@@mattm7378 When Ben Sisko went to the Academy, he visited his family every day and used a months worth of transporter credits in a week. Transporting is not unlimited either.
pokepress the money if needed, can be printed by the replicating machines just as the produce food and anything they want from nothing. Energy to matter converter.
Matt M Unless it’s the communities north of the Golden Gate Bridge. They still won’t want any transportation clusters in their area (aka...Bart) bringing in the unwashed masses.
When I talk to people about how the FED economy works, and they say it's impossible, I say that the problem is we can't imagine their economy: we are an engineer on a steamboat looking at the Space Shuttle taking off and wondering how many tons of coal their boilers need to get that vehicle into space.
"When I talk to people about how the FED economy works, and they say it's impossible" Because when it comes down to it, you have a situation where people need to work, but don't have to work. The only way it could work is if we had robots doing all the jobs and the robots were capable of fixing and performing maintenance on themselves. That is the only way a moneyless society can work, robots that do everything including take care of themselves. Theres a guy on youtube, hes a millionaire CEO. His channel basically exposes "contraprenuers", i.e. those guys that want to sell you directions on how to get as rich as them owning your own business. He explains, the reality is, the vast majority of people simply dont have the passion and drive it takes to become rich. Thats why its a con. Not necessarily that their "system" can't work, but they don't tell you it will take a LOT of time effort and work to make it successful and despite that the fact is they are selling it as such, it is not an "easy" way to get rich. Most people are just wired to be worker bees. They work because they have no other choice if they want to survive and earn a living. Most people if they won the lottery would never work another day in their life. Yet you see high powered CEO's literally working till they die despite the fact they could have retired at 35 rich as hell. That is why they are rich and you are not. A society where people take on all these complex jobs requiring years of study and hard work yet you will personally not be living any better than someone that just decided not to do anything with their life isn't really realistic because it is just a small minority of people that just have that passion for the work.
Tim most people who are rich were born rich. You’re talking about the theory capitalism, but reality doesn’t align in many cases. Families that are struggling to put food on the table for their kids aren’t doing so because they don’t have the drive to make a million dollars, they’re stuck. That could be a mental stagnation if they have mental illness and can not afford treatment or if they’ve never had a role model to show them that college can drastically improve their lives or it could be any number of things blocking them from getting ahead in life. To say being poor is a choice is just ignorant of the realities of life. I think the concept of the moneyless society in ST is only possible with a society that makes the path towards self improvement clear enough to incentivize people enough to do it. You can spend your life sitting at home or you can take a “job” that pays in travel through space and time with a focus on learning and experience. To fit the previous analogy, if a steam boat is our current society and coal is money then you can give the captain a lottery’s worth of coal but he’s not going to be any closer to flying into space. It’s a fundamentally different drive when you have people who need money to live and having complete free autonomy over where your life goes.
This mistake here is the Steamboat Engineer understands the concept of thrust and propulsion, so while they don't understand what specific technology would push the Space Shuttle into space, they get it. The issue with Trek and the economy is that it would take a fundamental change in the mindset of all of humanity to make a system like that work, but yet we've seen across every single series from the original series to Picard, that humans are still pretty much exactly like we are today. Which is fine by the way, I imagine the stories set in such a universe where money doesn't need to exist would be incredibly boring. The main issue is Roddenbury wanted no money, it was one of his rules for the show, but he never laid the groundwork in world building to explain it, he just hand waved it as fact...so it's been up to writers since then to back into it and try and justify it. This is the "12 parsec Kessel Run" of Star Trek. It was a throw away line to sound cool, but doesn't actually make sense.
@@tsdobbi Plus there is scarcity of everything but the universe. There is only so much of anything and the best way to organize an economy is to use supply and demand to organize everything. If it was as simple as simply handing out goods then why did the ussr economy suck? Sorry but there is and always will be scarcity and cost.
Easy response to Quark's statement is that he's looking through rose-tinted glasses at Ferengi culture, not surprising given how pro-ferengi culture he is shown to be. Taking Quark's opinions on Ferengi culture as gospel would be like taking Dukat's about Cardassian culture in the same light and that seems questionable.
So true. I mean, we know Ferengis do slavery, they still do it in the modern times even-they put the whole crew of the Enterprise to work in their mines in that episode of TNG where Riker and Worf immediately lose the ship to them… “Rascals” I think it was
It may well be indentured servitude, not slavery that the Ferengis practice. Arguable slavery with extra steps, but it usually has a buyout and indentured servitude can allow the person to save to buy their freedom (or work it off). I could see a scenario where the forced labor part isn't the problem they have with slavery, but not allowing someone to try and accumulate wealth - a slave that cannot own money cannot trade with others, which is one of the most central parts of Ferengi society.
A "True Ferengi" might argue that no one is forced into slavery, they agreed to it when they signed the contract. They're upfront about their natures and dishonesty, it's literally written down and codified.
@@majorsmashbox5294 Human's have excused learned conditions of chauvinism being driven in large part due to capitalism. THAT"S the opposite of reality, capitalism can exist (in decent guarded form as the federation shows) without chauvinism and chauvinistic structures can 100% exist without capitalistic drivers as it does today in a multitude of context. Humans ***LEARN*** chauvinism period, I disagree with Angela Davis.
I always assumed the Federation Credit was purely for other worlds to trade with the Federation. For example when trading with Klingons they might use latinum (since that is already a widely accepted currency) or they could pay with credits, which can then be exchanged for Federation resources
I think banks would figure out a way to distribute something like bitcoin to people within a society. Also, stock piles of resources makes a lot of sense because sometimes tit for tat trading just doesn't cut.
Personally considering how much we literally see them participating in commerce. I am of rye opinion that the "no money" thing is simply internal propaganda,along with Starfleet not veins a military.
@@KRYMauL The question is then, how do you prevent it from all breaking down again? How is it, that you can just walk into a bar and get food and drinks for free? If money really played a role in Federation life again, they would all want money again to be able to afford larger housing, better everything... you know. There has to be some restrictions by law in place, that enforce that money isn't used anymore. Obviously, we still see money in the criminal world. Maybe it's exactly that inefficiency of trades without money, that is wanted here. I can imagine that the Federation has an eye on anyone having too valuable items, because they could also be used as money. I guess, that there is an always concerted effort to keep some form of efficient money away from the Federation society. So that, you can only use that within criminal context, because all public cases are surveilled sufficiently. The problem with money is, it is used to control people. That's its intrinsic property. You can't completely ban trades, because that's also most human interactions, giving and giving back. Just exchanging some vegetables to help out, won't be enough to control many people though. But if you have an efficient means of trade, then it can go very quickly and efficiently. Meaning, that people will want to have money and the focus will shift away from sharing freely (important concept presented in this video!) and intellectual self-improvement to the acquiring of personal wealth again. So perhaps, it's really that, a combination of: - Inscarcity (abundance) of the vast majority of resources that humans need and want - Control of where the scarce materials are, so that they are always in the hands of the community, not in the hands of individuals; so that there can't be efficient means of trade - A logical and as much sound-proof as possible model of government, with control mechanisms that are not supposed to fail, although it will always be a fight and require attention
I always assumed that energy was the currency of the Federation, as we frequently see them talking about holo, replicator, and transporter rations. As they have warp cores, and we hear in voyager that a warp core can power an entire city, it seemed to me that their power output was what determined the wealth of a planet, and ships. Edit: they also have other miracle technologies, based on power. So, we can see that Miles O’Brien was a Federation Millionaire. Exchanging power credits/rations for the equivalent amount of physically replicated matter, ie Gold.
Most of the mention of rations are from Voyager. Which is simply because Voyager is stranded and cut off from the federation, so they don't have the resources that they normally would. Most other times rations are mentioned post-tng are under special circumstances when supplies are short, which isn't usually the norm.
Aren’t they always desperate to find planets with dilithium crystals? Scarcity/inability to replicate them suggests probable currency value. Also the books have ‘gold pressed latinum’ (?) as a non-replicable trade of value but I don’t know if the books are considered canon. I always thought they HAD money, it was just a case of people didn’t need it for most things like food and housing, because replicators. That ensured you didn’t need to work - but you could if you chose to, in order to have more than what was provided to all for free.
@@DeadDancers good theory, but the st:tng tech manual says that replicators must use something to make food etc. it states for instance that food is made from a nutricious base, and if needed it can use recycled "waste" that is steralized to be recycled back into food. i guess kinda like what some cities do to grey water to become drinking water.
interesting. but aren't we just swapping out gold (as when our currency was based on gold) for energy? i mean, if they're exchanging power-based credits, isn't that just... money?
The existence of things that cannot be replicated has always puzzled me. If something can be teleported, as gold pressed latinum can, then it can be replicated, because a replicator is just a transporter that uses prerecorded patterns to create objects from raw energy, instead of moving patterns of existing objects from one location to another.
I think the explanation was that replication uses patterns that are lower resolution and easy to store. Whereas transporters require basically a full quantum level copy. As well transporters seem to basically play hot potato with the person or thing in transit so I kinda get it (edit now i have access to a real keyboard) episodes have mentioned that replication isn't "perfect" most of the time, water is probably easily replicated pure, but food is probably a moderate quality "scan" of various constituent amino acids and sugars sequenced just right. a transporter however clearly has a lot more hardware to work with just to make sure that they make a true 100% copy, that would require a lot of energy and memory. even by the 24th century they hadn't figured out how to make a transporter pattern last longer than like 3-4 minutes.(neglecting scotty who has plot armour)
Allan Boone -- In my personal head-canon, Tom Riker is proof of HOW people and latium are unreplicatable. It's like Bashir and genetic modification. It's not impossible, just ILLEGAL, and most people in the Federation are too goody-goody to see the difference. Dilithium on the other hand makes perfect sense fron a safety POV. If it's a matter-antimatter moderator, one subatomic flaw in the assembly process means big boom. Kind of like when you fire a 3D-printed gun made of the wring plastic...
Rhi Sands -- I'm starting to figure that replicator patterns are like stock photos, sound libraries, quilting patterns, etc. Some poor bastard mixed HUNDREDS of martinis just to get the bragging rights. Meanwhile when Picard says "hot" it's probably a keyword for his PERSONAL library of tea patterns rather than the ship's defaults. It's like a personal playlist for "stuff."
I think I've seen most of his videos. Even gotten a few ❤ to my comments over the years. Isaac's a beast, I'd bet my life that he knows more than Neil Degrassi Tyson. He can instantly access the math of things I've only got a tentative grasp of in theory. I'll be watching and start to pick out an issue and he'll explain the solution within a minute or so.
@@neutrino78x Well then you recreate entire nations in O'Neill cylinders orbiting the Sun. We can convert most of or all matter in the system into habitats. Entire ecologies can be recreated on top of supporting quadrillions of decedents. We invent nano scale universal builders and basically anything can be made at the molecular level with just raw elements and some energy. Watch Isaac Arthur and realize what potential is wasted by humanity.
Was gonna say - often we have duplications of these things. For example, how many ‘Statue of Liberty’s are there? Both Macao AND Vegas have Venetian hotel/casinos (themselves a duplication of a well known place) Neighbourhoods, cities, compounds, etc that are replications (copy/paste/copy/paste)
@@neutrino78x Be homeless for awhile. Having a place means everything. Think most people live where they want? Sounds to me that's more of a problem to humans, than making sure the rows of people living under the bridge have a place to live. I say, personally, once every single human being is housed, clothed, and fed. Maybe once the planet no longer has to worry about clean water. Maybe then, want should come into focus. I think the obvious imbalance in this concept is reflective on the state of the world. Which is roasting, and is only going to get worse. At some point, you have to address need before want or the world will inform you of this lesson the hard way. Even infants know the difference.
I know you get flak for it, but I really appreciate when you get political. Science Fiction is necessarily political. It makes meaningful comments about our world. Keep up the great work.
They made reference to a "Bank of Bolias" in the DS9 episode _Honor Among Thieves,_ so I always figured that it was just _Earth_ specifically that no longer used money, since Bolians are Federation members.
With two industrial replicators , Bejor could have had one churning out more replicators while the other initially produced food and other goods. Hell, the Federation could have just given them one replicator, but presumably Bejor was starving and the Federation was being nice.
I also wanted to consider that two industrial replicators was plenty for what they needed, or what they could maintain. The scarcity might have been in training of engineers, or of problems that the replicators could solve. There are lots of possibilities besides scarcity of the replicators themselves.
That replicated gumbo is always the same, Sisko's down the street always brings out the flavour and variety of the in-season veggies and meats. Do you think he has some kind of online capacity information? The restaurant's pretty big but like, the present day has bigger.. and people can pop by for lunch from anywhere in the world on a whim.. either he's a hipster local secret, or he probably has some kind of backlog of people wanting to try his cooking..? He IS very devoted to "his customers", maybe he really feels like taking a day off is depriving a significant number of people their chances...
Kit Vitae -- At that point, it's all about self-satisfaction and reputation. Sisko's strikes me as a "first come, first served" or "invitation only" joint. What I think drives "eat real" in Star Trek is the fact that Sisko's CAN have it all go wrong some nights. The mere possibility of a chef having an off day makes conistency an achievement. I mean, do YOU watch baseball because you want to see it all go "so-so" for both teams?
@@@kaitlyn__L & Griz .... I think Joseph Sisko just likes to cook. He's not doing it for money, he's doing it because he enjoys it, he loves creating and experimenting with new and different flavor combinations (the replicator only provides the same select menu/portions/consistency/etc.), and he gets to share his creations with others, which allows him to socialize, develop friendships, etc. It gives him pride and purpose. He never/rarely takes vacations because he loves what he does. There isn't anything else he'd rather be doing. I know I enjoy grilling for friends and family. I wouldn't want to do it every day, but I know more inspired cooks who absolutely would cook all the time for everybody if left to their own devices and if having a job or buying ingredients were not a concern. Ben Sisko kinda does the same thing. When he's not busy being captain, he loves inviting over anybody and everybody and cooking for them. It's a bonding thing with his son/father, it's a social thing with his friends and colleagues, and he takes a ton of pride in it. Ben is at his happiest in his off-duty hours when he is cooking for others. And I think that is the epitome of the Earth/Federation economy. When you remove the drive for basic needs, people will still work, doing what they love to do, for the benefit of society and others, and for their own pride and desire to make their mark contributing something. Whether it's cooking, wine making, farming mining, writing literature, transporting goods across the galaxy, or exploring the unknown through Starfleet...people will figure out what excites and motivates them and they will do it.
Dammit Jim....I can't leave him in the hands of 20th century medicine. Working in the medical field, it makes me laugh everytime. The whole hospital scene is classic.
Yeah, can you imagine a future where people don't go bankrupt from not being able to pay for their hospital bills, and whether swallowing a pill will not only avoid dialysis but also regrow a kidney? Then there's McCoy's artery repair device that does just that sans invasive surgery.
Horse manure, Picard! How else do you pay for your uniforms and antes in your poker games? How do you pay for transportation aboard ship to and from Fleet postings? How can your family afford to keep its winery operational unless it sells its wines to its customers? Nice ideal about "bettering your lives in service to humanity," but impractical. You can not tell me that the reason you chose not to join the Atlantis Project instead of continuing to serve as Enterprise commander was because Starfleet paid better than the Atlantis Project did.
Ah, yes! The first season of ST-TNG! What absolute shite it was! It was so bad I actually stopped watching it for several years. It wasn't until the first episode, Parts 1&2, of Star Trek: Voyager that I felt the same adventurous spirit and SciFi challenge of Star Trek: The Original Series once again. That feeling lasted until about the middle of episode 3 and didn't come back until "Scorpion" introduced Seven of Nine, who saved the show.
@@shepwillner7507 I think the idea is that society has gotten so wealthy that there's enough for everyone. As to why people would do things instead of being a lump...imagine that you, Shep, had $5M in the bank. It's not enough to buy islands with but it's enough that you can live very comfortably on the interest for the rest of your life. What would you do? You wouldn't keep working at a job you hated, that's for sure. Would you sit on the couch and watch TV all day? Maybe for a while, decompressing and adjusting to not being in the rat race, but I bet that eventually you would want to take some classes, travel, write, learn an instrument, get involved in your community...maybe even start a small pop-up restaurant, where you fed anyone who came in and didn't bother to charge because you didn't need the money and helping people feels good. If you're technically inclined then you would probably contribute to some open-source projects or join a makerspace and teach people how to build cool stuff. You wouldn't waste the day away every day, you would contribute because contributing feels good. Now imagine that everyone is in that situation; that seems to be what Federation Society is like. Presumably they have automated away all the jobs that no one wants -- robot garbage trucks can collect the garbage, robot cleaning machines keep the sewers clear, etc. Everyone else does what interests them.
It's like minecraft server but everyone is on creative mode. You have everything. But you still create something. Why? Because you want to. Not because you need it.
The federation credit was also mentioned in DS9 when Sisko was telling Jake about his first week in the Academy and used the transporter to go from San Francisco to Louisiana to eat dinner at home and Jake says "You must've used up a month's worth of credits"
Just watched that one today; he specifically mentions "transporter credits," implying a scarcity of either energy to operate the transporters, or perhaps an overall lack of units for all the people who want to use them.
Interesting, I didn't remember that scene from DS9, and I don't know how exactly the dialogues about credits turned out in TOS or TNG. But I'd like to think "credit" is less a currency than a set of limits like Troy says. Not only for transporter use, but also in every other case where scarcities might occur. E.g. when you are drinking the bar dry on your own. Being low on credits could mean sth like: yes, you can allocate to yourself whatever you need, but now you're exaggerating a little.
I actually always interpreted that line to be referring to a credit system specific to the Academy. We already know that there are many rules and restrictions about what people can and can't do when enrolled at the Academy, and it is not unreasonable that, as Citizen_Grub suggests, they might place some limitations on how much they can just go hopping off around the globe when they're supposed to be, y'know, studying and performing their other school duties. Soldiers on military bases often have similar systems today where they can accumulate or trade certain benefits (such as furlough time) depending on their needs/desires, so this is also reasonable given the similarities between Star Fleet and many current-day military structures...
