exist.
A cure for cancer or aids is always based on donations and government contributions, basic medicine for 3rd world countries and normal folk a like is always based on how much it cost to manufacture, to sell and to buy.
Space exploration and technological advancement is always constrained by money, if the need for money to do this no longer existed, humans would be able to accomplish things a lot more than we can now.
Again religon does not exist in Star Trek, it is usually money, greed and religon that causes the most grief and wars in today's society, if there is to be a society where the human race builds a future to better itself and man kind, then bring it on, but unfortunately an awful destructive thing would have to happen to society first before we can evolve and progress on from the greedy self obsrobed society we've become.