
The Economics of Star Trek (2013) - Schwolop
https://medium.com/@RickWebb/the-economics-of-star-trek-29bab88d50
======
arethuza
The problem I have with Star Trek is that AIs don't seem to feature nearly as
extensively as I would expect them to if they actually existed, and I don't
see us getting anywhere near a "post scarcity" society unless we do have that
level of technology.

I hope our future looks more like the Culture than the Federation.

Edit: Of course, one valid criticism of the Culture is that humans are
effectively the pets of the god-like AIs (the Minds) that actually run
everything. However, as the Culture doesn't seem to act like most contemporary
cultures in that it is quite happy to see people leave or parts of it secede
if a group disagrees with a decision then I think I could probably live with
being a very indulged pet.

~~~
Afforess
Or a much more likely: strong AI isn't possible.

~~~
M2Ys4U
Data and Lore would seem to contradict that.

~~~
arethuza
There is a scene in "The State of the Art" where the Culture folks visiting
Earth are having a party and someone (while wearing a Star Trek uniform and
waving a lightsaber around) announces that he wants to be Captain of the GCU
Arbitrary.

Someone else comments that a person trying to take charge of a Culture ship is
like a intestinal bacteria trying to take command of a person.

Edit: Of course, the Culture also appeals because of the much higher ambient
humour level in the Culture than in the po-faced Federation.

------
Shivetya
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.

~~~
MrBra
> if a race could materialize star ships they would not need too

Sorry can you rephrase this please? I really can't get the sense of it.

~~~
GotAnyMegadeth
If a society was sufficiently advanced that they could just press a button and
make a star ship at will, then they would probably be equally advanced in
other areas and would not have any need for star ships.

~~~
Ygg2
That's a non sequitur. A society advances on numerous axis, but doesn't
necessarily advance at the same time. Society can be immoral and enough
scientifically advanced to have such machines. I'm pretty sure Romulans in
that universe had replicators and they were known for their black ops
division.

~~~
GotAnyMegadeth
Good point. Though I think that the suggestion was that the technology
required to materialise a massive, warp capable star ship may be more advanced
than a different technology that accomplishes the same tasks as a star ship.
For example being able to teleport both people and nuclear weapons across the
whole universe would pretty much render star ships obsolete.

------
zo1
I take it when they say "Star Trek", they're actually talking about the United
Federation of Planets, and Starfleet... with their supposedly "unlimited"
resources.

Of course, they don't go into details otherwise they'd quickly realize that
it's not really a post-scarcity economy. It might be a "post-scarcity" on a
lot of resources that we _currently_ find scarce, but not in the true
definition. E.g. labor is scarce, property is scarce, and energy is scarce.
Also, _Remember_ they need a mined resource to power those giant warp-cores
that make it _seem_ like they have unlimited energy to "create" any resource.

Much like the laws of physics constrain us from creating a perpetual motion
machine, they also constrain us from having a post-scarcity economy.

~~~
adrianN
The laws of physics don't really prevent us from having a post-scarcity
economy. The sun puts out _vast_ amounts of energy. If we had technology like
replicators that turns energy into basically anything we like, most things are
already taken care of. I don't really see how labour can be a problem either.
If most production jobs are done via replicator, many people have nothing to
do. And in the Star Trek universe there are holograms that are capable of
performing complex tasks, certainly anything the "service industry" would
require.

~~~
zo1
" _most things are already taken care of._ " Note how you used the word "most"
instead of all.

I see what you're saying, but it relies on a lot of details being glossed
over. We'd essentially have to live in some sort of utopian society where the
universe magically auto-aligns and adjusts everything so that everything and
everyone is equal, and has the exact same things.

Because, as soon as something is unequal, it's scarce in one place and
abundant in another. If that happens, then we've created a market for
exchange, and we're back to scarcity economics again. Granted, we're getting
into philosophical grounds now, but do you understand what I'm trying to say?

------
Schwolop
(was posted six months ago, but fell off the radar.)