The key words that Picard used that involve making it happen were "we grew out of our infancy" When the human race grows up as a whole and learns to work together anything will be possible." Imagine"
Thinking about how the post-scarcity economy is structured on Earth, I think I understand why there are so many human colonizing expeditions to other planets....and how that colonization is, as much as anything, plays a role in the utopian society. Money may not exist, and the Earth economy may be structured to meet everyone's basic needs, run by a benevloent government of/by/for humans who actually care about other humans.....but the opportunities for personal & professional growth are still probably somewhat limited. Sure, Earth's government might make sure everybody who needs a home has a home, but you're not going to get a large estate on the northern tip of San Francisco right at the foot of the Golden Gate Bridge. That land is already spoken for. Much of if not ALL the land on Earth is probably spoken for. So if you are born on a French winery and want to stay there growing delicious wines, Earth's government will be happy to let you because you are producing a good that other people will want. But if you weren't born on it, and if Robert Picard doesn't want to sell it to you, that land is already spoken for and you're out of luck. You can probably go live on the 16th floor of some generic Earth housing complex, where you can have food and shelter and clothing. But if what you really want in life is to indulge your love of nature and to branch out and farm and make some wines and have a large home on a large plot of land.....there's probably not a lot of available options for that left on Earth. So if you want to do or have any of that, you're probably going to have to go find another planet to cultivate. And we see that a lot on TOS and to a lesser extent on TNG. A lot of human colonists left the comfort of Earth, in many cases without even replicators, because the secondary needs of the ego and the drive to do things that meant something to them were more important to them than even the security of having those basic needs met. They would rather rough it on a perilous foreign planet, doing what they loved to do, out in the open nature, rather than just live a mundane life back on Earth crammed into some tiny apartment.
In short: you can have all your needs catered for, and even the house can be big, if you live in 16th floor. You dont ever need to work because only a few people need to work. Are you going to be happy with that? A retiree at 18? No. Thats not how people are wired. We are made to do things. Maybe its something you can do in a city. Maybe its excellence in sport, or maybe its writing, like Jake Sisko. What are you going to do with your life? You can become anything. But you have only one life, you are young only once. What will you do? You dont need a big house, thats just property too, and when you got it, you dont want it. When all the needs are met, when work is no longer necessary, work is no longer a grind for money. Work becomes something people want. A goal, a game, a hobby. Personal growth. This is something we forget trying to pay the bills: we work also for ourselves, as our own need to reach further, to achieve. Sure you can stay in bed all day. But after a few, how will you feel? Your body demands you to run, to lift, to climb, to play, and you are much happier when you do.
@@ribbitgoesthedoglastnamehe4681 Its amusing that you "get" that people are not wired like that, yet the argument we see, all the damn time, from people that don't want to create a "basic needs met" society is, "If no one had to actually do things, everyone would be lazy." That said, if basic needs "are" met, then it allows for other options. The single biggest problem we have, today, is that 90% of the population spends 6-7 hours a day (if they are bloody lucky and don't work for some place like Walmart) just to, "meet those basic needs". Without having to waste all that damn time just trying to keep yourself from starving, losing your home, and/or finding yourself in major debt, from say.. a hospital visit, I suspect that what you get instead is something a bit more like Etsy, or online "DIY" markets - there is still some level of trade, maybe even money, but people are not stuck just surviving.
@@리주민A "democratic society" could break even a well-intentioned "social credit system". Identity politics, rent-seeking, graft and corruption have broken representative functions of Congress so "representatives" in Congress do a dismal job of representing their constituents' interests. Even broken representative government, however, is less broken than a system which treats the people as "social units" who are rated arbitrarily. "Social credits" are sure to be assigned corruptly.
My guess is that a post scarcity economy will expose a fallacy in the traditional definition of economics which is that it is the study of how unlimited demands are satisfied by limited resources. A post scarcity economy would reveal that demands are not unlimited but instead limited.
The point about private property is not particularly poignant. Marx (and subsequent socialists) distinguish personal property from private property. What distinguishes the two is profit -- Sisko's doesn't make profit, and therefore, constitutes personal property. I can't think of a single communist or aspiring communist state without the ability to own homes and sell them. The informal hierarchies within the federation also do not disqualify it as communist. It is made clear at many points that Federation citizens have the right of free movement, and can choose to live anywhere. Though some children are certainly born in colonies with no choice, in Voyager and TNG we get a clear picture that most of the "rugged colonists" are choosing that lifestyle freely. That hardly constitutes a hierarchy. This is getting into theory, but post-scarcity is incompatible with capitalism. Capitalism demands need so it creates it. The Ferengi are similarly technologically advanced to the federation, and yet they suffer huge inequalities and apparent scarcity. The difference is that their economy is organized to generate profit. We don't see any corporations in TNG, every major product seems to be created in a centrally managed economy. There are no private sales of industrial replicators, and the Orien Syndicate is the closest we see to a genuinely capitalist organization working inside the federation. This all suggests to me that, at the absolute least, the federation can be described as post-capitalist.
Maybe the ideal society would be a more thorough mix of communistic and capitalistic. Say for example, one in which you had the right to buy your own home, but if you couldn't afford one, the government would provide you with public housing for free. And all human healthcare is provided for, by the government; but if you want a healthcare plan for your pet, you have to buy it yourself. And rather than having private power companies contracted to the local government, to power towns, the government would have control of the energy grid/power lines, and be responsible for their upkeep. Thus, the government would be free to invest money in renewable energy sources (solar, wind..etc.), because there would be no energy industry lobbyists, because companies like Con Ed and Exxon wouldn't exist. It seems to work for other countries like Sweden and Germany.
Actually, there is a hint of a corporation in TNG - See "Conspiracy", where Picard meets his friend Walker Keel etc. on a planet supposedly owned by the "Dytallix Mining Corporation" or something like that. Is this a federation planet? We don't know, I don't think, but if Starfleet officers can just beam down, seems plausible.
The Illuminaughty -- most humans were farmers trying not to starve until the very end of the 19th century. That's a very easy metric. If you ate this week, you're better off than the Pattersons. And some people were just raised to think poverty is a result of bad choices. ESPECIALLY the children of people who managed to lift thrmselves out of poverty. Never mind that "lift yourself up by the bootstraps" was invented as an expression to show the _effective impossibility_ for what it is.
I find the people that feel the need to measure their success against others the single most irksome. I get someone wanting a private jet, huge mansion, expensive cars and so on just because they enjoy such things. But the people that want all these things for the sole purpose of rubbing it in other people's faces how much more they have than others are just assholes, IMO. I wish that in particular was something we could outgrow as a species. The need to look down on others to make yourself feel better, and the need to 'compete' in destructive ways to make that happen. There's plenty of research already about how wealth inequality is inherently bad for the wellbeing of societies, regardless of how wealthy the country is as a whole. Something to keep in mind for sure. More wealth inequality correlates to a lot of bad things. That's not to say it needs to go as far as everyone having exactly the same level of wealth... But a society where the wealthiest are about 25 times as wealthy as the poorest is a much healthier one than many countries right now where it's more like 400 times...
@@cheshirekat3050 Private ownership of the means of production is necessarily exploitative. Even if you could preserve a social democratic balance in perpetuity without exploiting other nations, paying workers less than the value they produce from within non-democratic hierarchies is unjustifiable on any scale.
At the end of the day it doesn't really matter how the economics of Star Trek "work." What matters is that Star Trek reminds us that the way we organize our world isn't the only way we could do so. This steps on your point, but it can't be said enough.
One of the better suggestions I've seen for the Federation economy is that there is in a certain sense "money" but it's not something a Federation citizen ever has to really think about. Due to the material and productivity surplus, all people are assigned a kind of invisible stipend. Computers keep track of the data, and it is almost never necessary for an individual to ask for their account balance. Nobody could realistically "spend" it all living as a normal human being. If, however, somebody went and asked to be given their own personal starship, the system would suddenly balk at the amount of materials and resources required to build it for one person's property and they would be told "ha ha... no." However, someone who wanted to "own" a smaller personal ship for example, could "co-finance" it by agreeing to operate the ship as part of a bigger initiative. Such as providing transportation for students and scientists from an institute or university. The system might calculate a five year tour would balance the books for creation of a ship, and after that, the "owner" / captain would be free to use the ship for whatever. The thing is, a standard Federation Credit, backed by gold-pressed latinum does exist, and I tend to imagine this credit is what a person can draw upon if they ever need to trade "money" in unusual circumstances. We've seen on-screen that when people do have a personal supply of GP Latinum credits, they treat them a little preciously - as if they do not have an unlimited supply on hand. Probably, they can draw an certain amount of them from that hidden account balance over a period of time. Finally, engaging in activities that directly create more prosperity for the Federation might entitle someone to a larger allowance within the system. But people would be socially conditioned to not view it as "wealth". Their basic needs as a human being are already met automatically, and having more credits doesn't increase their influence in society, or their social standing. It is effectively play money for them to go have some fun with.
I dont know how Star Trek economics work - but I know I absolutely love it in ST IV when Gillian tells Kirk "Let me guess - they dont use money in the 24th century" as she gets the check for the pizza. Every time.
In the original series episode "The Trouble with Tribbles" when Chekhov & Uhura come to the station to "shop" , there is a mention of how much a tribble costs. The "currency" mentioned are credits and neither Chekhov or Uhura seemed to be carrying any kind of wallet. I saw it as a kind of Federation credit/debit system where all transactions are numbers on a computer.
THX1138 come to mind. When Star trek first aired what we now know as the Visa Card, Bankamericard had just been introduced or was about to, haven't at this looked it up or watched the whole video, but by the first Star trek would cash and coin be obsolete? We now have credit cards, debit cards, bit coin, smart phones etc. Soon there will be no need for cash and coin once people get used to not having to have it. The one real bitch about all of this is collecting things like stamps, coins, toys, models, on and on, etc. etc. Like say match books are they still around? Oh of a bye gone era?
"Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. " Carl Sagan
Oh, yeah, right, Dr. Sagan. And if that help does arrive, our rescuers will probably want something in exchange: water, food, air, metals/ores/gems, etc. Don't believe me? Try watching the Twilight Zone episode "To Serve Man", the 1983 and 1985 sci-fi miniseries "V" and "V: The Final Battle", and the 60s movie "Soylent Green." In every one of these shows and movies, our helpers wanted our freshwater and food in the form of humans.
My biggest wish for a Star Trek series is one about how the reconstruction periods after WWIII and after the Earth/Romulan War play out. My basic idea is that an historian consults the newly formed UFP, allowing for a way for the two periods to interact, not in a literal way, but in a storytelling format. But the important thing would be that we'd need regular people as characters so that we see how the decisions made by the powerful affect them. In other words, I want civilian Trek. A big part of such a show would be an analysis of the economics of a United Earth and of the United Federation of Planets.
This was fascinating! My husband and I have had many discussions on how the economy would work so I really enjoyed this! I agree about what Quark said, he might have just have a few blind spots about Ferengi culture and history. They’re definitely extremely misogynistic; by law women aren’t allowed to own property, participate in trade, talk to strangers, travel, or wear clothes. Quark even points out in the episode “Ménage à Troi,” “If Ferengi women can wear clothes in public, then they can leave their homes. If they can leave their homes, they can go to work. If they can go to work, they can make profit.” So, yeah, they don’t exactly treat all of their people equally. I’m not saying this kind of misogyny is equivalent to slavery, it’s definitely not. There does seem to be the suggestion of the ownership of women however, because in that same episode a Ferengi tries to actually purchase Lwaxana Troi and then kidnaps her when he learns she’s not for sale and she rejects him.
I've always figured that they had a cashless economy when they said 'we don't use money'' and people had a basic living allowance which they can augment by work or creating art etc.
@@JoannaHammond That's likely how it will start; however, Star Trek combines automation and 3d printing technologies into their "replicators" allowing scarcity to become a foreign concept. I tend to think Star Trek is Post Scarcity as no one person has any need to go hungrey. The concept of Post Scarcity is something that is usually reserved for Science Fiction, but Issac Arthur does a lot of serious discussion on the topic.
@Gabriel Clark No it's not a currency it's a coupon that would directly correlate to goods that are held under price controls so that can't inflate/deflate the "price".
"Kirk is an oblivious dipshit" is always a good first working hypothesis. It set up most of the action in Kirk's decisions in military engagements during ST:TOS. His victories just aren't based on military axioms, most of the time. "Wrath of Khan" is the first part of the franchise in which military axioms are respected at all. Those of us who sat through college ROTC re-watched ST:TOS and screamed at the tube "GOD, KIRK, WHO'D YOU HUMP TO GET A STARSHIP COMMAND?"
Lighten up, its just good entertainment. If every little detail were exact then nobody would want to watch this stuff. In fact, that is just the problem with modern TV & movies - they try to be TOO real.
Let me put it this way: Suppose you go back to Roman times. And the Romans ask you "what, you don't have slaves in your century?" And you say "Well we don't". And the Romans say "Who do you get to till the fields?" And you reply: "We have machines for that." That's basically what the ST 24th century is to us. It doesn't mean they don't have scarcity, don't have desires and need for limited goods and services, and don't have currency, it means they don't need to pay for them because technology has rendered those industries unprofitable. They are deontologists -- they work to better themselves and improve their lives, not for money or material comfort because those comforts are already taken care of. That doesn't mean ALL the things are taken care of, just the basic necessities (ie: the first two levels of Maslow's Hierarchy).
Sex, love, social acceptance, search for answers to the unknown. Historical driving points not based on Survival needs... well sex is a survival need for our species not the individual though.
And when you have a magic "Anything you want" machine like a Replicator, the concept of material wealth kind of loses its meaning, or at least changes.
@Liz Lee I don't see how the technology would stop evolving if we don't have scarcity. For one we will always have the aficionados who will try to make things better, faster and more efficiently. Or simply make things in new ways, more healthy, more artistic, more fun etc. Besides that, we'll always have something to accomplish in science and engineering, some boundary to overcome. Like fast space travel, terraforming, teleportation and molecular constructs, to name a few Star Trek technologies. And our history shows that we always come-up with useful ideas to day-to-day life while we try to expand our knowledge and abilities. I think that creativity and ingenuity are a big part of humanity, and we don't need any special drive to make that function well. But I do agree, that the transition will be rough to some people. My guess is that we should just endure it, it's for a VERY good reason.
"Suppose you go back to Roman times. And the Romans ask you "what, you don't have slaves in your century?" And you say "Well we don't". And the Romans say "Who do you get to till the fields?" And you reply: "We have machines for that."" Well, I mean first of all the Romans didn't use slave labor exclusively to do menial labor. There were plenty of regular Roman citizens that fell in the lower classes and performed laborer jobs. "They are deontologists -- they work to better themselves and improve their lives, not for money or material comfort because those comforts are already taken care of. " That simply isn't realistic. People that work for that sake, exist now, but they are rare individuals. i.e. look at CEOs etc. that work till they die when they could have retired rich decades ago. The thing is, this is largely why they are rich, they had the drive and passion to work in their profession to the point they still did it when they didn't need to. Most people are worker bees and work because it is a necessity to survival and making a more comfortable life for themselves. I mean take me for example, I like what I do, I am good at it and make a good living at it, but I'll be damned if I wouldn't retire to a beach drinkin mai tais for the rest of my life if I won the lottery tomorrow, almost every decision I've made for my livelihood has been to get a more comfortable living. While I like what I do its stressful at times, if I could just choose to maintain my lifestyle and no longer have to deal with that I would in a heart beat.
I love the idea that in the 23rd century, people just mill aimlessly about in traffic so it’s literally impossible to predict how long a motor-powered trip will take unless your car can suddenly lunge up into the air in order to avoid people - but also mostly runs along the ground because Kirk didn’t think twice before stepping in front of it.
I wonder how far into 24th century it was before the majority of people traveled by transporter. _Picard_ showed that it was the primary method of commuting, and of course, _Discovery_ showed that by the 32nd, people would rather transport than use a _turbolift._
One of the common complaints from right-leaning Star Trek fans is "but why would anyone CHOOSE to work? What's in it for them?" Aside from the answers you give - social responsibility, a sense of mission and purpose - there's another motivator that is present and operating right now in the real world as we speak, and the one thing that will *always* be scarce, even in a post-scarcity economy: the attention and esteem of others. Consider the situation of a chemist or other scientist working for some huge corporation. Sure, they get paid to do work, but in many cases, if you invent a new polymer for Dow Chemical or a new drug patent for a pharmaceutical company, you don't own the thing you invented: the company does. They might generously decide to pay you more or give you shares of stock, but it's a far cry from the remuneration you'd get as the actual owner of the patent. So why do it? Why not just punch the clock and do barely enough to not get fired? The answer is credit. If you make a major discovery, you get to publish a paper. You get the attention, the esteem of your colleagues, the prestigious seat at a college. You get the Nobel - you, the person, not Bell Labs or Dow or IBM or whatever. Maybe you go down in history. So when someone asks "why doesn't everyone in Star Trek just sit around eating replicated sundaes and jerking off in the holodeck?" the answer is...some people probably do! Maybe a lot of people do! But you don't get respect for that. You don't stand out from the crowd for that. Whereas, if you learn to cook really well like Sisko's dad, suddenly people notice. You've got famous, important, good-looking people lining up to try your food, and maybe they've got something *you* want in turn. Like maybe you want a good haircut for your date; you can get an ok haircut from the holodeck but Dante the hairdresser is an *artiste* with a waiting list. But maybe he'll bump you to the top of the list if you make him some of your fancy food? We see that in Star Trek already. Prestigious artists, academics, scientists, etc seem to get attention and privileges; unique works are treasured. Nobody needs to be an artist, scientist, etc to *survive*, but there are rewards for doing your job well and participating in society that lazy holodeck jerkoff guy doesn't get to have.
Well reasoned. It's also how I happen to view the Trek existence. It's worth making the effort to rise in the hierarchy in order to gain scarcer items or just the favour of your fellows. There's no need for a placeholder currency when there's a central computer access to a virtual "who's who" updating in real time. Just as material falsehoods become meaningless with virtually all public incidents being observed. There is little to no motivation for disputes over fact.
I know this is an old comment on an old video but I'd like to add that some people just want to work. my own mother doesnt need to work, my father makes enough but she gets a job because she just gets bored at home and she likes doing things. how people ask "why do people work in trek" and dont realise some people just want to is a little nuts
My guess is that the Ferengi never did slavery... But did a hell of a lot of 'indentured servitude' which is totes not slavery, nope, nosiree. It's basically a pedantic technicality, but consider slaves have no money to pay for goods verses the ability to open up a big line of credit on those trapped in debt.
Kameth My biggest issue with that speech was that, like Star Trek writers, it completely ignores the status of female Ferengi. Half the population are essentially non-people, not allowed to own property or even wear clothing. You can’t tell me Ferengi women aren’t trafficked and traded as possessions of Ferengi men.
@@ADavidJohnson Actually, I think there's canon for that example. It's mentioned in DS9 Ron entered a marriage contract (I think for the specific purpose of having a child, but that might be me misremembering) then falling in love, getting screwed over by his father in law when he went to extend the contract, leading to him being broke and working for Quark. In this case, it's clear that this woman was being traded as a commodity. Maybe Quark thinks they never did slavery as they never did it to *male* Ferengi, as he views female Ferengi as commodities and not applicable to be slaves? Or the writers forgot / didn't know / ignored that inconvenient bit. Or Quark might be exaggerating a bit to dig at Sisko.
With AI advancing by the moment we may have a fleet of Data's soon and they will do all the work we need except where a human needs to be involved for nuance. Need to build a structure or maintain the land, well your android(s) will do that for you. But with these android(s) being so advanced I could see them wanting something in return as well.
Thar is one of my favorite episodes, a life like android created by Dr. Soong. A being so advanced that still could not be remade no matter how advanced Starfleet has gotten.
@@JQB45 Replicants were used off-world as slave labor in the hazardous exploration and colonization of other planets. After a bloody mutiny by a Nexus-6 combat team...... A bunch of Lores.
Nice vid-really interesting. As a human female, I’m looking forward to the next one as well, having had conflicted feelings about the franchise’s treatment of women over the decades (and not, as Nomad said of Uhura, because I am “a mass of conflicting impulses”, but because the show itself vacillates between treating men and women as equals and the kind of wife-joke attitude that Nomad had).
I know this is an old video, and you probably won't read this, but I'm so glad I got out of that Anti-SJW pipeline around gamergate. Obviously I am now unironically a trans fem communist, and it took me quite a lot of time to warm up to you as a person again, since you were one of the more prominent targets for Anti-SJWs... Well, all I want to say is that I really glad I grew as a person to a point at which I can enjoy you and the content you produce :3
federation society is built on cooperation not competition. They don't build their society on the idea of winners and loser. They see that as childish.
Humanity has only NOT been a monarchy for 200 years or so. In many ways we're still hanging on to that system. We're still hanging on to the concept of masters and servants.
@Lawofimprobability I'm no specialist, but either both designs are equally good, in which case it's probably whichever comes first, or they're not equally good or just differently performing, the most efficient for the particular purpose is used, right?
Is evolution "childish"? What if I told you that competition can result in everyone ultimately winning, because sometimes the best ideas are only arrived at through a competitive process. There's clearly room for cooperation as well, but while I can see the value from both approaches, some more narrow minded people reject competition, dismissing it as simply "winners and losers"
11:30 "Why only two (industrial replicators for Bajor)?" When you replicate (create) matter, you need a LOT of energy to do that.. It's reasonable to assume that two industrial replicators are all the Bajoran energy budget (renewable energy capture, nuclear energy, etc) could support. Creation of mass requrires huge energy to be used in its creation (a little under a gram's worth of uranium converted to nuclear energy destroyed Hiroshima).
@@JK50with10 Perhaps Federation generators aren't compatible with the bajoran power grid, but then, they could simply run just the Federation industrial replicators on them. Perhaps Industrial replicators or Federation generators can't be replicated themselves, or perhaps they use an energy source that is limited. We could assume the generators would work on the same principle as their warp reactors, so they require antimatter and dilithium crystals. The crystals are a limited resource and producing or collecting antimatter in needed quantities might be outside the abilities of the post-occupation bajoran industry.
@@HappyBeezerStudios Why would you need the Federation generators connected to the Bajoran grid, only just to the Federation Industrial Replicators. They could then create anything they need, even convertors between the two systems
Maybe they only needed 2 industrial replicators... I'm sure those are mainly for huge items... It said nothing of the number of smaller food, etc. Replicators provided
In terms of ownership, Steve, let's not confuse private property with personal property. A house (and a toothbrush!) would be considered personal property. Private property, in communist parlance, means industry and profit-making property. Just a bit of clarification. Thanks for the video, and for reading! :D
That vineyard sort of toes the line, and so would distilleries which definitely are also around pumping out genuine Scotch Whisky, given dialogue. Like I think it can be looked at as people who love the craft operating on a small scale.. like someone who loves farming and whisky being like "I'm going to help my friend by growing barley for them to malt", all the way up, as a passion project. As in, the Federation wouldn't really do franchise alcohol artisanship anymore. But then of course the Kelvin films went and had Glenfiddich and stuff which is a bit hrmmm. But I've seen plenty of arguments around saying like, people think Robert Picard was petit-bourgeois and that the Federation isn't ideologically pure as a result of even keeping things like that vineyard around through the economic transition, Like I personally think if you're on the track meeting Vulcans put humanity on, there's very little harm by keeping local history and character alive, if there's no one being forced to do farm work anymore then who cares if they might've been run unethically a century ago, what would we even gain by trying and make a blank slate But I definitely know a bunch of people who would prefer to get rid of everything like that.. completely demolish castles once belonging to long-gone royalty, and so forth. And sometimes I can understand where they're coming from but at the same time... nothing made me appreciate how much more peaceful the modern day was for me at like six years old than visiting a preserved historical site and seeing things like "here's where they'd execute the homeless children for stealing bread" yk? Like recognising the past and holding onto the importance does not prevent progressing beyond that past, I'd say. Personally. This got long fast ahah, I'll leave this ramble.. there..
I think part of the thinking of Robert being petit-bourgeois is that obviously everyone who wants one can't have a historical French vineyard, and we're told very clearly that this was property that was transferred as inheritance, which I think gives some credence to a notion of "wealth" that goes beyond the social capital we're led to believe is the main differentiator of people in Trek's world. That generational wealth replicates a condition we see under capitalism, but as someone else has pointed out capitalism in any recognizable form is incompatible with post-scarcity.
There is no such difference. Almost any personal property (a bike, an apartment) can make profit by renting it. Or everyone can have one if they want, without any effort on their part -> then no renting. But then you will face the fact that biological creatures without scarcity of food can grow exponentially in a limited space.
@@Sam-lr9oi Inheritance doesn't necessarily restrict to family. It is possible to inherit a business by being the most likely successor to carry it on. So if the family was working the land, as long as they continued to do so they would have it. If none of the family were interested, they likely would have seen if someone else wanted to apprentice to become the successor. If neither of those options were successful the land would then be reclaimed and redistributed for another use.
I think you explained this really well.I was always kind of confused.It's funny because before Star Trek IV,You have McCoy chartering a spaceflight in Star Trek III and saying he had the money for it. Then in the original series you had Uhura asking how much a tribble cost and the seller talked about how many credits it cost. Thanks for this deep dive.
That speech you give that ends at 19:30, That should be made into a short. The part that's like "imagine a world where your basic needs are met...." That's a good, emotional speech
There is a currency in Star trek. It is simply your quality of living. If you are best at your job you get a better rank and home. Federation planets may keep their own money system. Federation credits exist as a intermediary currency think 1K/10K/100K federal bank notes. In a post scarcity society these things are all possible. Most of it is Beta sources. I have 2 college credits in Star Trek. 1. Class based on Economics of Star trek . 2. The Physics of Star Trek.
George Parkins -- Money has 2 main uses: As a medium of exchange, and as a store of value. Since Replicators make all elements worh the same, pretty much the only value left is sentiment and novelty. Neither of which is all that transferable. Think of pirated movie torrents - but for EVERYTHING. Up to and including PEOPLE. Kind of reminds me of "the rifleman's creed" and the old joke about "the family axe." And if money is no longer a commodity, it's only an in insturment of measurement. And the people who try to hoard "all the centimeters" are considered mentally ill.
Your reputation clearly still matters. That much is certain. And you could interpret that as a form of 'currency' in some ways. In fact, at times I try and think up ways of making a space sim game in a non-capitalist context with no obvious 'currency', and reputation is the main stand-in I can think of to make that work at all as a game. Granted the genre in question, based around games like Elite, the X series, Freelancer, etc - is largely built around trading and buying new stuff, so that's part of the problem - creating an economic simulation while removing some of the core elements of such a simulation is tricky, it turns out. XD Another that occurred to me, for slightly different reasons... What would you use as a currency in a world where technology similar to replicators exists? And I thought... Energy. Some resources would still have value in certain contexts because of the amount of energy involved. If you have fusion reactors, Hydrogen has value by definition since it's what gets converted to energy. If you have solar... Assuming energy is something that can be transported from place to place (think the most amazing battery tech ever), then the power generation is nearly free, but the moving it from place to place costs energy (since starships use energy to function) Replicators use energy, thus the 'cost' of a replicated item is in terms of the energy used. Replicator feed stock might be formulated to reduce the energy costs of replicating common items (secondary sources for Star Trek suggest this to be the case, while suggesting that 1. You cannot directly turn energy into matter with a replicator and 2. That 'transmutation' of elements is very expensive compared to rearranging atoms and molecules.) It follows naturally that an efficient method of creating this feed stock has some kind of value too. In fact, if the energy costs for replication are high enough, then making things using traditional manufacturing methods would also have value, as long as the item in question doesn't have to be transported too far. (since moving it around costs energy). If traditional manufacturing + transport has a lower total energy cost than replicating an object onsite... Then again, you can define a relative 'cost' of these manufactured items purely in terms of energy... Thus, energy can easily become a defacto currency in a post scarcity society, assuming there are still some functional constraints. (eg it's not truly post-scarcity in the sense of having truly unlimited resources.) Then again, relative to how much energy any given person could trivially access, many items probably have 'costs' so low they could near enough be regarded as 'free'...
@@KuraIthys Careful. If such a society puts too much value on reputation and social acceptance and possibly a few corrupt individuals in government push the system the right way. You could have something similar to The Orville S01E07 Majority Rule.
I have to say, this was the most hopeful, positive, optimistic video of yours I've seen. You do more than analyze Star Trek, but you apply the lessons of Star Trek directly to ourselves, and you do so with a twinkle of possibility in your eye. Yes, yes we *can* and that is what the message of Star Trek has always been. It's always been a metaphor for what we *can* become if we just choose to. So thanks.
Something to add is that the Ferengi government might officially say that they never had any slavery and hid all evidence of it. This would mean that Quark is just continuing this lie as something that he believes in, or to just protect the view that people have of the Ferengi Alliance, knowing that it wasn't the truth and that Sisko didn't know any better. A third possibility is that the Ferengi define slavery in a different way. For example, a Ferengi master might have ‘paid’ you for your work by giving you food, and if you didn't want to work, you simply wouldn't get any food. We might see that as slavery, but they may not have. Besides, slavery is when you legally own an individual. If you just preyed on the desperation of the poor and ‘employed’ poor people and paid them food, you wouldn't need to pay a certain amount of money to buy someone, you would just pay for their food, which is a cost that you would have to cover if you owned the person anyway. In effect, you would have a system that eliminates the need for slavery, but it's just as bad.
The Ferengi are rarely shown to be especially violent so logically would not have enacted slavery which requires the violent oppression of others. The Klingons of course are violent, yes, but would plausibly find slavery too dishonorable and cowardly to do.
Or they debt trapped people, so they never technically were slaves. Most of the slaves up until the massive colonial era were actually this type of slave. It's called an indentured servant, and is mentioned in Bible. The Ferengi probably was referring to Chatel slavery.
@@horatio8213 I'm not convinced female ferengi were not slaves. They were forbidden from conducting business. Yet, when Quark talks to Rom about his ex-wife, he says that Rom entered into a standard marriage contract because Rom wanted to have a child (Nog). So who did Rom enter into a contract with if female ferengi cannot make business contracts? Rom entered into a contract with his wife's father. Female ferengi were forbidden to wear clothes or go shopping, which I'm presuming meant go outside. So. They were traded in contracts that they had no legal say in, had their movements restricted, and presumably were required to take care of all the domestic labor. Sounds like a slave to me. They may have certain rights/protections, but that's a slave.
"If you just preyed on the desperation of the poor and ‘employed’ poor people and paid them food, you wouldn't need to pay a certain amount of money to buy someone, you would just pay for their food, which is a cost that you would have to cover if you owned the person anyway" This is reality currently
Perhaps, but human slavery has never been purely financial. It has _always_ had an aspect of social dominance to it, so baring the treatment of women (and I don't recall enough to be certain on that), the Ferengi version could have been, for similarly social reasons, so alien to us that we ourselves wouldn't consider it slavery... even if it arguably is. If the government places a levy or tax on your income then we don't call it slavery, because the only restriction is on your income; nor do we call it selling a slave when a bank sells the loan they made to you to another bank, despite the fact that they sold the right to profit from the sweat of your brow. Depending on the course of Ferengi history, it's possible that more advanced financial systems _pre-empted_ systematic slavery, rendering the existence of labor-slavery among the Frengi unrecognizable... after all, if a Ferengi could make a case that following their "owner's" orders would reduce profits, then that _could_ conceivably have been enough for a Ferengi court to bar the owner from exercising any authority over the purported slave: depending on the details, Ferengi may have learned of slavery not from their own hyper-commercial behaviors, but instead from the less profit-based behaviors of aliens.
I know people think you are joking but man I've had to take 2 economics courses in college and saying that it's hard to read those text books is an understatement. I don't think Steve gives himself enough credit for being really smart.
One thing that I think contributes to the confusion about the economics of Trek come down to some people being hyperliteral. I mean, there are a lot of phrases in just the English language whose origins stem from things that went obsolete before our great-grandparents were zygotes, so it's not too much of a stretch to imagine that phrases that include money in them would remain in common usage even after money itself wasn't. I mean heck, even NOW there are people who will use the phrase "that's above my paygrade" to refer to things that actually have nothing to do with their actual job. We still say "we have that on tape" when talking about RUclips clips, or "you sound like a broken record" when vinyl has been gone long enough to have made a comeback. And on top of that, since most "future slang" and metaphors writers come up sound stupid anyway, just having the characters use phrases we already now, like "burning the midnight oil" for a non-money based example just makes sense from the script writing perspective.
See also: "Treachery, Faith and the Great River," which foreshadowed brilliantly how Ferengi ideals could evolve to align with those of the Federation.
Been watching this channel for awhile. Some of your episodes have made me misty eyed before. The way you articulated your admiration of this vision of harmony brought me to real tears. Couldn't tell you if this is your best episode, but it's my current favorite.
Alternative explanation to the Ferengi slave statement: The education system is also privatised. So no need to teach these unconvinient chapters in their history. After all, Quark is just stating what he knows.
@@CaptainAndy Which probably puts them akin to the Romans where it was illegal to own a Roman citizen as a slave but you could buy an sell slaves who were not Romans.
@@Z1gguratVert1go in civilised countries, the government takes you to court for non-payment of taxes, rather than sensing armed goons to evict or kill you.
Oh, yeah, right. I guess he pressed forward for free college education and free medical care for everybody while in the past. I wonder whether he also made sure that the US became bankrupt because it couldn't afford to pay for universal college education and healthcare.
Until people can answer "Why should I give you a place to live if you haven't earned it" with an answer of Because you need it, and it allows you to flourish and prosper and benefit society as a whole we will still be very far away from a post-scarcity economy. Just like Wars make no sense if you do not need to control the physical land and the people that live there for your own gain but rather believe that thier goods and services that are produced in the place can be shared with you to meet your needs.
I always got the impression that the Federation saw trade as primarily a diplomatic action. It can be hard to convince some cultures they've just met that they have much to offer of value, so they start things out by offering trade agreements. Their goods are typically of high quality, and they don't need to turn a profit, so they can afford to offer incredibly low prices, so trade agreements with the federation are seen as quite desirable.
MrMeepzor -- considering how almost every version since TNG shows Starfleet officers engaging in some form of gambling, it makes sense. If your basic needs are met whether you work or not, gambling is a pretty good way to accumulate "favours", make social connections, and aquire other non-monetary forms of "wealth". ESPECIALLY since no stakes short of life and death amount to more than playing for poker chips.
@@Grizabeebles I believe in Voyager the crew trade holodeck timeslots, but Voyager's an unusual case where they have a lot more scarcity than most ships. Hence bartering with aliens just to survive. I wonder if the Maquis used currency?
um the feds energy credit is a representation of how much energy they can use use on star ships for using the replicators and holo decks and such... Not money but a needed ration for day to day use of the ships facility.. Mostly learned this from Voyager, and StarTrek online.
I think that's a really excellent point at 18:21. If basic human needs were simply covered, then what would motivate human beings? Sure, there would be a lot of humans who would simply exist, whiling away their lives in relative comfort, maybe just exploring their own planet and not much else. But the reality is, as soon as anyone in that kind of environment tried to do the least thing to pass the time and escape boredom, they would -- wait for it -- IMPROVE THEMSELVES. Once that ball starts rolling, and one realizes that -- perish the thought -- that's ALL YOU HAVE TO LOOK FORWARD TO IN LIFE, it actually sounds like a pretty awesome deal. Don't struggle for basic needs, just spend your time trying to find ways to make yourself smarter, healthier, more sociable, more open to experience or history. Because hey, the pursuit of money/power/fame is an empty, vapid one. Sounds a lot like the Star Trek fantasy at that point, don'cha think? Unfortunately, yeah, for that to have any bearing on our reality, some horrible cataclysm is pretty much required. Ugh.
I agree with you mostly, but I think we can skip the catastrophe. Martin Luther changed the world with just a list of 95 critiques of the church. We just need another Martin Luther, well, a third one. I'm already working on my list.
Federation Economics is based on Tourism. Freedom of Travel = Personal Wealth. Star Fleet is not the only game in town. Trek Lore constantly refers to ships (merchant freighters and cruise ships) existing out side Star Fleet control as well as a number of Private Yachts.
that is true but in that sense its used as a currency in a game world ...but they never once in any mission or bit of lore explain where the EC comes from.
@@remirez2k3 They did explain it. The Energy Credit value of an object is equivalent to the energy you need to create it in a replicator. So basically creating something in a replicator isn't free, it consumes energy. And in order to ration energy, you need a measurement, hence the EC.
It makes me think of how some arcades would have days when you'd go in, and it would be "free" but each person gets a certain number of credits to use as they please, as time and energy isn't necessarily infinite. Or how when you go to an event like a company dinner or wedding, often times you'll have drink tickets which function as a credit for getting something at the bar. It's free to you, but those in charge worked out an agreement with the bar service to provide that. I have a feeling that Starfleet would have something similar, where they make some kind of agreement or trade to provide their people with credits, while providing something in the background, even if that's not a physical thing, like planetary defence, or ensuring safety of spacecraft from that planet. I'd imagine there'd be a lot of stuff like that where a planet will give out free meals to crew in exchange for their safety against whatever group happens to be a threat.
Star trek is real! You're not real. You're not my real dad! Now I'm going to go sob in my room clutching my Picard plushy and sobbing while rocking back and forth.