~~~
tempestn
You might be getting downvotes from people who think this comment is a dupe
complaint, not realizing you're the OP.

~~~
Schwolop
If so, they're getting outweighed by the upvotes on the post itself, so I'm
not bothered... :-)

------
jonnathanson
Whenever people discuss "Star Trek Economics," they seem to limit their
discussion to the apparent economics of, and within, the Federation -- and
specifically, within Starfleet. This is problematic for two reasons.

The first is that the Federation is but one of many interstellar powers within
its galaxy, and that's putting aside any of the thousands of unaligned or
independent worlds and smaller coalitions. Many of these societies, even some
of the Federation constituent societies, appear to use their own currencies or
means of exchange. Take the Ferengi as the most extreme example. They are
basically an anarcho-capitalist society, bordering on kleptocracy. Money is
important to the Ferengi, to put it mildly. So how does the Federation conduct
trade with the Ferengi government? On a more microeconomic level, what happens
when Bashir and O'Brien order a couple rounds at Quark's? Who picks up their
tab? Clearly Quark pays for his own supplies, and charges hefty markups, and
he's always seen fretting about the difference. I have a hard time believing
that Federation officers can just consume his (clearly limited) resources
without contributing to his profit margins. And if they pay him in Federation
Credits, what good are they to a non-member of the Federation? If they are not
currency -- if they are more like scrip, or rations, or promissory notes good
for X units of energy, or what have you -- then this creates a serious problem
for Quark. Presumably, the value of Federation credits is relatively fixed
and/or tied to some other unit or commodity. It is not a fiat currency. So why
in the world would Quark accept credits, when he'd strongly prefer latinum?
And how does one go about exchanging one for the other? For that matter, what
would the Federation make of someone who decided to exchange all of his
credits, even if he could, for gold-pressed latinum? If credits are not money,
then perhaps they are something along the lines of notes or bonds, floated by
the Federation government. In which case, Bashir and O'Brien pay for their
drinks in the equivalent of US treasury bills, or perhaps in fractional shares
of a Federation sovereign wealth fund. Or perhaps they are energy rations of
some sort, in which case, Quark needs energy as much as any other business,
and so he's happy to accept it (and to charge as many energy-units as he sees
fit for his food, drinks, and games of chance).

The second problem has more to do with using Starfleet as the lens through
which we draw conclusions about Federation society. If I were to show some
alien society a documentary about the United States, set primarily on a US
aircraft carrier, with ~90% of the situations and characters taking place in a
military context, my alien viewers would draw some very interesting inferences
about the US (or, more broadly, all of human society). They'd think we were a
rigidly hierarchical society. They'd think we have a handful of basic
professions, and that nobody really cares too much about personal property.
They'd wonder how everyone gets by, and how resources are allocated, and
they'd probably assume it's through a quasi-socialist system of rationing and
stipends.

The microcosm of the US military is different from the macrocosm of US
society, and especially different from that of the entire world. It's sort of
a mini society within a larger society, operating under its own rules and
organizing principles. Similarly, we should suspect that life in Starfleet is
probably different, in some meaningful ways, from ordinary life in the
Federation. And life in the Federation is different from life in the Klingon
Empire, or in the Cardassian Union, etc.

None of this is to discount the deep and insightful thinking on the part of
this article's author. Nevertheless, I think we should consider the
limitations of the framework through which the shows allow us to view the Star
Trek universe. We get our fair share of glimpses into the outside-Starfleet
world, but we should still be mindful of the observational lens through which
we catch those glimpses.

~~~
personlurking
As someone finally watching DS9 for the first time, how does it work when
Quark thumb-scans/charges Odo for 8 slips of latinum (in exchange for the baby
changeling) in 'The Begotten' episode?

A few questions arise: Who does Odo work for? Who pays him? Does he use money
(he doesn't seem to in any other episode)? How does Quark get the latinum?

~~~
drdeadringer
> how does it work when Quark thumb-scans/charges Odo

I find it funny that a scheming Quark would bother thumb-printing a shape-
shifter. It's only Odo's honor that prevents him from saying, "Oh, no, that's
not my fingerprint. Let me show you my current set..."