You hit on a very important fact of the current era we live in: we already posess the technology and infrastructure required to begin the transtion into some kind of post-scarcity economy. The majority of functional scarcity that exists in the world today is manufactured scarcity. Our governments, however have been enacting policies that promote false scarcity and enact forced income redistribution. The government will send police to arrest, detain, and imprison poor and middle-class individuals if they do not fulfil their legal obligation to give hundreds or thousands of dollars of their income to the wealthiest 0.1%. It's called taxpayer-funded corporate welfare (which includes bail-outs, corporate subsidies, and other so-called "economic stimulus programs" that just take money from poor people and give it to rich people), and it is the largest single use of taxes in most capatalist countries (especially seeing how a HUGE chunk of defense spending is actually just corporate welfare for private defense contractors).
prophetisaiah08 -- the problem is war. Same as it's always been. Any group that comes together to TAKE stuff can only be opppsed by an even larger comparatively-armed group. And whoever controls the largest military can pretty much do whatever they want. The U.S. is currently fighting at least 7 different wars right now to protect it's foreign interests. If the richest two dozen people on earth didn't WANT it to be this way, all they'd have to do is pull their funding and wait.
And the resources that are most directly analogous to post-scarcity resources are legally restricted, and the legal restrictions seem to get more onerous over time. Basically the stuff covered by Copyright, patents and other IP law is almost all stuff that is functionally a 'post-scarcity' resource which could be given to everyone for free with little to no consequence except to the people directly responsible for creating the initial works. (and even then the consequence to the creators is largely a product of them needing other, more directly restricted resources.)
KuraIthys -- To that I say, you just didn't grow up pirating music and video games in the 1990s like I did. I used to be that kid recording songs off the radio with a tape recorder and collecting VHS tapes of my favorite TV shows because nobody in 100 miles was selling personal copies and we couldn't afford it anyway. Once I discovered P2P piracy (look it up) I went digital and haven't looked back since. These days you can buy your own portable printing press for less than 100 bucks and print any 400 page book for less than $80. That was UNTHINKABLE well into my teen years. Now with digital media, it's even faster, easier and cheaper. Streaming only exists because it's more convenient. Books are only profitable because of economies of scale. In Star Trek, they can do that for ANYTHING MADE OF MATTER. Technically speaking, Tom Riker's EXISTENCE was an act of piracy. In hindsight, they really should have seen that thing with the Defiant coming...
So what's the incentive for the workers who provide these unlimited resources? I'm all for a post scarcity civilisation, but economic shifts won't get us there, technological ones will. People still have to work. They still have to mine ores, farm crops, produce goods, learn the sciences, and put hard work and effort into bringing these resources to those who need them. The problem with removing money and wealth, is how do you create a system that is fair for everyone? Sure everyone can work for free and be provided with a free home, free utilities and free food and some luxuries, but how do you determine what is a more valuable luxury and who to give them to? Should someone who works at a fast food restaurant be afforded the same luxuries as a scientist? Or a police officer? Or a firefighter? If so, why? Money was created to solve the problem of bartering, to solve the problem of relative worth and value inequality. You could barter 3 chickens for 3 hours of work, but those 3 chickens might not be the same as the next 3 chickens given to someone else. How do you determine which items are equally as valuable as other items? Is 20m of rope the same as 2 packets of seeds? Is a set of handcrafted silverware as valuable as 5 hours of work and a handful of wax? Money solves that by making transactions precise and fair. This item is worth 5 coins, 1 hour of work earns 30 coins, etc. It's how money is earned that is the problem, income inequality is the problem. Not money.
@@cadkls You immediately conflate the basics listed with luxuries, so I'm not sure there's much of a reason to respond to begin with... ...let alone you pretending money is intrinsically nice and fair, like every exchange is conducted with perfect information and no coercion (hint: you can't shop around for a doctor when you've been shot)... ...but on the off chance there might be, this isn't some speculation you're dismissing the utopia with... it's a reality that will give is a dystopia unless we address it. Because rather than ask why anyone would work a farming or mining job if they didn't have to, you need to ask what will we do about it when they couldn't if they wanted to. Once a select group of people owning the rights to the automation technology are the only ones in control of essential needs. Because I'm sure even greater disparity than the heirs of a single family owning more of what there is than 40% of a society is any way sustainable... let's keep going with the model that got us that, shall we? So why be a doctor or a firefighter? Other than social conscience and self actualisation? There'd still be perks to things others couldn't / won't do (and status is often one of these)... but no one would have to fear for their (or, more usually, children's) well being if they didn't have a role they were a fit for available (and so only be open to exploitation for existence as is now). But when we wouldn't have enough doctors, and people would suffer more! Pish Posh. Prestige, Perks, Pride... not basic necessities.
Great video. There is some nuance between private property (means of production) and personal property (a house) in economics. I see the federation as having socialized most private property to almost eliminate scarcity and yet maintains personal property. Vineyards and restaurants are interesting cases but as you point out meals at Sisko’s are not charged for so it seems in the utopian earth that most will have leisure time to pursue passions like cooking and then give away products of labor.
The way I figure the Federation's economy works is actually based on the availability of energy and the amount of energy needed to replicate something, go somewhere and so on. Every citizen is provided a set number of energy credits a month which is more than enough to cover the cost of housing, replicating food and clothing and still leave plenty left to just enjoy life. However while it allows a very comfortable, stress free life it has its limits and if you want to say go to another star for whatever reason you need to a) either have a career where your paid extra energy credits on top of the monthly amount or b) save up your spare credits like mad for a few months (which could mean not using a holodeck for a few weeks or not using a transporter beam to transport yourself to your mates house on the other side of the planet).
A bit like on Voyager they ration replicator and holodeck use. (Tom even uses it to create a lottery) It still means they have a currency in form of energy. Perhaps basic needs are "free" and only "luxury goods" need to be paid for. That way in daily life a person doesn't encounter any form of "money", but if they want something special, they have to pay for it.
@@HappyBeezerStudios This was always my preferred headcanon. Most of the time you don't run into money in your daily life in the Federation, so when people say "they don't use money" they mean on the day-to-day.
honestly this is in my personal opinion the most likely situation each person is alloted an amount of EC then if they want to live a more extravagent life they create a job or career of some sort and are alotted another amount of EC to use.
That was just awesome! Been a huge fan for as long as I can remember. Always hope that we as humans can reach farther and build a world like they built in the Star Trek universe. Thanks for this video. Eye opening!
A thought on Quark's statement to Sisko- As Steve says, taken that Ferengi are focused on the profit motive, and worker exploitation is expected, on the flip side in this society the tenacity of the worker to cunningly use their wits to get the best or most lucrative payoff from their wealthier counterparts would naturally be expected as well. So on either side (boss or worker), in Ferengi society it is the nature of the individual to use whatever means to achieve the best deal whether negotiating from a place of strength or bluffing and scamming from a position of weakness. This would be ingrained in the Ferengi societal fabric so much so that a successful Ferengi, whether boss or worker, would even out both sides since each is getting the best deal possible from their position. So much so that it actually turns into a very, very, long chess-game-like journey of getting to a place where the actualization of profits would average out to the equivalent of a mutually beneficial comprise. However since comprise would be seen as weakness, it is not the first move a Ferengi would make, it would only be when it's the last possible resort to maintain a profit. I think the true and real profit for a Ferengi is to be made from alien cultures that are so blinded-side by the Ferengi's finely tuned art of the con that they just get materially wiped out.
The writers did slip up on this point, apparently. In one TNG episode, aliens duplicate Picard while he sleeps and, leaving the duplicate on the Enterprise, haul the original off to be tested. The duplicate tips the aliens' hand by behaving erratically -- at one point buying a round of drinks for his crew in 10 Forward and singing drinking songs with them.
I think the examples of private property dont actually constitute private property, with a possible exception. The marxist definition of private property (the definition that matters when discussing if the federation is communist) differentiates it from Personal Property (your house, car, toothbrush) Sisko's restaurant wouldn't be private property either, as it's not operated for a profit. Since sisko doesn't charge for the food, it's essentially a bigger fancier version of cooking dinner for your neighbors. The picard vineyard is perhaps private property, but if they aren't selling the wine it would again just be personal property. (PS. If nobody has suggested it, maybe the federation credits are a labor voucher)
Regarding Quark, I think this may be a combination of the unreliable narrator and the fish not seeing the water. Ferengis undoubtedly had systems like slavery (their treatment of women for example). However this is Quark's own society and history, one he is deeply invested in, so he doesn't see the fault or doesn't see it as being as bad as human history. Quark is also fairly privileged, relatively speaking, and hasn't yet been confronted by the darkness in Ferengi society. I think we see his analog in some folks today who may admit the injustices of the past but can't see today's injustices. Or are apt to point out what they see as barbarism in another culture, and say "the West never did things like that". It's a missed opportunity that Sisko doesn't call him out, or revisit the conversation later when Quark has experienced more of the downsides of Ferengi culture. But I think when we look back on him now Quark has even more resonance as satire
But that is still pretty red herringy. Sisko preaches Federation Values, yet he has no negative qualms of bribing others and playing dirty if he needs too. Despite the fact that those are against federation values. Both are biased, yet both are right. Only in the nuances do they break down.
I’m surprised you didn’t mention during the part about Quark’s beef with humanity that the Ferengi society is incredibly misogynistic and patriarchal . Ferengi women are treated incredibly unfairly. They are unable to work or attain profit, they can’t express their beliefs or opinions, and they’re not even allowed to wear clothing! Ferengi women are constantly referred to as “females” in a derogatory tone. So that would have been something Sisko could have thrown back in Quark’s face during that little exchange.
Which also begs the question why most of the females haven't up and left to the Federation to have careers while the Ferengi men would have to figure out a way to fuck themselves.
DS9 strongly implies that the sexism and misogyny inherent in Ferengi culture exist only because of the belief that it optimizes profit and not because they feel women are inherently inferior life forms. Ishka and Zek are able to transform Ferengi society fairly quickly which likely means one of two things: A. Ferengi are actually extremely progressive as a whole and were just hiding it due to fear of social pressure. B. The sexism and misogyny was rooted in a desire to optimize profit which is why it didn't take too much convincing to start change Ferengi society. My guess is it's the latter. If so, it means Sisko trying to throw that in his face would just get him laughed at considering humans literally used atomic weapons against each other and committed genocide out of pure hatred.
Watching Star Trek as a kid really got me thinking about how things could be better. I think it was a big reason I ended up being a leftist. I don't think the communist ideal is to get rid of personal property, but to eliminate private control of the stuff necessary for production and the private seizure of the products. So there's no reason why a person in an ideal communist society shouldn't own where they live (or perhaps the building or house or whatever could be owned collectively) and own their clothes and stuff. But that person shouldn't own an enterprise where they buy the labor of other people, seize the products of their labor, then pay them the least they can get away with. Ideally the people doing the work would own the business together and decide democratically what to do with the proceeds. Anyway we can do a whole lot better just using the technology we have today. If we can keep from destroying ourselves, our technology is going to keep making it easier to have abundance for everyone, but we've got to get the political will together to tell the financial elite that they don't get to have everything to themselves.
Your 4th paragraph is interesting. But the problem with anything in any form of government is bureaucracy, consider Bill Gates Mico Soft or Apple Computer the Wright brothers. The bureaucracy would say our main frames work just fine! Or the bureaucracy would say we gave Samuel Perpont Langley, a good Party Member in good standing $50000 in 1890 $💲💲to build our airplane. Would we have building size computer maybe a tad smaller. No personal computers, no internet to much freedom for the masses. Ah no airplane because our good party member couldn't make it work and he was sent to a re-education camp!
Consider a society with an insane level of resource and production relative to today. One way to distribute the plentiful, but still limited resources and production is to give every one a slice of what's available. You can spend this opportunity as you want but you will rarely spend everything since you are credited so much more than you need. As tech improves the amount everyone can "spend" increases.
They don't work for money, but that doesn't mean that they don't work to stand out from or above others. There are still competitive aspects to life and rewards/privileges for certain behaviors or accomplishments. There is still power and authority to be wielded by an individual, otherwise there wouldn't be exclusive positions like Federation President or director of a research institute. Those have rewards and privileges even if money isn't on the table anymore.
I’m surprised you didn’t mention the episode “Times Arrow” of TNG when Samuel Clemens comes on the enterprise and questions Troi in these very topics about the Federation.
I'm a local political candidate in my city. And I can tell you now that I carry everything I learnt from Star Trek with me. I'm a democratic socialist after all in the British Labour Party. Socialist ideals are what Star Trek promote. It's a miracle it even made it on screen in the US given the Red Scare and general opposition to left wing ideals. I'd suggest that it's because of shows like Star Trek has kept the flame of social justice and social political ideas alive in a world where right wing and neoliberal obsession with capitalism is failing.
Yo Steve, please make a short from 21:35 that gives us your talk of what we could change in our soceity. I would like to share that. I think our world need more of that stuff. That is one of the reasons i personally became a Trekkie in the first place.
I do like that in the novels Ralph Offenhouse found his 24th century destiny - he became a key member of the Starfleet Diplomatic Core specializing in negotiations with the Ferengi, and ended up being the Federation’s first permanently stationed ambassador in Ferenginar - as diplomacy on Ferenginar is just representing your government as a broker on the stock exchange.
"A lot has changed in the past three hundred years. People are no longer obsessed with the accumulation of things. We've eliminated hunger, want, the need for possessions. We've grown out of our infancy."
@@laughablelarry9243 Quark's isn't in The Federation. Cisco's Restaurant though. Maybe the wait staff work for the tips. But what would they be. Compliments? Fashion advice? Invitations to parties?
@@alanpennie8013 In the Orville, they say that after they stopped using money, people used reputation as kind of a measurement of wealth, if we could assume the same thing happened in Star Trek, we could assume that those wait staff are probably just beginning their careers, and they want to build a reputation of themselves so that they can get the opportunities they want (even though anyone can do anything, there's still limited spots, for example, there are only as many captains as there are ships and installations to be run). And in the old constant cycle of "can't get job because of lack of experience, can't get experience because of lack of a job" to attain some reputation they had to start somewhere, and why not wait tables?
matheusGMN -- one of the key conciets of Star Trek has always been the idea that attaining and applying new knowledge is the highest pursuit mankind can engange in. Sisko is a Gourmet Chef trapped in an officer's uniform, Picard is a frustrated wannabe-archeologist-turned-diplomat. However, like Kirk both men became Starfleet officers because only the most elite of elites even manages to graduate from the academy and only a fool would pass that up. I for one really do wonder what the world would be like if the top 1% of the top 1% of society running things were all scientists and artists and certified geniuses. Anyone here ever work in Silicon Valley or a public hospital?
Post-scarcity economy is near. The resources already exist!!! It's just a matter of prying the resources from the cold, greedy hands of the crazy rich folks.
That’s exactly why it’s not going to happen soon. Also, people focus on the super rich, but if you’re living in a developed country, have the leisure time to watch this video, and a device and access to the internet with which to view it, chances are you are far richer than most of the human race. People like you and I have and waste more resources than we need too, so we’d likely have to give up a lot to balance things out too. This is not something that most people are truly willing to do, so things are not going to change any time soon. Even ignoring poverty, our consumerism is literally killing the planet and we just keep ramping it up. I think that we it will take something catastrophic or fundamentally world changing to make us change, just like in Star Trek.
We need a philosophical shift. Since the industrial revolution and computer age, peoples' livelihoods have become so niched down that meaning is gone. These changes also brought about the death of God, essentially, and humans are kind of rudderless now, accumulating money and prestige while worshiping republicans&democrats, football teams, coke & pepsi. Until we realize a new purpose and define a reason to exist, we're going to continue going on like ants, building, eating, birthing, fighting, dying. If you can answer why life exists and what it's purpose is on a cosmic level, I think you could start to convert people to the mindset necessary to begin letting go of some of the capitalistic trappings of the world... I think I figured out why we're here, why everything is here after a recent brush with death. I'm almost done writing it down, then I will distribute it for free. Followed by a video (because people don't read much anymore, congrats if you made it this far) and distribute that. We're at a crossroads right now, so do we want the utopia after world war 3, or can we just skip the massacre?
Eh, the resources exist but not on Earth. We can probably get to an interim state between here and there where everyone's basic needs for food, water, shelter, and clothing are met, but if you think everyone's getting an iPhone and a computer with what we have here, you're far off the mark. We're already using four times the materials the planet can generate in a given year, so it's going to take settling our current population on four separate earth sized planets, and telling them not to grow their populations much, to even begin to get there.
@Jay B You are quite correct there. I constitute one of the poorest people in my own country, but on a global scale that still puts me in the top 10% of the world's wealthiest people. Most likely the majority of commenters here are too. That's not to say this is always 'real' in the same sense. If I move to a poorer country with my current income my standard of living would rise dramatically. That's because standard of living, and 'wealth' in the sense of how much money someone has in a more objective sense are not direct correlates. But still... When 26 people have as much wealth as 3.8 billion combined, that's somewhat different than arguing about the 'top 10%'. We've also got the distinction between the people that can live comfortably, and those that can do basically anything they like (buy anything, do basically anything) And then we have the category that can do anything they like AND still have so much income that they're getting richer just for existing. If you have so much money that you could buy basically anything whatsoever and not just basically not notice, but have so much to spare that you couldn't spend everything you've got even if you wanted to.... Well, there's wealth, and there's WEALTH. Anyway, regardless of where most of us fit on that wealth totem pole (judging by quality of life I'm not so sure it's as clear cut), it's clear that the very richest have the least to lose in any practical sense (since much of their wealth is not something they could personally spend on anything even in theory), and the very poorest have the most to gain. The first goal is not eradicating inequality, but simply reducing it. Improve things for the very worst off by taking from those that are at the very top of the pyramid... And then work up, and down from that as required to make things sufficiently fair that nobody has to miss out on basics like food and shelter and so on. Once we've gotten to that point we can worry about the broader details and more extensive issues of people's quality of life...
I thought of it as a social credit system where you build credits based on your contribution to society. By joining the space core you build it as you work and everything is paid for you. If you choose not to you can build it in other ways. Like an artist may create a work and if it has cultural merit they are issued credit. In that way you could build credit to have a nicer house or fancier clothes etc but it’s about contribution. Everyone has basics like food, travel and housing but if you want more you have to contribute more. That’s why the captain has better quarters than an ensign.
More than any other fictional series, I think, Star Trek has had an impact on our world. Because of Captain Kirk's communicator we had flip phones. TNG's replicators were sited as part of the reason why those who made 3D printers made 3D printers, even to the point where several 3D printers have been branded "Replicator". Uhura, Chekhov, Scotty showed us how to break down racial walls and prejudices (though it did take a while before a colored person was a captain and even longer before a woman, but you know, baby steps). If one show can influence technology and society, then why not economy?
Another one is Kirk's question, "Is that a lot?" with regard to being paid 100 bucks for selling his glasses to the antique dealer. Then Kirk distributes the $ to each member of the crew sans coins. You would think, though, that instead of walking around in 23rd century Fleet uniforms--Spock is still wearing his robe from "The Search for Spock"-- the crew ought to be able to find a thrift shop to buy 20th century clothes to blend in better among Earth inhabitants.
The philosophy of the (internal) Federation economy can be best described by a quote from Karl Marx. "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs."
Yes…but it is not ‘free’…your social position and productivity are what entitle you to the best assets. So if you don’t want to work for the good of society you’ll not be given much to enjoy or live on. If you think you will get to live like Royalty for no payback…well no, and no one else in the model gets that either.
One of the reasons why the Christian Heaven sounds like Hell to me is that it's a world without struggle where there is no pain or wanting. Being hungry makes the steak delicious. I never want to live in a world where everything I could want or need is handed to me.
Ferengi never had slavery? That's kinda hard to square with the fact that they treat their women like property, women have a second class status, and are expected to be naked at all times.
Ferengi's treatment of females is closer to Saudi Arabia's treatment of women rather than full on slavery. It's in the same ballpark though. Quark's point was that of a technicality: even if Sisko thought the Ferengi treatment of women was bad, he knew that humanity's history of slavery was technically even worse.
Joke Answer: The writers needed to answer how Starfleet personnel could afford to live in San Francisco. 😉
Zing!
@@mattm7378 When Ben Sisko went to the Academy, he visited his family every day and used a months worth of transporter credits in a week. Transporting is not unlimited either.
Not everyone can have a beach house.
pokepress the money if needed, can be printed by the replicating machines just as the produce food and anything they want from nothing. Energy to matter converter.
Matt M Unless it’s the communities north of the Golden Gate Bridge. They still won’t want any transportation clusters in their area (aka...Bart) bringing in the unwashed masses.
When I talk to people about how the FED economy works, and they say it's impossible, I say that the problem is we can't imagine their economy: we are an engineer on a steamboat looking at the Space Shuttle taking off and wondering how many tons of coal their boilers need to get that vehicle into space.
Are you a Pisces?
"When I talk to people about how the FED economy works, and they say it's impossible" Because when it comes down to it, you have a situation where people need to work, but don't have to work. The only way it could work is if we had robots doing all the jobs and the robots were capable of fixing and performing maintenance on themselves. That is the only way a moneyless society can work, robots that do everything including take care of themselves. Theres a guy on youtube, hes a millionaire CEO. His channel basically exposes "contraprenuers", i.e. those guys that want to sell you directions on how to get as rich as them owning your own business. He explains, the reality is, the vast majority of people simply dont have the passion and drive it takes to become rich. Thats why its a con. Not necessarily that their "system" can't work, but they don't tell you it will take a LOT of time effort and work to make it successful and despite that the fact is they are selling it as such, it is not an "easy" way to get rich. Most people are just wired to be worker bees. They work because they have no other choice if they want to survive and earn a living. Most people if they won the lottery would never work another day in their life. Yet you see high powered CEO's literally working till they die despite the fact they could have retired at 35 rich as hell. That is why they are rich and you are not. A society where people take on all these complex jobs requiring years of study and hard work yet you will personally not be living any better than someone that just decided not to do anything with their life isn't really realistic because it is just a small minority of people that just have that passion for the work.
Tim most people who are rich were born rich. You’re talking about the theory capitalism, but reality doesn’t align in many cases. Families that are struggling to put food on the table for their kids aren’t doing so because they don’t have the drive to make a million dollars, they’re stuck. That could be a mental stagnation if they have mental illness and can not afford treatment or if they’ve never had a role model to show them that college can drastically improve their lives or it could be any number of things blocking them from getting ahead in life. To say being poor is a choice is just ignorant of the realities of life. I think the concept of the moneyless society in ST is only possible with a society that makes the path towards self improvement clear enough to incentivize people enough to do it. You can spend your life sitting at home or you can take a “job” that pays in travel through space and time with a focus on learning and experience. To fit the previous analogy, if a steam boat is our current society and coal is money then you can give the captain a lottery’s worth of coal but he’s not going to be any closer to flying into space. It’s a fundamentally different drive when you have people who need money to live and having complete free autonomy over where your life goes.
This mistake here is the Steamboat Engineer understands the concept of thrust and propulsion, so while they don't understand what specific technology would push the Space Shuttle into space, they get it.
The issue with Trek and the economy is that it would take a fundamental change in the mindset of all of humanity to make a system like that work, but yet we've seen across every single series from the original series to Picard, that humans are still pretty much exactly like we are today. Which is fine by the way, I imagine the stories set in such a universe where money doesn't need to exist would be incredibly boring.
The main issue is Roddenbury wanted no money, it was one of his rules for the show, but he never laid the groundwork in world building to explain it, he just hand waved it as fact...so it's been up to writers since then to back into it and try and justify it. This is the "12 parsec Kessel Run" of Star Trek. It was a throw away line to sound cool, but doesn't actually make sense.
@@tsdobbi Plus there is scarcity of everything but the universe. There is only so much of anything and the best way to organize an economy is to use supply and demand to organize everything. If it was as simple as simply handing out goods then why did the ussr economy suck? Sorry but there is and always will be scarcity and cost.
Easy response to Quark's statement is that he's looking through rose-tinted glasses at Ferengi culture, not surprising given how pro-ferengi culture he is shown to be. Taking Quark's opinions on Ferengi culture as gospel would be like taking Dukat's about Cardassian culture in the same light and that seems questionable.
So true. I mean, we know Ferengis do slavery, they still do it in the modern times even-they put the whole crew of the Enterprise to work in their mines in that episode of TNG where Riker and Worf immediately lose the ship to them… “Rascals” I think it was
Exactly.
It's just simple denial.
It may well be indentured servitude, not slavery that the Ferengis practice. Arguable slavery with extra steps, but it usually has a buyout and indentured servitude can allow the person to save to buy their freedom (or work it off).
I could see a scenario where the forced labor part isn't the problem they have with slavery, but not allowing someone to try and accumulate wealth - a slave that cannot own money cannot trade with others, which is one of the most central parts of Ferengi society.
A "True Ferengi" might argue that no one is forced into slavery, they agreed to it when they signed the contract. They're upfront about their natures and dishonesty, it's literally written down and codified.
@@majorsmashbox5294 Human's have excused learned conditions of chauvinism being driven in large part due to capitalism. THAT"S the opposite of reality, capitalism can exist (in decent guarded form as the federation shows) without chauvinism and chauvinistic structures can 100% exist without capitalistic drivers as it does today in a multitude of context. Humans ***LEARN*** chauvinism period, I disagree with Angela Davis.
I always assumed the Federation Credit was purely for other worlds to trade with the Federation. For example when trading with Klingons they might use latinum (since that is already a widely accepted currency) or they could pay with credits, which can then be exchanged for Federation resources
I think banks would figure out a way to distribute something like bitcoin to people within a society. Also, stock piles of resources makes a lot of sense because sometimes tit for tat trading just doesn't cut.
Personally considering how much we literally see them participating in commerce. I am of rye opinion that the "no money" thing is simply internal propaganda,along with Starfleet not veins a military.
@@KRYMauL The question is then, how do you prevent it from all breaking down again? How is it, that you can just walk into a bar and get food and drinks for free? If money really played a role in Federation life again, they would all want money again to be able to afford larger housing, better everything... you know. There has to be some restrictions by law in place, that enforce that money isn't used anymore. Obviously, we still see money in the criminal world.
Maybe it's exactly that inefficiency of trades without money, that is wanted here. I can imagine that the Federation has an eye on anyone having too valuable items, because they could also be used as money. I guess, that there is an always concerted effort to keep some form of efficient money away from the Federation society. So that, you can only use that within criminal context, because all public cases are surveilled sufficiently.
The problem with money is, it is used to control people. That's its intrinsic property. You can't completely ban trades, because that's also most human interactions, giving and giving back. Just exchanging some vegetables to help out, won't be enough to control many people though. But if you have an efficient means of trade, then it can go very quickly and efficiently. Meaning, that people will want to have money and the focus will shift away from sharing freely (important concept presented in this video!) and intellectual self-improvement to the acquiring of personal wealth again.
So perhaps, it's really that, a combination of:
- Inscarcity (abundance) of the vast majority of resources that humans need and want
- Control of where the scarce materials are, so that they are always in the hands of the community, not in the hands of individuals; so that there can't be efficient means of trade
- A logical and as much sound-proof as possible model of government, with control mechanisms that are not supposed to fail, although it will always be a fight and require attention
The gold-pressed latinum-to-Gakh exchange rate has been weak lately so the Klingon economy hasn't been great since Praxis.
like the yuan and rmb.
I always assumed that energy was the currency of the Federation, as we frequently see them talking about holo, replicator, and transporter rations. As they have warp cores, and we hear in voyager that a warp core can power an entire city, it seemed to me that their power output was what determined the wealth of a planet, and ships.
Edit: they also have other miracle technologies, based on power. So, we can see that Miles O’Brien was a Federation Millionaire. Exchanging power credits/rations for the equivalent amount of physically replicated matter, ie Gold.
That actually makes a lot of sense.
Most of the mention of rations are from Voyager. Which is simply because Voyager is stranded and cut off from the federation, so they don't have the resources that they normally would. Most other times rations are mentioned post-tng are under special circumstances when supplies are short, which isn't usually the norm.
Aren’t they always desperate to find planets with dilithium crystals? Scarcity/inability to replicate them suggests probable currency value.
Also the books have ‘gold pressed latinum’ (?) as a non-replicable trade of value but I don’t know if the books are considered canon.
I always thought they HAD money, it was just a case of people didn’t need it for most things like food and housing, because replicators. That ensured you didn’t need to work - but you could if you chose to, in order to have more than what was provided to all for free.
@@DeadDancers good theory, but the st:tng tech manual says that replicators must use something to make food etc. it states for instance that food is made from a nutricious base, and if needed it can use recycled "waste" that is steralized to be recycled back into food. i guess kinda like what some cities do to grey water to become drinking water.
interesting. but aren't we just swapping out gold (as when our currency was based on gold) for energy? i mean, if they're exchanging power-based credits, isn't that just... money?
The existence of things that cannot be replicated has always puzzled me. If something can be teleported, as gold pressed latinum can, then it can be replicated, because a replicator is just a transporter that uses prerecorded patterns to create objects from raw energy, instead of moving patterns of existing objects from one location to another.
By this logic, you should be able to replicate people as well. Of course, we did find out that Riker did get replicated by the transporter.
I think the explanation was that replication uses patterns that are lower resolution and easy to store. Whereas transporters require basically a full quantum level copy. As well transporters seem to basically play hot potato with the person or thing in transit so I kinda get it
(edit now i have access to a real keyboard) episodes have mentioned that replication isn't "perfect" most of the time, water is probably easily replicated pure, but food is probably a moderate quality "scan" of various constituent amino acids and sugars sequenced just right. a transporter however clearly has a lot more hardware to work with just to make sure that they make a true 100% copy, that would require a lot of energy and memory. even by the 24th century they hadn't figured out how to make a transporter pattern last longer than like 3-4 minutes.(neglecting scotty who has plot armour)
@@Walkerman379 and since that is an undesirable effect in transporter, it makes sense that you don't want that happening under normal circumstances.
Allan Boone -- In my personal head-canon, Tom Riker is proof of HOW people and latium are unreplicatable.
It's like Bashir and genetic modification. It's not impossible, just ILLEGAL, and most people in the Federation are too goody-goody to see the difference.
Dilithium on the other hand makes perfect sense fron a safety POV. If it's a matter-antimatter moderator, one subatomic flaw in the assembly process means big boom. Kind of like when you fire a 3D-printed gun made of the wring plastic...
Rhi Sands -- I'm starting to figure that replicator patterns are like stock photos, sound libraries, quilting patterns, etc. Some poor bastard mixed HUNDREDS of martinis just to get the bragging rights. Meanwhile when Picard says "hot" it's probably a keyword for his PERSONAL library of tea patterns rather than the ship's defaults. It's like a personal playlist for "stuff."
Isaac Arthur's video explaining Post Scarcity is a good start to understanding how Star Trek could work
Isaac Arthur is awesome!
I think I've seen most of his videos. Even gotten a few ❤ to my comments over the years. Isaac's a beast, I'd bet my life that he knows more than Neil Degrassi Tyson. He can instantly access the math of things I've only got a tentative grasp of in theory.
I'll be watching and start to pick out an issue and he'll explain the solution within a minute or so.
@@neutrino78x Well then you recreate entire nations in O'Neill cylinders orbiting the Sun. We can convert most of or all matter in the system into habitats. Entire ecologies can be recreated on top of supporting quadrillions of decedents. We invent nano scale universal builders and basically anything can be made at the molecular level with just raw elements and some energy.
Watch Isaac Arthur and realize what potential is wasted by humanity.
Was gonna say - often we have duplications of these things. For example, how many ‘Statue of Liberty’s are there? Both Macao AND Vegas have Venetian hotel/casinos (themselves a duplication of a well known place) Neighbourhoods, cities, compounds, etc that are replications (copy/paste/copy/paste)
@@neutrino78x Be homeless for awhile. Having a place means everything. Think most people live where they want? Sounds to me that's more of a problem to humans, than making sure the rows of people living under the bridge have a place to live. I say, personally, once every single human being is housed, clothed, and fed. Maybe once the planet no longer has to worry about clean water. Maybe then, want should come into focus. I think the obvious imbalance in this concept is reflective on the state of the world. Which is roasting, and is only going to get worse. At some point, you have to address need before want or the world will inform you of this lesson the hard way. Even infants know the difference.
I know you get flak for it, but I really appreciate when you get political. Science Fiction is necessarily political. It makes meaningful comments about our world. Keep up the great work.
Well said.
They made reference to a "Bank of Bolias" in the DS9 episode _Honor Among Thieves,_ so I always figured that it was just _Earth_ specifically that no longer used money, since Bolians are Federation members.
With two industrial replicators , Bejor could have had one churning out more replicators while the other initially produced food and other goods. Hell, the Federation could have just given them one replicator, but presumably Bejor was starving and the Federation was being nice.
I also wanted to consider that two industrial replicators was plenty for what they needed, or what they could maintain. The scarcity might have been in training of engineers, or of problems that the replicators could solve. There are lots of possibilities besides scarcity of the replicators themselves.
In a world where you can replicate literally almost anything, I would image that cottage industries for handmade goods are quite popular.
MLC -- So... The entire Federation runs on Patreon and Like, Share, Subscribe?
That replicated gumbo is always the same, Sisko's down the street always brings out the flavour and variety of the in-season veggies and meats.
Do you think he has some kind of online capacity information? The restaurant's pretty big but like, the present day has bigger.. and people can pop by for lunch from anywhere in the world on a whim.. either he's a hipster local secret, or he probably has some kind of backlog of people wanting to try his cooking..? He IS very devoted to "his customers", maybe he really feels like taking a day off is depriving a significant number of people their chances...
Kit Vitae -- At that point, it's all about self-satisfaction and reputation. Sisko's strikes me as a "first come, first served" or "invitation only" joint.
What I think drives "eat real" in Star Trek is the fact that Sisko's CAN have it all go wrong some nights. The mere possibility of a chef having an off day makes conistency an achievement.
I mean, do YOU watch baseball because you want to see it all go "so-so" for both teams?
@@kaitlyn__L
I think he launders money through his restaurant for Mudd's Venus Drug operation.
@@@kaitlyn__L & Griz .... I think Joseph Sisko just likes to cook. He's not doing it for money, he's doing it because he enjoys it, he loves creating and experimenting with new and different flavor combinations (the replicator only provides the same select menu/portions/consistency/etc.), and he gets to share his creations with others, which allows him to socialize, develop friendships, etc. It gives him pride and purpose. He never/rarely takes vacations because he loves what he does. There isn't anything else he'd rather be doing.
I know I enjoy grilling for friends and family. I wouldn't want to do it every day, but I know more inspired cooks who absolutely would cook all the time for everybody if left to their own devices and if having a job or buying ingredients were not a concern.
Ben Sisko kinda does the same thing. When he's not busy being captain, he loves inviting over anybody and everybody and cooking for them. It's a bonding thing with his son/father, it's a social thing with his friends and colleagues, and he takes a ton of pride in it. Ben is at his happiest in his off-duty hours when he is cooking for others.
And I think that is the epitome of the Earth/Federation economy. When you remove the drive for basic needs, people will still work, doing what they love to do, for the benefit of society and others, and for their own pride and desire to make their mark contributing something. Whether it's cooking, wine making, farming mining, writing literature, transporting goods across the galaxy, or exploring the unknown through Starfleet...people will figure out what excites and motivates them and they will do it.
Dammit Jim....I can't leave him in the hands of 20th century medicine.
Working in the medical field, it makes me laugh everytime. The whole hospital scene is classic.
I'm not familiar with that scene. What happened that was amusing?
You need to rewatch the movie my friend. Totally worth it. There is the old lady scene too, at the hospital.
@@werewolf4358 For real bro? Part 4 The voyage home
Yeah, can you imagine a future where people don't go bankrupt from not being able to pay for their hospital bills, and whether swallowing a pill will not only avoid dialysis but also regrow a kidney? Then there's McCoy's artery repair device that does just that sans invasive surgery.
And there's McCoy's line from City on the Edge of Forever: "They used to sew people like garments... needles and sutures--"
“The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves to better humanity.”
-Jean-Luc Picard, 2063
Horse manure, Picard! How else do you pay for your uniforms and antes in your poker games? How do you pay for transportation aboard ship to and from Fleet postings? How can your family afford to keep its winery operational unless it sells its wines to its customers? Nice ideal about "bettering your lives in service to humanity," but impractical. You can not tell me that the reason you chose not to join the Atlantis Project instead of continuing to serve as Enterprise commander was because Starfleet paid better than the Atlantis Project did.
Says the guy who lives in a large Chateau
Ah, yes! The first season of ST-TNG! What absolute shite it was! It was so bad I actually stopped watching it for several years.
It wasn't until the first episode, Parts 1&2, of Star Trek: Voyager that I felt the same adventurous spirit and SciFi challenge of Star Trek: The Original Series once again.
That feeling lasted until about the middle of episode 3 and didn't come back until "Scorpion" introduced Seven of Nine, who saved the show.
@@shepwillner7507 I think the idea is that society has gotten so wealthy that there's enough for everyone. As to why people would do things instead of being a lump...imagine that you, Shep, had $5M in the bank. It's not enough to buy islands with but it's enough that you can live very comfortably on the interest for the rest of your life. What would you do? You wouldn't keep working at a job you hated, that's for sure. Would you sit on the couch and watch TV all day? Maybe for a while, decompressing and adjusting to not being in the rat race, but I bet that eventually you would want to take some classes, travel, write, learn an instrument, get involved in your community...maybe even start a small pop-up restaurant, where you fed anyone who came in and didn't bother to charge because you didn't need the money and helping people feels good. If you're technically inclined then you would probably contribute to some open-source projects or join a makerspace and teach people how to build cool stuff. You wouldn't waste the day away every day, you would contribute because contributing feels good.