~~~
personlurking
Also a bit funny is the Founders all look like Odo, or rather his "father",
the scientist who experimented on him when he was "young".

------
ChuckMcM
When I read this the last time it came up, I suspected that the author was
walking around the edges of the Basic Income hypothesis. Theory being you can
be "poor" forever (income provided for basic shelter, food, and medical
attention. And anything else you want you have to work for. The basic tenant
being that _everyone_ is funded into a reasonably safe life, even people who
are working. Being paid a salary is 'bonus' on top of the basic allotment.

At which point you can eliminate minimum wage and labor unions. The question
of course is whether or not anyone would do some of the jobs we cannot
currently outsource to robots.

~~~
guimarin
It's funny you ask whether someone will do the jobs we cannot outsource to
robots. I saw an old man bend over and pick up a piece of trash the other day
while walking to work. I have also calculated that about 90% of the software I
use on a daily basis is OSS. Your question has actually already been answered.
People do jobs they are not compensated for all the time. And for things that
must get done, you can raise salaries until they get done.

------
dnautics
"The key here, to me, is to start thinking about how economics would work when
we decouple labor from reward."

Economics has always had a weak association between labor and reward....
That's where I stopped reading.

~~~
darkmighty
I think he means something like "Economic value of a certain function largely
decoupled from reward" \-- otherwise you couldn't contemplate the possibility
of not working at all and having a high baseline reward. You'd have gotten the
spirit if you read the rest.

~~~
dnautics
your comment makes even less sense. Economic value is coupled to reward, but
value != labor. It's actually Marxist (and to a lesser degree classical
Smithian) theories that conflate value with labor. There are plenty of
economic theories that generally disregard the relationship between labor and
value, except the causal relationship that labor sometimes (but not always)
creates value.

~~~
aric
Value has value. Labor is labor. Agreed. It's laughable to base assumptions on
relating "labor" to "value." The forms of labor that generate value depend
entirely on cultures, systems, laws/artificial constraints, and circumstances
of an era. It's still worth noting that in a society with post-scarcity such
as Star Trek:TNG, which, of course, is almost entirely a result of replicator
proliferation, "labor" would have a far more visceral and noticeable
correlation with "value." Which human actions would be highly valued in a
fantasy where people have the means to bend matter/energy to their will, where
no one is without most specialty foods and material objects of choice, where
it's almost always a question of what people feel like doing on any particular
day?

Many episodes touched on that. Naturally, the value of a person's _time_
sharply rises where no one need give their time. Today there are still vast
differences in personalities among people that generates incredible variance
in culture and pursuits irrespective of reward. Conjecture that to the
maximum. There are things that give incentive to pull away from what one might
not ordinarily do. There's specialty teaching; personal performances; lively
forms of artistry; types of manual labor for odds and ends not conducive to
androids and automation; the never-ending pursuit of happiness and/or power?
What might "dirty work" be? It's like thinking of an amalgamation of the
present day considerations of elite society equalized through sheer
unrestricted access of the masses. I forget how land settlement on Earth works
in Star Trek.

No matter the economics...

One might expect that most societies comprised of Earthlings will still start
with the world's oldest profession and end with the world's second-oldest
profession.

------
chiph
I don't have any rigor behind this, but my theory is that credits are used
external to the Federation. And that transactions between Federation citizens
are essentially cashless.