Now imagine that everyone is in that situation; that seems to be what Federation Society is like. Presumably they have automated away all the jobs that no one wants -- robot garbage trucks can collect the garbage, robot cleaning machines keep the sewers clear, etc. Everyone else does what interests them.
It's like minecraft server but everyone is on creative mode.
You have everything. But you still create something.
Why? Because you want to. Not because you need it.
The federation credit was also mentioned in DS9 when Sisko was telling Jake about his first week in the Academy and used the transporter to go from San Francisco to Louisiana to eat dinner at home and Jake says "You must've used up a month's worth of credits"
Just watched that one today; he specifically mentions "transporter credits," implying a scarcity of either energy to operate the transporters, or perhaps an overall lack of units for all the people who want to use them.
@@prestonroberts2941 Or possibly just a restriction on travel for recruits.
I always interpreted transporter credits as part of a set of limits in place to keep people from using more then they produce.
Interesting, I didn't remember that scene from DS9, and I don't know how exactly the dialogues about credits turned out in TOS or TNG. But I'd like to think "credit" is less a currency than a set of limits like Troy says. Not only for transporter use, but also in every other case where scarcities might occur. E.g. when you are drinking the bar dry on your own. Being low on credits could mean sth like: yes, you can allocate to yourself whatever you need, but now you're exaggerating a little.
I actually always interpreted that line to be referring to a credit system specific to the Academy. We already know that there are many rules and restrictions about what people can and can't do when enrolled at the Academy, and it is not unreasonable that, as Citizen_Grub suggests, they might place some limitations on how much they can just go hopping off around the globe when they're supposed to be, y'know, studying and performing their other school duties. Soldiers on military bases often have similar systems today where they can accumulate or trade certain benefits (such as furlough time) depending on their needs/desires, so this is also reasonable given the similarities between Star Fleet and many current-day military structures...
The key words that Picard used that involve making it happen were "we grew out of our infancy" When the human race grows up as a whole and learns to work together anything will be possible." Imagine"
Thinking about how the post-scarcity economy is structured on Earth, I think I understand why there are so many human colonizing expeditions to other planets....and how that colonization is, as much as anything, plays a role in the utopian society.
Money may not exist, and the Earth economy may be structured to meet everyone's basic needs, run by a benevloent government of/by/for humans who actually care about other humans.....but the opportunities for personal & professional growth are still probably somewhat limited.
Sure, Earth's government might make sure everybody who needs a home has a home, but you're not going to get a large estate on the northern tip of San Francisco right at the foot of the Golden Gate Bridge. That land is already spoken for. Much of if not ALL the land on Earth is probably spoken for. So if you are born on a French winery and want to stay there growing delicious wines, Earth's government will be happy to let you because you are producing a good that other people will want. But if you weren't born on it, and if Robert Picard doesn't want to sell it to you, that land is already spoken for and you're out of luck. You can probably go live on the 16th floor of some generic Earth housing complex, where you can have food and shelter and clothing. But if what you really want in life is to indulge your love of nature and to branch out and farm and make some wines and have a large home on a large plot of land.....there's probably not a lot of available options for that left on Earth. So if you want to do or have any of that, you're probably going to have to go find another planet to cultivate.
And we see that a lot on TOS and to a lesser extent on TNG. A lot of human colonists left the comfort of Earth, in many cases without even replicators, because the secondary needs of the ego and the drive to do things that meant something to them were more important to them than even the security of having those basic needs met. They would rather rough it on a perilous foreign planet, doing what they loved to do, out in the open nature, rather than just live a mundane life back on Earth crammed into some tiny apartment.
In short: you can have all your needs catered for, and even the house can be big, if you live in 16th floor. You dont ever need to work because only a few people need to work.
Are you going to be happy with that? A retiree at 18?
No. Thats not how people are wired. We are made to do things. Maybe its something you can do in a city. Maybe its excellence in sport, or maybe its writing, like Jake Sisko.
What are you going to do with your life? You can become anything. But you have only one life, you are young only once. What will you do? You dont need a big house, thats just property too, and when you got it, you dont want it.
When all the needs are met, when work is no longer necessary, work is no longer a grind for money. Work becomes something people want. A goal, a game, a hobby. Personal growth. This is something we forget trying to pay the bills: we work also for ourselves, as our own need to reach further, to achieve. Sure you can stay in bed all day. But after a few, how will you feel? Your body demands you to run, to lift, to climb, to play, and you are much happier when you do.
@@ribbitgoesthedoglastnamehe4681 Its amusing that you "get" that people are not wired like that, yet the argument we see, all the damn time, from people that don't want to create a "basic needs met" society is, "If no one had to actually do things, everyone would be lazy."
That said, if basic needs "are" met, then it allows for other options. The single biggest problem we have, today, is that 90% of the population spends 6-7 hours a day (if they are bloody lucky and don't work for some place like Walmart) just to, "meet those basic needs". Without having to waste all that damn time just trying to keep yourself from starving, losing your home, and/or finding yourself in major debt, from say.. a hospital visit, I suspect that what you get instead is something a bit more like Etsy, or online "DIY" markets - there is still some level of trade, maybe even money, but people are not stuck just surviving.
@@patrickelliott2169 thats been the experiense from ubi and welfare dependense
@@리주민A "democratic society" could break even a well-intentioned "social credit system". Identity politics, rent-seeking, graft and corruption have broken representative functions of Congress so "representatives" in Congress do a dismal job of representing their constituents' interests. Even broken representative government, however, is less broken than a system which treats the people as "social units" who are rated arbitrarily. "Social credits" are sure to be assigned corruptly.
My guess is that a post scarcity economy will expose a fallacy in the traditional definition of economics which is that it is the study of how unlimited demands are satisfied by limited resources. A post scarcity economy would reveal that demands are not unlimited but instead limited.
The point about private property is not particularly poignant. Marx (and subsequent socialists) distinguish personal property from private property. What distinguishes the two is profit -- Sisko's doesn't make profit, and therefore, constitutes personal property. I can't think of a single communist or aspiring communist state without the ability to own homes and sell them. The informal hierarchies within the federation also do not disqualify it as communist. It is made clear at many points that Federation citizens have the right of free movement, and can choose to live anywhere. Though some children are certainly born in colonies with no choice, in Voyager and TNG we get a clear picture that most of the "rugged colonists" are choosing that lifestyle freely. That hardly constitutes a hierarchy.
This is getting into theory, but post-scarcity is incompatible with capitalism. Capitalism demands need so it creates it. The Ferengi are similarly technologically advanced to the federation, and yet they suffer huge inequalities and apparent scarcity. The difference is that their economy is organized to generate profit.
We don't see any corporations in TNG, every major product seems to be created in a centrally managed economy. There are no private sales of industrial replicators, and the Orien Syndicate is the closest we see to a genuinely capitalist organization working inside the federation. This all suggests to me that, at the absolute least, the federation can be described as post-capitalist.
Maybe the ideal society would be a more thorough mix of communistic and capitalistic.
Say for example, one in which you had the right to buy your own home, but if you couldn't afford one, the government would provide you with public housing for free.
And all human healthcare is provided for, by the government; but if you want a healthcare plan for your pet, you have to buy it yourself.
And rather than having private power companies contracted to the local government, to power towns, the government would have control of the energy grid/power lines, and be responsible for their upkeep. Thus, the government would be free to invest money in renewable energy sources (solar, wind..etc.), because there would be no energy industry lobbyists, because companies like Con Ed and Exxon wouldn't exist.
It seems to work for other countries like Sweden and Germany.
Actually, there is a hint of a corporation in TNG - See "Conspiracy", where Picard meets his friend Walker Keel etc. on a planet supposedly owned by the "Dytallix Mining Corporation" or something like that. Is this a federation planet? We don't know, I don't think, but if Starfleet officers can just beam down, seems plausible.
The Illuminaughty -- most humans were farmers trying not to starve until the very end of the 19th century. That's a very easy metric. If you ate this week, you're better off than the Pattersons.
And some people were just raised to think poverty is a result of bad choices. ESPECIALLY the children of people who managed to lift thrmselves out of poverty. Never mind that "lift yourself up by the bootstraps" was invented as an expression to show the _effective impossibility_ for what it is.
I find the people that feel the need to measure their success against others the single most irksome.
I get someone wanting a private jet, huge mansion, expensive cars and so on just because they enjoy such things.
But the people that want all these things for the sole purpose of rubbing it in other people's faces how much more they have than others are just assholes, IMO.
I wish that in particular was something we could outgrow as a species.
The need to look down on others to make yourself feel better, and the need to 'compete' in destructive ways to make that happen.
There's plenty of research already about how wealth inequality is inherently bad for the wellbeing of societies, regardless of how wealthy the country is as a whole.
Something to keep in mind for sure.
More wealth inequality correlates to a lot of bad things.
That's not to say it needs to go as far as everyone having exactly the same level of wealth...
But a society where the wealthiest are about 25 times as wealthy as the poorest is a much healthier one than many countries right now where it's more like 400 times...
@@cheshirekat3050 Private ownership of the means of production is necessarily exploitative. Even if you could preserve a social democratic balance in perpetuity without exploiting other nations, paying workers less than the value they produce from within non-democratic hierarchies is unjustifiable on any scale.
At the end of the day it doesn't really matter how the economics of Star Trek "work." What matters is that Star Trek reminds us that the way we organize our world isn't the only way we could do so.
This steps on your point, but it can't be said enough.
One of the better suggestions I've seen for the Federation economy is that there is in a certain sense "money" but it's not something a Federation citizen ever has to really think about. Due to the material and productivity surplus, all people are assigned a kind of invisible stipend. Computers keep track of the data, and it is almost never necessary for an individual to ask for their account balance. Nobody could realistically "spend" it all living as a normal human being.
If, however, somebody went and asked to be given their own personal starship, the system would suddenly balk at the amount of materials and resources required to build it for one person's property and they would be told "ha ha... no." However, someone who wanted to "own" a smaller personal ship for example, could "co-finance" it by agreeing to operate the ship as part of a bigger initiative. Such as providing transportation for students and scientists from an institute or university. The system might calculate a five year tour would balance the books for creation of a ship, and after that, the "owner" / captain would be free to use the ship for whatever.
The thing is, a standard Federation Credit, backed by gold-pressed latinum does exist, and I tend to imagine this credit is what a person can draw upon if they ever need to trade "money" in unusual circumstances. We've seen on-screen that when people do have a personal supply of GP Latinum credits, they treat them a little preciously - as if they do not have an unlimited supply on hand. Probably, they can draw an certain amount of them from that hidden account balance over a period of time.
Finally, engaging in activities that directly create more prosperity for the Federation might entitle someone to a larger allowance within the system. But people would be socially conditioned to not view it as "wealth". Their basic needs as a human being are already met automatically, and having more credits doesn't increase their influence in society, or their social standing. It is effectively play money for them to go have some fun with.
I dont know how Star Trek economics work - but I know I absolutely love it in ST IV when Gillian tells Kirk "Let me guess - they dont use money in the 24th century" as she gets the check for the pizza. Every time.
'It's true!", says Kirk 😂
In the original series episode "The Trouble with Tribbles" when Chekhov & Uhura come to the station to "shop" , there is a mention of how much a tribble costs. The "currency" mentioned are credits and neither Chekhov or Uhura seemed to be carrying any kind of wallet. I saw it as a kind of Federation credit/debit system where all transactions are numbers on a computer.
THX1138 come to mind. When Star trek first aired what we now know as the Visa Card, Bankamericard had just been introduced or was about to, haven't at this looked it up or watched the whole video, but by the first Star trek would cash and coin be obsolete? We now have credit cards, debit cards, bit coin, smart phones etc. Soon there will be no need for cash and coin once people get used to not having to have it. The one real bitch about all of this is collecting things like stamps, coins, toys, models, on and on, etc. etc. Like say match books are they still around? Oh of a bye gone era?
"Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
"
Carl Sagan
Oh, yeah, right, Dr. Sagan. And if that help does arrive, our rescuers will probably want something in exchange: water, food, air, metals/ores/gems, etc. Don't believe me? Try watching the Twilight Zone episode "To Serve Man", the 1983 and 1985 sci-fi miniseries "V" and "V: The Final Battle", and the 60s movie "Soylent Green." In every one of these shows and movies, our helpers wanted our freshwater and food in the form of humans.
My biggest wish for a Star Trek series is one about how the reconstruction periods after WWIII and after the Earth/Romulan War play out. My basic idea is that an historian consults the newly formed UFP, allowing for a way for the two periods to interact, not in a literal way, but in a storytelling format. But the important thing would be that we'd need regular people as characters so that we see how the decisions made by the powerful affect them.
In other words, I want civilian Trek.
A big part of such a show would be an analysis of the economics of a United Earth and of the United Federation of Planets.
This was fascinating! My husband and I have had many discussions on how the economy would work so I really enjoyed this! I agree about what Quark said, he might have just have a few blind spots about Ferengi culture and history. They’re definitely extremely misogynistic; by law women aren’t allowed to own property, participate in trade, talk to strangers, travel, or wear clothes. Quark even points out in the episode “Ménage à Troi,” “If Ferengi women can wear clothes in public, then they can leave their homes. If they can leave their homes, they can go to work. If they can go to work, they can make profit.” So, yeah, they don’t exactly treat all of their people equally. I’m not saying this kind of misogyny is equivalent to slavery, it’s definitely not. There does seem to be the suggestion of the ownership of women however, because in that same episode a Ferengi tries to actually purchase Lwaxana Troi and then kidnaps her when he learns she’s not for sale and she rejects him.
One of my favorite callback was in a TNG novel where the unfrozen formerly Rich Guy Ralph turns up again.....as the Ambassador to the Ferengi.
I've always figured that they had a cashless economy when they said 'we don't use money'' and people had a basic living allowance which they can augment by work or creating art etc.
You mean like the concept of UBI (Universal Basic Income) ?
AKA money
Soooo... favor & clout as currency.
@@JoannaHammond That's likely how it will start; however, Star Trek combines automation and 3d printing technologies into their "replicators" allowing scarcity to become a foreign concept. I tend to think Star Trek is Post Scarcity as no one person has any need to go hungrey. The concept of Post Scarcity is something that is usually reserved for Science Fiction, but Issac Arthur does a lot of serious discussion on the topic.
@Gabriel Clark No it's not a currency it's a coupon that would directly correlate to goods that are held under price controls so that can't inflate/deflate the "price".
"Kirk is an oblivious dipshit" is always a good first working hypothesis. It set up most of the action in Kirk's decisions in military engagements during ST:TOS. His victories just aren't based on military axioms, most of the time. "Wrath of Khan" is the first part of the franchise in which military axioms are respected at all. Those of us who sat through college ROTC re-watched ST:TOS and screamed at the tube "GOD, KIRK, WHO'D YOU HUMP TO GET A STARSHIP COMMAND?"
Lighten up, its just good entertainment. If every little detail were exact then nobody would want to watch this stuff. In fact, that is just the problem with modern TV & movies - they try to be TOO real.
Let me put it this way:
Suppose you go back to Roman times. And the Romans ask you "what, you don't have slaves in your century?" And you say "Well we don't". And the Romans say "Who do you get to till the fields?" And you reply: "We have machines for that."
That's basically what the ST 24th century is to us. It doesn't mean they don't have scarcity, don't have desires and need for limited goods and services, and don't have currency, it means they don't need to pay for them because technology has rendered those industries unprofitable. They are deontologists -- they work to better themselves and improve their lives, not for money or material comfort because those comforts are already taken care of. That doesn't mean ALL the things are taken care of, just the basic necessities (ie: the first two levels of Maslow's Hierarchy).
Sex, love, social acceptance, search for answers to the unknown. Historical driving points not based on Survival needs... well sex is a survival need for our species not the individual though.
And when you have a magic "Anything you want" machine like a Replicator, the concept of material wealth kind of loses its meaning, or at least changes.
@Liz Lee I don't see how the technology would stop evolving if we don't have scarcity. For one we will always have the aficionados who will try to make things better, faster and more efficiently. Or simply make things in new ways, more healthy, more artistic, more fun etc.
Besides that, we'll always have something to accomplish in science and engineering, some boundary to overcome. Like fast space travel, terraforming, teleportation and molecular constructs, to name a few Star Trek technologies. And our history shows that we always come-up with useful ideas to day-to-day life while we try to expand our knowledge and abilities. I think that creativity and ingenuity are a big part of humanity, and we don't need any special drive to make that function well.
But I do agree, that the transition will be rough to some people. My guess is that we should just endure it, it's for a VERY good reason.
An interesting and well-thought out observation.
"Suppose you go back to Roman times. And the Romans ask you "what, you don't have slaves in your century?" And you say "Well we don't". And the Romans say "Who do you get to till the fields?" And you reply: "We have machines for that.""
Well, I mean first of all the Romans didn't use slave labor exclusively to do menial labor. There were plenty of regular Roman citizens that fell in the lower classes and performed laborer jobs.
"They are deontologists -- they work to better themselves and improve their lives, not for money or material comfort because those comforts are already taken care of. "
That simply isn't realistic. People that work for that sake, exist now, but they are rare individuals. i.e. look at CEOs etc. that work till they die when they could have retired rich decades ago. The thing is, this is largely why they are rich, they had the drive and passion to work in their profession to the point they still did it when they didn't need to. Most people are worker bees and work because it is a necessity to survival and making a more comfortable life for themselves. I mean take me for example, I like what I do, I am good at it and make a good living at it, but I'll be damned if I wouldn't retire to a beach drinkin mai tais for the rest of my life if I won the lottery tomorrow, almost every decision I've made for my livelihood has been to get a more comfortable living. While I like what I do its stressful at times, if I could just choose to maintain my lifestyle and no longer have to deal with that I would in a heart beat.
I love the idea that in the 23rd century, people just mill aimlessly about in traffic so it’s literally impossible to predict how long a motor-powered trip will take unless your car can suddenly lunge up into the air in order to avoid people - but also mostly runs along the ground because Kirk didn’t think twice before stepping in front of it.
I wonder how far into 24th century it was before the majority of people traveled by transporter. _Picard_ showed that it was the primary method of commuting, and of course, _Discovery_ showed that by the 32nd, people would rather transport than use a _turbolift._
I always figured that federation "money" is whatever energy used by replicators... Hence Voyager's "replicator rations"
One of the common complaints from right-leaning Star Trek fans is "but why would anyone CHOOSE to work? What's in it for them?" Aside from the answers you give - social responsibility, a sense of mission and purpose - there's another motivator that is present and operating right now in the real world as we speak, and the one thing that will *always* be scarce, even in a post-scarcity economy: the attention and esteem of others.
Consider the situation of a chemist or other scientist working for some huge corporation. Sure, they get paid to do work, but in many cases, if you invent a new polymer for Dow Chemical or a new drug patent for a pharmaceutical company, you don't own the thing you invented: the company does. They might generously decide to pay you more or give you shares of stock, but it's a far cry from the remuneration you'd get as the actual owner of the patent. So why do it? Why not just punch the clock and do barely enough to not get fired?
The answer is credit. If you make a major discovery, you get to publish a paper. You get the attention, the esteem of your colleagues, the prestigious seat at a college. You get the Nobel - you, the person, not Bell Labs or Dow or IBM or whatever. Maybe you go down in history.
So when someone asks "why doesn't everyone in Star Trek just sit around eating replicated sundaes and jerking off in the holodeck?" the answer is...some people probably do! Maybe a lot of people do! But you don't get respect for that. You don't stand out from the crowd for that. Whereas, if you learn to cook really well like Sisko's dad, suddenly people notice. You've got famous, important, good-looking people lining up to try your food, and maybe they've got something *you* want in turn.
Like maybe you want a good haircut for your date; you can get an ok haircut from the holodeck but Dante the hairdresser is an *artiste* with a waiting list. But maybe he'll bump you to the top of the list if you make him some of your fancy food?
We see that in Star Trek already. Prestigious artists, academics, scientists, etc seem to get attention and privileges; unique works are treasured. Nobody needs to be an artist, scientist, etc to *survive*, but there are rewards for doing your job well and participating in society that lazy holodeck jerkoff guy doesn't get to have.
I'll just get a holodeck program where everyone treats me like a genius and showers me with praise, after jerking off, of course.
Well reasoned. It's also how I happen to view the Trek existence. It's worth making the effort to rise in the hierarchy in order to gain scarcer items or just the favour of your fellows. There's no need for a placeholder currency when there's a central computer access to a virtual "who's who" updating in real time. Just as material falsehoods become meaningless with virtually all public incidents being observed. There is little to no motivation for disputes over fact.
I know this is an old comment on an old video but I'd like to add that some people just want to work. my own mother doesnt need to work, my father makes enough but she gets a job because she just gets bored at home and she likes doing things. how people ask "why do people work in trek" and dont realise some people just want to is a little nuts
My guess is that the Ferengi never did slavery... But did a hell of a lot of 'indentured servitude' which is totes not slavery, nope, nosiree.
It's basically a pedantic technicality, but consider slaves have no money to pay for goods verses the ability to open up a big line of credit on those trapped in debt.
Kameth My biggest issue with that speech was that, like Star Trek writers, it completely ignores the status of female Ferengi.
Half the population are essentially non-people, not allowed to own property or even wear clothing. You can’t tell me Ferengi women aren’t trafficked and traded as possessions of Ferengi men.
@@ADavidJohnson Actually, I think there's canon for that example. It's mentioned in DS9 Ron entered a marriage contract (I think for the specific purpose of having a child, but that might be me misremembering) then falling in love, getting screwed over by his father in law when he went to extend the contract, leading to him being broke and working for Quark. In this case, it's clear that this woman was being traded as a commodity.
Maybe Quark thinks they never did slavery as they never did it to *male* Ferengi, as he views female Ferengi as commodities and not applicable to be slaves?
Or the writers forgot / didn't know / ignored that inconvenient bit. Or Quark might be exaggerating a bit to dig at Sisko.
@Steve Shives - A progressive topic you could look at would be how Star Fleet considered data property and wanted to disassemble and study him.
With AI advancing by the moment we may have a fleet of Data's soon and they will do all the work we need except where a human needs to be involved for nuance. Need to build a structure or maintain the land, well your android(s) will do that for you. But with these android(s) being so advanced I could see them wanting something in return as well.
Thar is one of my favorite episodes, a life like android created by Dr. Soong. A being so advanced that still could not be remade no matter how advanced Starfleet has gotten.
@@JQB45
They'll want Respect.
@@JQB45
Replicants were used off-world as slave labor in the hazardous exploration and colonization of other planets. After a bloody mutiny by a Nexus-6 combat team......
A bunch of Lores.
@Jeff C
"Data".
Nice vid-really interesting. As a human female, I’m looking forward to the next one as well, having had conflicted feelings about the franchise’s treatment of women over the decades (and not, as Nomad said of Uhura, because I am “a mass of conflicting impulses”, but because the show itself vacillates between treating men and women as equals and the kind of wife-joke attitude that Nomad had).
I know this is an old video, and you probably won't read this, but I'm so glad I got out of that Anti-SJW pipeline around gamergate. Obviously I am now unironically a trans fem communist, and it took me quite a lot of time to warm up to you as a person again, since you were one of the more prominent targets for Anti-SJWs...
Well, all I want to say is that I really glad I grew as a person to a point at which I can enjoy you and the content you produce :3
federation society is built on cooperation not competition. They don't build their society on the idea of winners and loser. They see that as childish.
Humanity has only NOT been a monarchy for 200 years or so. In many ways we're still hanging on to that system. We're still hanging on to the concept of masters and servants.
@Lawofimprobability I'm no specialist, but either both designs are equally good, in which case it's probably whichever comes first, or they're not equally good or just differently performing, the most efficient for the particular purpose is used, right?
>federation society is built on cooperation not competition
What is Starfleet Academy?
This true in our world today. Those who believe they lose due to others winning is why they do not.
Is evolution "childish"? What if I told you that competition can result in everyone ultimately winning, because sometimes the best ideas are only arrived at through a competitive process. There's clearly room for cooperation as well, but while I can see the value from both approaches, some more narrow minded people reject competition, dismissing it as simply "winners and losers"
11:30 "Why only two (industrial replicators for Bajor)?" When you replicate (create) matter, you need a LOT of energy to do that.. It's reasonable to assume that two industrial replicators are all the Bajoran energy budget (renewable energy capture, nuclear energy, etc) could support. Creation of mass requrires huge energy to be used in its creation (a little under a gram's worth of uranium converted to nuclear energy destroyed Hiroshima).
The flaw with this argument is why not just gift them some power generators as well?
@@JK50with10 Perhaps Federation generators aren't compatible with the bajoran power grid, but then, they could simply run just the Federation industrial replicators on them. Perhaps Industrial replicators or Federation generators can't be replicated themselves, or perhaps they use an energy source that is limited.
We could assume the generators would work on the same principle as their warp reactors, so they require antimatter and dilithium crystals. The crystals are a limited resource and producing or collecting antimatter in needed quantities might be outside the abilities of the post-occupation bajoran industry.
Another explanation: It only takes two to generate the infrastructure to build more.
@@HappyBeezerStudios Why would you need the Federation generators connected to the Bajoran grid, only just to the Federation Industrial Replicators. They could then create anything they need, even convertors between the two systems
Maybe they only needed 2 industrial replicators... I'm sure those are mainly for huge items... It said nothing of the number of smaller food, etc. Replicators provided
In terms of ownership, Steve, let's not confuse private property with personal property. A house (and a toothbrush!) would be considered personal property. Private property, in communist parlance, means industry and profit-making property. Just a bit of clarification. Thanks for the video, and for reading! :D
That vineyard sort of toes the line, and so would distilleries which definitely are also around pumping out genuine Scotch Whisky, given dialogue.
Like I think it can be looked at as people who love the craft operating on a small scale.. like someone who loves farming and whisky being like "I'm going to help my friend by growing barley for them to malt", all the way up, as a passion project. As in, the Federation wouldn't really do franchise alcohol artisanship anymore. But then of course the Kelvin films went and had Glenfiddich and stuff which is a bit hrmmm.
But I've seen plenty of arguments around saying like, people think Robert Picard was petit-bourgeois and that the Federation isn't ideologically pure as a result of even keeping things like that vineyard around through the economic transition,
Like I personally think if you're on the track meeting Vulcans put humanity on, there's very little harm by keeping local history and character alive, if there's no one being forced to do farm work anymore then who cares if they might've been run unethically a century ago, what would we even gain by trying and make a blank slate
But I definitely know a bunch of people who would prefer to get rid of everything like that.. completely demolish castles once belonging to long-gone royalty, and so forth. And sometimes I can understand where they're coming from but at the same time... nothing made me appreciate how much more peaceful the modern day was for me at like six years old than visiting a preserved historical site and seeing things like "here's where they'd execute the homeless children for stealing bread" yk? Like recognising the past and holding onto the importance does not prevent progressing beyond that past, I'd say. Personally.
This got long fast ahah, I'll leave this ramble.. there..
I think part of the thinking of Robert being petit-bourgeois is that obviously everyone who wants one can't have a historical French vineyard, and we're told very clearly that this was property that was transferred as inheritance, which I think gives some credence to a notion of "wealth" that goes beyond the social capital we're led to believe is the main differentiator of people in Trek's world. That generational wealth replicates a condition we see under capitalism, but as someone else has pointed out capitalism in any recognizable form is incompatible with post-scarcity.
There is no such difference. Almost any personal property (a bike, an apartment) can make profit by renting it. Or everyone can have one if they want, without any effort on their part -> then no renting.
But then you will face the fact that biological creatures without scarcity of food can grow exponentially in a limited space.
@@Sam-lr9oi Inheritance doesn't necessarily restrict to family. It is possible to inherit a business by being the most likely successor to carry it on. So if the family was working the land, as long as they continued to do so they would have it. If none of the family were interested, they likely would have seen if someone else wanted to apprentice to become the successor. If neither of those options were successful the land would then be reclaimed and redistributed for another use.
I think you explained this really well.I was always kind of confused.It's funny because before Star Trek IV,You have McCoy chartering a spaceflight in Star Trek III and saying he had the money for it. Then in the original series you had Uhura asking how much a tribble cost and the seller talked about how many credits it cost. Thanks for this deep dive.
That speech you give that ends at 19:30, That should be made into a short. The part that's like "imagine a world where your basic needs are met...." That's a good, emotional speech
There is a currency in Star trek. It is simply your quality of living. If you are best at your job you get a better rank and home. Federation planets may keep their own money system. Federation credits exist as a intermediary currency think 1K/10K/100K federal bank notes. In a post scarcity society these things are all possible. Most of it is Beta sources.
I have 2 college credits in Star Trek. 1. Class based on Economics of Star trek . 2. The Physics of Star Trek.
This is what I think as well. I'd also posit that menial jobs are better compensated than more enjoyable ones as well
George Parkins -- Money has 2 main uses: As a medium of exchange, and as a store of value.
Since Replicators make all elements worh the same, pretty much the only value left is sentiment and novelty. Neither of which is all that transferable. Think of pirated movie torrents - but for EVERYTHING. Up to and including PEOPLE.
Kind of reminds me of "the rifleman's creed" and the old joke about "the family axe."
And if money is no longer a commodity, it's only an in insturment of measurement. And the people who try to hoard "all the centimeters" are considered mentally ill.
On his YT channel, Isaac Arthur has discussed post scarcity civilizations(Future.).
Your reputation clearly still matters. That much is certain.
And you could interpret that as a form of 'currency' in some ways.
In fact, at times I try and think up ways of making a space sim game in a non-capitalist context with no obvious 'currency', and reputation is the main stand-in I can think of to make that work at all as a game. Granted the genre in question, based around games like Elite, the X series, Freelancer, etc - is largely built around trading and buying new stuff, so that's part of the problem - creating an economic simulation while removing some of the core elements of such a simulation is tricky, it turns out. XD
Another that occurred to me, for slightly different reasons...
What would you use as a currency in a world where technology similar to replicators exists?
And I thought... Energy.
Some resources would still have value in certain contexts because of the amount of energy involved.
If you have fusion reactors, Hydrogen has value by definition since it's what gets converted to energy.
If you have solar... Assuming energy is something that can be transported from place to place (think the most amazing battery tech ever), then the power generation is nearly free, but the moving it from place to place costs energy (since starships use energy to function)
Replicators use energy, thus the 'cost' of a replicated item is in terms of the energy used.
Replicator feed stock might be formulated to reduce the energy costs of replicating common items (secondary sources for Star Trek suggest this to be the case, while suggesting that 1. You cannot directly turn energy into matter with a replicator and 2. That 'transmutation' of elements is very expensive compared to rearranging atoms and molecules.)
It follows naturally that an efficient method of creating this feed stock has some kind of value too.
In fact, if the energy costs for replication are high enough, then making things using traditional manufacturing methods would also have value, as long as the item in question doesn't have to be transported too far. (since moving it around costs energy).
If traditional manufacturing + transport has a lower total energy cost than replicating an object onsite...
Then again, you can define a relative 'cost' of these manufactured items purely in terms of energy...
Thus, energy can easily become a defacto currency in a post scarcity society, assuming there are still some functional constraints. (eg it's not truly post-scarcity in the sense of having truly unlimited resources.)
Then again, relative to how much energy any given person could trivially access, many items probably have 'costs' so low they could near enough be regarded as 'free'...
@@KuraIthys Careful. If such a society puts too much value on reputation and social acceptance and possibly a few corrupt individuals in government push the system the right way. You could have something similar to The Orville S01E07 Majority Rule.
I have to say, this was the most hopeful, positive, optimistic video of yours I've seen. You do more than analyze Star Trek, but you apply the lessons of Star Trek directly to ourselves, and you do so with a twinkle of possibility in your eye. Yes, yes we *can* and that is what the message of Star Trek has always been. It's always been a metaphor for what we *can* become if we just choose to.
So thanks.
Something to add is that the Ferengi government might officially say that they never had any slavery and hid all evidence of it. This would mean that Quark is just continuing this lie as something that he believes in, or to just protect the view that people have of the Ferengi Alliance, knowing that it wasn't the truth and that Sisko didn't know any better. A third possibility is that the Ferengi define slavery in a different way. For example, a Ferengi master might have ‘paid’ you for your work by giving you food, and if you didn't want to work, you simply wouldn't get any food. We might see that as slavery, but they may not have. Besides, slavery is when you legally own an individual. If you just preyed on the desperation of the poor and ‘employed’ poor people and paid them food, you wouldn't need to pay a certain amount of money to buy someone, you would just pay for their food, which is a cost that you would have to cover if you owned the person anyway. In effect, you would have a system that eliminates the need for slavery, but it's just as bad.
I might be wrong but female ferengk were basically second class citizens or slaves
The Ferengi are rarely shown to be especially violent so logically would not have enacted slavery which requires the violent oppression of others. The Klingons of course are violent, yes, but would plausibly find slavery too dishonorable and cowardly to do.
Or they debt trapped people, so they never technically were slaves. Most of the slaves up until the massive colonial era were actually this type of slave. It's called an indentured servant, and is mentioned in Bible.
The Ferengi probably was referring to Chatel slavery.
@@horatio8213 I'm not convinced female ferengi were not slaves. They were forbidden from conducting business. Yet, when Quark talks to Rom about his ex-wife, he says that Rom entered into a standard marriage contract because Rom wanted to have a child (Nog). So who did Rom enter into a contract with if female ferengi cannot make business contracts? Rom entered into a contract with his wife's father. Female ferengi were forbidden to wear clothes or go shopping, which I'm presuming meant go outside. So. They were traded in contracts that they had no legal say in, had their movements restricted, and presumably were required to take care of all the domestic labor. Sounds like a slave to me. They may have certain rights/protections, but that's a slave.
"If you just preyed on the desperation of the poor and ‘employed’ poor people and paid them food, you wouldn't need to pay a certain amount of money to buy someone, you would just pay for their food, which is a cost that you would have to cover if you owned the person anyway"
This is reality currently
That last bit about the separation of those priorities was so true and awesome
Thanks for the video!
The Ferengi most certainly did have slavery. They enslaved an entire gender.
Quark was totally pulling Benjamin's leg and you fell for it too, hoo-man.
Perhaps, but human slavery has never been purely financial. It has _always_ had an aspect of social dominance to it, so baring the treatment of women (and I don't recall enough to be certain on that), the Ferengi version could have been, for similarly social reasons, so alien to us that we ourselves wouldn't consider it slavery... even if it arguably is. If the government places a levy or tax on your income then we don't call it slavery, because the only restriction is on your income; nor do we call it selling a slave when a bank sells the loan they made to you to another bank, despite the fact that they sold the right to profit from the sweat of your brow. Depending on the course of Ferengi history, it's possible that more advanced financial systems _pre-empted_ systematic slavery, rendering the existence of labor-slavery among the Frengi unrecognizable... after all, if a Ferengi could make a case that following their "owner's" orders would reduce profits, then that _could_ conceivably have been enough for a Ferengi court to bar the owner from exercising any authority over the purported slave: depending on the details, Ferengi may have learned of slavery not from their own hyper-commercial behaviors, but instead from the less profit-based behaviors of aliens.
I'm so happy you can read!!! (Wish I could) lol jk
I know people think you are joking but man I've had to take 2 economics courses in college and saying that it's hard to read those text books is an understatement. I don't think Steve gives himself enough credit for being really smart.
One thing that I think contributes to the confusion about the economics of Trek come down to some people being hyperliteral. I mean, there are a lot of phrases in just the English language whose origins stem from things that went obsolete before our great-grandparents were zygotes, so it's not too much of a stretch to imagine that phrases that include money in them would remain in common usage even after money itself wasn't. I mean heck, even NOW there are people who will use the phrase "that's above my paygrade" to refer to things that actually have nothing to do with their actual job. We still say "we have that on tape" when talking about RUclips clips, or "you sound like a broken record" when vinyl has been gone long enough to have made a comeback. And on top of that, since most "future slang" and metaphors writers come up sound stupid anyway, just having the characters use phrases we already now, like "burning the midnight oil" for a non-money based example just makes sense from the script writing perspective.
I believe it just refers to the death of the petro dollar backed economics when cheap energy (fusion power) became common place.
Or it could just be that the writers simply didn't put much thought on the federation as a whole when they were focused on writing each episode.
To me, the most fascinating STDS9 episode about trade is "It's in the cards."
See also: "Treachery, Faith and the Great River," which foreshadowed brilliantly how Ferengi ideals could evolve to align with those of the Federation.
Been watching this channel for awhile. Some of your episodes have made me misty eyed before. The way you articulated your admiration of this vision of harmony brought me to real tears. Couldn't tell you if this is your best episode, but it's my current favorite.
Alternative explanation to the Ferengi slave statement:
The education system is also privatised. So no need to teach these unconvinient chapters in their history. After all, Quark is just stating what he knows.
Elbrasch -- Quark WAS pretty resistant to Nog going to school until it was phrased in terms of investment.
It's also mentioned in the 'Enterprise' episode 'Acquisition' that the Ferengi do trade slaves.
@@CaptainAndy Which probably puts them akin to the Romans where it was illegal to own a Roman citizen as a slave but you could buy an sell slaves who were not Romans.
@@Z1gguratVert1go in civilised countries, the government takes you to court for non-payment of taxes, rather than sensing armed goons to evict or kill you.