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.

~~~
dragonwriter
> With replicator technology, a Star Fleet officer could produce all the gold
> pressed Latinum he wants.

The whole basis for latinum's value as a medium of exchange is the fact that
it has some kind of technobabble immunity to replication so, no, they
couldn't. (Latinum isn't the _only_ thing which has this kind of problem --
IIRC, as also antimatter, dilithium, certain radioactives, and, well,
basically anything that needed to be scarce in at least one episode where they
didn't want to invoke the non-availability of the replicators has a similar
issue; of course, given that replicators and transporters notionally work on
the same principles, but most replicator-immune things _have_ been transported
in the series, there is a pretty deep technobabble consistency problem here,
but that's a recurring problem in Trek.)

------
Astrosocialist
I'm surprised nobody has linked Matthew Yglesias' excellent response: "The
Star Trek Economy: (Mostly) Post-Scarcity (Mostly) Socialism".

[http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/11/18/star_trek_eco...](http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/11/18/star_trek_economy_federation_is_only_mostly_post_scarcity.html)

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](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.

------
smoyer
"Take a mental journey for a moment with me: what if, one day, technology
reaches the point that a small number of humans — say, 10 million — can
produce all of the food, shelter and energy that the race needs. This doesn’t
seem like insanely wishful thinking, given current trends. There’s no rational
reason why the advances in robotics, factories, energy and agriculture
couldn’t continue unabated for long periods of time. Of course I’m not saying
they will, but rather, they could."

If those $10 million people are capitalists, the price of the goods they
create will rise until the rest of us become their slaves.

------
wtbob
> In reality,the market already basically dictates this, for who can claim
> that a Wall Street banker works more than a teacher?

Ummm, I daresay that just about any Wall Street banker works significantly
more, has to comprehend significantly more data points, exerts significantly
more mental effort and is (probably) significantly more stressed than a
teacher.

I will cheerfully admit that one's _mental image_ of a Wall Street banker
works less than one's mental image of a teacher.

And he puts _way_ too much effort into justifying the internal contradictions
of a poorly-written, third-rate science fantasy show.

------
edwldh3qe239jh9
"I’ll listen to them again when our schools are decent and our life span
starts increasing again magically."

Stopped reading right there. If you need straw men, you aren't worth reading.

------
jpollock
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].

[1]
[http://craphound.com/down/download.php](http://craphound.com/down/download.php)
[2]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whuffie](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whuffie)

------
mikkeluk
I always assumed Federation members had their bills paid by the Federation.
ie. Quark sells 100 bars of latinum worth of drinks in a week to Federation
staff, the Federation's accounting/remittance department sends over 100 bars
of latinum to Quark (digitally of course).

------
Titanbase
Star Trek: The Next Generation's episode "The Neutral Zone" covers this topic
pretty well. I highly recommend it.

"The challenge, Mr. Offenhouse, is to improve yourself... to enrich yourself.
Enjoy it."

\- Picard, describing life on 24th century Earth

------
hooande
I read a more detailed explanation of the star trek economy. I can't find the
link now [1] but it answered some of the questions raised in this post. Since
I can't find it I'm not sure if it was canon or just fan theorizing, but it
was interesting all the same. I understand that this is a highly nerdy topic,
but it's an example of how a a Proto Post Scarcity economy could work.

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.

~~~
davidw
I think your heart is in the right place, but your economics are off - by a
lot.

It's hard to rectify that in a quick comment though, as it's a complicated,
interesting and fascinating subject.

Just to pick one thing, you mention 'efficiency'. Capitalism is not very
efficient in a lot of ways. However, it happens to be more efficient for large
groups of people than all the _other_ systems people have tried, if you don't
mind me poaching Churchill's quote about democracy.

And another: money. Money is merely a means of trading scarce goods. Looking
at it as a problem is a red herring. The actual problem is the availability
and distribution of scarce resources like food and shelter and iphones and
other things people want.

Here's a book I'm fond of - it's fairly mainstream economics.

[http://www.amazon.com/The-Undercover-Economist-Tim-
Harford/d...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Undercover-Economist-Tim-
Harford/dp/0345494016?tag=dedasys-20)

He's written another one lately about macroeconomics which is pretty good as
well:

[http://www.amazon.com/The-Undercover-Economist-Strikes-
Back/...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Undercover-Economist-Strikes-
Back/dp/1594631409/?tag=dedasys-20)

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
Money is _not_ merely a means of trading goods.

Capitalist culture is essentially a Darwinian zero-sum game. Winners win big,
losers lose freedom, basic necessities, and ultimately their lives - directly
through a life of quasi-slavery working for someone else's benefit, and also
through drastically shortened lifespan.

Money is the game counter. Decisions about how much money is available, who
has access to it under what circumstances, and how much freedom they get in
return for that access, define the game. But they're not set democratically -
they're declared by a fiat, by a priestly caste of economists and bankers who
administer the game.

The big difference between a Star Trek economy and this one is that in Star
Trek, the game doesn't exist. Nor does the priestly caste.

What happens instead is that individuals trust the culture to do everything it
can to look after them, and in return the culture trusts individuals to
contribute voluntarily without freeloading, or without having some kind of
semi-psychotic 'use all the things' fit of pointless public consumption.

It's effectively a trust economy, instead of a top-down planned economy like
the capitalist system.

Wait - capitalism is a planned economy? Uh huh. Didn't you notice? It's as
planned as the Soviet economy was, but instead of the Politburo, the planning
is coordinated by the priestly caste which sets the rules of commerce (e.g.
'corporations must maximise profits and growth at all costs, even at the
expense of long-term social stability'.)

In Star Trek, the economists have been replaced by planners who treat
individuals like adults. The individuals act like adults, because they
understand that the social benefits of volunteering time and talent vastly
outweigh the personal costs, even if it costs them their lives.

In capitalism individuals are forced to compete for essentials. This makes
volunteering _impossible_ for most of the population. It also turns the
culture into a bear pit, and wastes a lot of energy on pointlessly damaging
individual competition.

~~~
davidw
> Capitalist culture is essentially a Darwinian zero-sum game.

No, it isn't. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-
sum_game#Economics](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-sum_game#Economics)

[http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html)

~~~
jerf
In fact, I'd suggest even beyond that... just _think_ about that claim. Love
it or hate it or anything in between, wealth of _all_ kinds has absolutely
exploded under capitalism since the Industrial Revolution. If individual
transactions in the world of capitalism are intrinsically exploitative and
there is always a winner and a loser and a net loss of societal wealth... _how
can you explain the modern world_ , in which the poorest residents of the
industrialized countries consider their birthright many things that the Kings
of old could literally not have gotten at any price? Don't just read the
propaganda, _think_. This is self-evidently a ludicrous claim if you take it
seriously. It is absurd that the net effect of multiple trillions
(quadrillions?) of net-loss transactions could somehow sum to something so net
positive. Bridge the gap between theory and reality... don't just let people
babble on and on about economics without ever asking them to be correct,
_think_ about what it would actually produce in the real world if it were
true.

Capitalism has its problems. There may be better economic organizations.
Capitalism may yet have a long term flaw in it as technology progresses (a lot
of chatter about that case on HN in the past couple of years, there's a lot of
interesting questions there). There's all sorts of avenues of "attack", or,
better yet, all sorts of ways to just _think_ about where we've been, where we
are, and where we're going. However, it's a sort of basic "you must be at
least this tall to ride the ride" sort of thing that your theories must be
able to explain how wealth has exploded under capitalism, and why it didn't
explode under the older systems, and why it doesn't explode even more under
any of the several attempts to use another system that have been really tried
in the real world. (i.e., don't try to claim that many of the obvious "fixes"
to capitalism have never been tried when in fact they've all been tried
numerous times, and so far have not generated the best track records. Theories
should include and explain real-world data, not ignore it when it is
convenient to do so.)

And should you be tempted to explain _away_ the wealth, or claim with varying
degrees of obfuscation that its distribution negates the wealth explosion
entirely because it isn't to your exact tastes (an obviously absurd claim when
spelled out clearly but a popular dodge when slathered over with enough words
to mask the logic), I strongly recommend spending some time with 18th century
medical case notes, or reading about the opulence of 16th century royalty with
an eye to what simple things we have today that they would (quite literally)
kill for, or something else that will simply rub in your face how unbelievably
_wealthy_ we are today compared to the past. The past is _poor_. You can have
theories about how it could be better, but if your theories become so powerful
they explain why the wealth explosion didn't happen at all, it's time to throw
the theory away and find a better one.

(Incidentally, I do have ways I'd improve things myself. If you're reading
this as a paean to the status quo and anyone criticizing it should just shut
up, you've probably got a bad case of the propagandas rendering you unable to
understand different ideas. I've got my criticisms. However, my criticisms and
yours still need to take the all of the above facts into account.)

~~~
davidw
Thanks for writing all that down. TheOtherHobbes' comments are another example
of the bullshit asymmetry principle: refuting them takes a fair amount of time
and energy, whereas it's easy to just write that kind of nonsense.

------
BasDirks
That bar up top that appears when you scroll up; I want to squash it like a
fly, and I don't even squash flies. /meta

------
netcan
This article has an interesting starting in an 'Age of The Essay'^ way. Start
with an interesting question and see where the meandering leads. I don't think
this got anywhere interesting though.

" _a long, complicated journey as somethings become more abundant in some
places, while other things are still scarce_ "

That's an interesting thought. We have lots of examples of things suddenly
becoming 'abundant,' especially in the last few decades. If I was doing a
meandering essay on this topic I'd make a list and see if there's anything
insightful to be learned from these. Maybe we can find a pattern.

Calories/grains are, for the wealthier half of the world are essentially
abundant. Peasants were once the majority, producing and consuming grain as
their primary economic activity. Today grains cost $200-$500 per ton. Median
household income is in the $5k-$10k range. So half the world can have more
grain than they can eat for <10% of their income.

Computers have various interesting examples of similar abundance.

The end result is interestingly similar in both cases. Our capacity to consume
more quality is enormous. We feed grain to cattle to produce meat. It takes
5-10 grain calories to make a calorie of meat, depending on the animal. We
spent processing power to create user interfaces put personal computers in
every pocket. More consumption. Higher quality.

This seems to follow standard economics. When goods get cheaper we consumer
more, at higher quality and spend less. That concept seems to stretch pretty
well. Even though calories and computing power are incredible cheap and
abundant compared to their historical prices, we haven't crossed our ability
to consume more of them and 'scarcity economics' doesn't break.

If you go back to the industrial age or "space age" equivalents of this essay
you will find fantastic parallels. _" We can make so much stuff! So cheap!
This will change everything!"_ There seems to be a common fallacy here. We
look at a future of 10X efficiency and we underestimate our ability to consume
more. Since we can't consume 10X more goods, we assume that we'll just work
less. I think the tricky part is 'quality.' You certainly can't eat a ton of(
$250) maize per day. But, you can easily spend $250 on food in a day. So, if
you don't want to look stupid in 100 years, be careful about predicting free
time.

Here's a question I would love to hear economists opines about: why don't high
earners work less. Say a Belgian lawyer makes €100,000 euros per year and a
paralegal make €35,000. Why doesn't the lawyer work fewer hours? Think of
working hours as money and everything they buy as a good. It appears that
demand for "goods" as a whole is infinitely elastic. Make the goods half the
price and homo economicus buys twice as much. Most markets are a lot more
elastic than this one. Why?

If we saw some clear negative correlation between earnings per hour and hours
worked (either at economy or individual level) we might be able predict see
the path to a start trek economy of optional employment.

It might be worth going back to the beginning with this question. "Why don't
people work less when they make more per hour."

^[http://www.paulgraham.com/essay.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/essay.html)

~~~
VLM
The problem with the market is its not so smoothly distributed. You can
barely, almost, sometimes buy commodities at a worldwide price in most places,
but certainly cannot earn the same everywhere. The median for Africa is about
$2K not $10K so making the huge assumption that poverty stricken economies
only involve food, thats still ten or so pounds of rice per day, which is
pretty marginal as a sole long term food source for an entire household.

Thats the problem with "homo economicus" the market is very small and will not
offer certain things, the Belgian lawyer in the example simply won't be
offered a part time job by the market, no matter if the demand exists or not.

If you don't really have a market, market speak and market analysis don't lead
to useful places.

------
Uncompetative
I think we will get there, but on a much longer timeframe.