We should privatize the education system as much as possible. Privatization almost always results in better goods and services at a lower costs.
1:10 Bernie Sanders is now confirmed to also be a time traveler.
I was like 🤣🤣🤣 he looks like em
Oh, yeah, right. I guess he pressed forward for free college education and free medical care for everybody while in the past. I wonder whether he also made sure that the US became bankrupt because it couldn't afford to pay for universal college education and healthcare.
That picture of gowron holding that knife as your symbol for the kilingon empire killed me.
Until people can answer "Why should I give you a place to live if you haven't earned it" with an answer of Because you need it, and it allows you to flourish and prosper and benefit society as a whole we will still be very far away from a post-scarcity economy. Just like Wars make no sense if you do not need to control the physical land and the people that live there for your own gain but rather believe that thier goods and services that are produced in the place can be shared with you to meet your needs.
I always got the impression that the Federation saw trade as primarily a diplomatic action. It can be hard to convince some cultures they've just met that they have much to offer of value, so they start things out by offering trade agreements.
Their goods are typically of high quality, and they don't need to turn a profit, so they can afford to offer incredibly low prices, so trade agreements with the federation are seen as quite desirable.
If you had instead asked about the economics of Star Trek Online, I would say that's easy. Gambling and more gambling.
MrMeepzor -- considering how almost every version since TNG shows Starfleet officers engaging in some form of gambling, it makes sense. If your basic needs are met whether you work or not, gambling is a pretty good way to accumulate "favours", make social connections, and aquire other non-monetary forms of "wealth".
ESPECIALLY since no stakes short of life and death amount to more than playing for poker chips.
Star trek might be set in a post scarcity future. But star trek online is run by a profit seeking corporation.
@@Grizabeebles I believe in Voyager the crew trade holodeck timeslots, but Voyager's an unusual case where they have a lot more scarcity than most ships. Hence bartering with aliens just to survive. I wonder if the Maquis used currency?
Lol Starfleet captains and civilians operate on different economies.
um the feds energy credit is a representation of how much energy they can use use on star ships for using the replicators and holo decks and such... Not money but a needed ration for day to day use of the ships facility.. Mostly learned this from Voyager, and StarTrek online.
its is money if it works equilent like cigars in prison
I think that's a really excellent point at 18:21. If basic human needs were simply covered, then what would motivate human beings? Sure, there would be a lot of humans who would simply exist, whiling away their lives in relative comfort, maybe just exploring their own planet and not much else. But the reality is, as soon as anyone in that kind of environment tried to do the least thing to pass the time and escape boredom, they would -- wait for it -- IMPROVE THEMSELVES. Once that ball starts rolling, and one realizes that -- perish the thought -- that's ALL YOU HAVE TO LOOK FORWARD TO IN LIFE, it actually sounds like a pretty awesome deal.
Don't struggle for basic needs, just spend your time trying to find ways to make yourself smarter, healthier, more sociable, more open to experience or history. Because hey, the pursuit of money/power/fame is an empty, vapid one.
Sounds a lot like the Star Trek fantasy at that point, don'cha think?
Unfortunately, yeah, for that to have any bearing on our reality, some horrible cataclysm is pretty much required. Ugh.
I agree with you mostly, but I think we can skip the catastrophe. Martin Luther changed the world with just a list of 95 critiques of the church. We just need another Martin Luther, well, a third one. I'm already working on my list.
Federation Economics is based on Tourism. Freedom of Travel = Personal Wealth. Star Fleet is not the only game in town. Trek Lore constantly refers to ships (merchant freighters and cruise ships) existing out side Star Fleet control as well as a number of Private Yachts.
Well, Star Trek had the horrible cataclysm in the Third World War, combined with the Eugenics Wars.
In Star Trek Online there's a currency called Energy Credits that are used by players for buying stuff, which could be what the Federation Credit is.
that is true but in that sense its used as a currency in a game world ...but they never once in any mission or bit of lore explain where the EC comes from.
@@remirez2k3 Could they be more of a blackmarket currency like bitcoin is being used today?
@@remirez2k3 They did explain it. The Energy Credit value of an object is equivalent to the energy you need to create it in a replicator. So basically creating something in a replicator isn't free, it consumes energy. And in order to ration energy, you need a measurement, hence the EC.
It makes me think of how some arcades would have days when you'd go in, and it would be "free" but each person gets a certain number of credits to use as they please, as time and energy isn't necessarily infinite. Or how when you go to an event like a company dinner or wedding, often times you'll have drink tickets which function as a credit for getting something at the bar. It's free to you, but those in charge worked out an agreement with the bar service to provide that. I have a feeling that Starfleet would have something similar, where they make some kind of agreement or trade to provide their people with credits, while providing something in the background, even if that's not a physical thing, like planetary defence, or ensuring safety of spacecraft from that planet. I'd imagine there'd be a lot of stuff like that where a planet will give out free meals to crew in exchange for their safety against whatever group happens to be a threat.
Not sure what brought me to this video, but I'm glad it did. Very well done, something I've wondered on and off about for a while. All the best.
This is why I love star trek. It teaches us that we can even better and gives us a vision of what that could be. Great video. Again.
At least until Star Trek Discovery anyway. Then the philosophy takes a back seat to the action.
Star trek is real! You're not real. You're not my real dad!
Now I'm going to go sob in my room clutching my Picard plushy and sobbing while rocking back and forth.
You hit on a very important fact of the current era we live in: we already posess the technology and infrastructure required to begin the transtion into some kind of post-scarcity economy. The majority of functional scarcity that exists in the world today is manufactured scarcity. Our governments, however have been enacting policies that promote false scarcity and enact forced income redistribution. The government will send police to arrest, detain, and imprison poor and middle-class individuals if they do not fulfil their legal obligation to give hundreds or thousands of dollars of their income to the wealthiest 0.1%. It's called taxpayer-funded corporate welfare (which includes bail-outs, corporate subsidies, and other so-called "economic stimulus programs" that just take money from poor people and give it to rich people), and it is the largest single use of taxes in most capatalist countries (especially seeing how a HUGE chunk of defense spending is actually just corporate welfare for private defense contractors).
prophetisaiah08 -- the problem is war. Same as it's always been.
Any group that comes together to TAKE stuff can only be opppsed by an even larger comparatively-armed group. And whoever controls the largest military can pretty much do whatever they want. The U.S. is currently fighting at least 7 different wars right now to protect it's foreign interests.
If the richest two dozen people on earth didn't WANT it to be this way, all they'd have to do is pull their funding and wait.
And the resources that are most directly analogous to post-scarcity resources are legally restricted, and the legal restrictions seem to get more onerous over time.
Basically the stuff covered by Copyright, patents and other IP law is almost all stuff that is functionally a 'post-scarcity' resource which could be given to everyone for free with little to no consequence except to the people directly responsible for creating the initial works.
(and even then the consequence to the creators is largely a product of them needing other, more directly restricted resources.)
KuraIthys -- To that I say, you just didn't grow up pirating music and video games in the 1990s like I did. I used to be that kid recording songs off the radio with a tape recorder and collecting VHS tapes of my favorite TV shows because nobody in 100 miles was selling personal copies and we couldn't afford it anyway. Once I discovered P2P piracy (look it up) I went digital and haven't looked back since.
These days you can buy your own portable printing press for less than 100 bucks and print any 400 page book for less than $80.
That was UNTHINKABLE well into my teen years.
Now with digital media, it's even faster, easier and cheaper. Streaming only exists because it's more convenient. Books are only profitable because of economies of scale.
In Star Trek, they can do that for ANYTHING MADE OF MATTER. Technically speaking, Tom Riker's EXISTENCE was an act of piracy.
In hindsight, they really should have seen that thing with the Defiant coming...
So what's the incentive for the workers who provide these unlimited resources?
I'm all for a post scarcity civilisation, but economic shifts won't get us there, technological ones will. People still have to work. They still have to mine ores, farm crops, produce goods, learn the sciences, and put hard work and effort into bringing these resources to those who need them.
The problem with removing money and wealth, is how do you create a system that is fair for everyone? Sure everyone can work for free and be provided with a free home, free utilities and free food and some luxuries, but how do you determine what is a more valuable luxury and who to give them to? Should someone who works at a fast food restaurant be afforded the same luxuries as a scientist? Or a police officer? Or a firefighter? If so, why?
Money was created to solve the problem of bartering, to solve the problem of relative worth and value inequality. You could barter 3 chickens for 3 hours of work, but those 3 chickens might not be the same as the next 3 chickens given to someone else. How do you determine which items are equally as valuable as other items? Is 20m of rope the same as 2 packets of seeds? Is a set of handcrafted silverware as valuable as 5 hours of work and a handful of wax?
Money solves that by making transactions precise and fair. This item is worth 5 coins, 1 hour of work earns 30 coins, etc.
It's how money is earned that is the problem, income inequality is the problem. Not money.
@@cadkls You immediately conflate the basics listed with luxuries, so I'm not sure there's much of a reason to respond to begin with...
...let alone you pretending money is intrinsically nice and fair, like every exchange is conducted with perfect information and no coercion (hint: you can't shop around for a doctor when you've been shot)...
...but on the off chance there might be, this isn't some speculation you're dismissing the utopia with... it's a reality that will give is a dystopia unless we address it. Because rather than ask why anyone would work a farming or mining job if they didn't have to, you need to ask what will we do about it when they couldn't if they wanted to. Once a select group of people owning the rights to the automation technology are the only ones in control of essential needs.
Because I'm sure even greater disparity than the heirs of a single family owning more of what there is than 40% of a society is any way sustainable... let's keep going with the model that got us that, shall we?
So why be a doctor or a firefighter? Other than social conscience and self actualisation? There'd still be perks to things others couldn't / won't do (and status is often one of these)... but no one would have to fear for their (or, more usually, children's) well being if they didn't have a role they were a fit for available (and so only be open to exploitation for existence as is now). But when we wouldn't have enough doctors, and people would suffer more! Pish Posh. Prestige, Perks, Pride... not basic necessities.
This has been keeping me up at night for as long as I can remember.
Great video. There is some nuance between private property (means of production) and personal property (a house) in economics. I see the federation as having socialized most private property to almost eliminate scarcity and yet maintains personal property. Vineyards and restaurants are interesting cases but as you point out meals at Sisko’s are not charged for so it seems in the utopian earth that most will have leisure time to pursue passions like cooking and then give away products of labor.
The way I figure the Federation's economy works is actually based on the availability of energy and the amount of energy needed to replicate something, go somewhere and so on. Every citizen is provided a set number of energy credits a month which is more than enough to cover the cost of housing, replicating food and clothing and still leave plenty left to just enjoy life. However while it allows a very comfortable, stress free life it has its limits and if you want to say go to another star for whatever reason you need to a) either have a career where your paid extra energy credits on top of the monthly amount or b) save up your spare credits like mad for a few months (which could mean not using a holodeck for a few weeks or not using a transporter beam to transport yourself to your mates house on the other side of the planet).
This is my thought too. A basic income and then you choose to upgrade or not
You just describe capitalism with UBI
A bit like on Voyager they ration replicator and holodeck use. (Tom even uses it to create a lottery) It still means they have a currency in form of energy.
Perhaps basic needs are "free" and only "luxury goods" need to be paid for. That way in daily life a person doesn't encounter any form of "money", but if they want something special, they have to pay for it.
@@HappyBeezerStudios This was always my preferred headcanon. Most of the time you don't run into money in your daily life in the Federation, so when people say "they don't use money" they mean on the day-to-day.
honestly this is in my personal opinion the most likely situation each person is alloted an amount of EC then if they want to live a more extravagent life they create a job or career of some sort and are alotted another amount of EC to use.
"Star Trek was made up"!!! - I thought it was a documentary! My heart is now empty.
WHAT this isn’t Star Trek, noooooo
This was a beautiful episode man. Really good watch and you really hit it out of the park in the end.
That was just awesome! Been a huge fan for as long as I can remember. Always hope that we as humans can reach farther and build a world like they built in the Star Trek universe. Thanks for this video. Eye opening!
A thought on Quark's statement to Sisko- As Steve says, taken that Ferengi are focused on the profit motive, and worker exploitation is expected, on the flip side in this society the tenacity of the worker to cunningly use their wits to get the best or most lucrative payoff from their wealthier counterparts would naturally be expected as well. So on either side (boss or worker), in Ferengi society it is the nature of the individual to use whatever means to achieve the best deal whether negotiating from a place of strength or bluffing and scamming from a position of weakness. This would be ingrained in the Ferengi societal fabric so much so that a successful Ferengi, whether boss or worker, would even out both sides since each is getting the best deal possible from their position. So much so that it actually turns into a very, very, long chess-game-like journey of getting to a place where the actualization of profits would average out to the equivalent of a mutually beneficial comprise. However since comprise would be seen as weakness, it is not the first move a Ferengi would make, it would only be when it's the last possible resort to maintain a profit. I think the true and real profit for a Ferengi is to be made from alien cultures that are so blinded-side by the Ferengi's finely tuned art of the con that they just get materially wiped out.
Great topic, to quote Kirk 'Scotty, yiu've just earned your pay for the week'
Jacques Fresco has it pretty well surrounded I think. A resource based economy. It sounds very Roddenberry-esque to me.
I was heavily influenced by Star Trek from the 1960’s and even until now. This was terrific, thank you.
The writers did slip up on this point, apparently. In one TNG episode, aliens duplicate Picard while he sleeps and, leaving the duplicate on the Enterprise, haul the original off to be tested. The duplicate tips the aliens' hand by behaving erratically -- at one point buying a round of drinks for his crew in 10 Forward and singing drinking songs with them.
I think the examples of private property dont actually constitute private property, with a possible exception.
The marxist definition of private property (the definition that matters when discussing if the federation is communist) differentiates it from Personal Property (your house, car, toothbrush)
Sisko's restaurant wouldn't be private property either, as it's not operated for a profit. Since sisko doesn't charge for the food, it's essentially a bigger fancier version of cooking dinner for your neighbors.
The picard vineyard is perhaps private property, but if they aren't selling the wine it would again just be personal property.
(PS. If nobody has suggested it, maybe the federation credits are a labor voucher)
Regarding Quark, I think this may be a combination of the unreliable narrator and the fish not seeing the water. Ferengis undoubtedly had systems like slavery (their treatment of women for example). However this is Quark's own society and history, one he is deeply invested in, so he doesn't see the fault or doesn't see it as being as bad as human history. Quark is also fairly privileged, relatively speaking, and hasn't yet been confronted by the darkness in Ferengi society.
I think we see his analog in some folks today who may admit the injustices of the past but can't see today's injustices. Or are apt to point out what they see as barbarism in another culture, and say "the West never did things like that".
It's a missed opportunity that Sisko doesn't call him out, or revisit the conversation later when Quark has experienced more of the downsides of Ferengi culture. But I think when we look back on him now Quark has even more resonance as satire
PRECISELY
But that is still pretty red herringy.
Sisko preaches Federation Values, yet he has no negative qualms of bribing others and playing dirty if he needs too. Despite the fact that those are against federation values.
Both are biased, yet both are right. Only in the nuances do they break down.
I’m surprised you didn’t mention during the part about Quark’s beef with humanity that the Ferengi society is incredibly misogynistic and patriarchal . Ferengi women are treated incredibly unfairly. They are unable to work or attain profit, they can’t express their beliefs or opinions, and they’re not even allowed to wear clothing! Ferengi women are constantly referred to as “females” in a derogatory tone. So that would have been something Sisko could have thrown back in Quark’s face during that little exchange.
I so wish Sisko did now that you meant it.
Which also begs the question why most of the females haven't up and left to the Federation to have careers while the Ferengi men would have to figure out a way to fuck themselves.
DS9 strongly implies that the sexism and misogyny inherent in Ferengi culture exist only because of the belief that it optimizes profit and not because they feel women are inherently inferior life forms. Ishka and Zek are able to transform Ferengi society fairly quickly which likely means one of two things:
A. Ferengi are actually extremely progressive as a whole and were just hiding it due to fear of social pressure.
B. The sexism and misogyny was rooted in a desire to optimize profit which is why it didn't take too much convincing to start change Ferengi society.
My guess is it's the latter. If so, it means Sisko trying to throw that in his face would just get him laughed at considering humans literally used atomic weapons against each other and committed genocide out of pure hatred.
Watching Star Trek as a kid really got me thinking about how things could be better. I think it was a big reason I ended up being a leftist.
I don't think the communist ideal is to get rid of personal property, but to eliminate private control of the stuff necessary for production and the private seizure of the products.
So there's no reason why a person in an ideal communist society shouldn't own where they live (or perhaps the building or house or whatever could be owned collectively) and own their clothes and stuff.
But that person shouldn't own an enterprise where they buy the labor of other people, seize the products of their labor, then pay them the least they can get away with. Ideally the people doing the work would own the business together and decide democratically what to do with the proceeds.
Anyway we can do a whole lot better just using the technology we have today. If we can keep from destroying ourselves, our technology is going to keep making it easier to have abundance for everyone, but we've got to get the political will together to tell the financial elite that they don't get to have everything to themselves.
Your 4th paragraph is interesting. But the problem with anything in any form of government is bureaucracy, consider Bill Gates Mico Soft or Apple Computer the Wright brothers. The bureaucracy would say our main frames work just fine! Or the bureaucracy would say we gave Samuel Perpont Langley, a good Party Member in good standing $50000 in 1890 $💲💲to build our airplane. Would we have building size computer maybe a tad smaller. No personal computers, no internet to much freedom for the masses. Ah no airplane because our good party member couldn't make it work and he was sent to a re-education camp!
Consider a society with an insane level of resource and production relative to today. One way to distribute the plentiful, but still limited resources and production is to give every one a slice of what's available. You can spend this opportunity as you want but you will rarely spend everything since you are credited so much more than you need. As tech improves the amount everyone can "spend" increases.
How do you allocate land?
@@andyrwebman that is a great question! Also one of a kind objects like art, or antiques or fossils.
They don't work for money, but that doesn't mean that they don't work to stand out from or above others. There are still competitive aspects to life and rewards/privileges for certain behaviors or accomplishments. There is still power and authority to be wielded by an individual, otherwise there wouldn't be exclusive positions like Federation President or director of a research institute. Those have rewards and privileges even if money isn't on the table anymore.
I’m surprised you didn’t mention the episode “Times Arrow” of TNG when Samuel Clemens comes on the enterprise and questions Troi in these very topics about the Federation.
I'm a local political candidate in my city. And I can tell you now that I carry everything I learnt from Star Trek with me. I'm a democratic socialist after all in the British Labour Party.
Socialist ideals are what Star Trek promote. It's a miracle it even made it on screen in the US given the Red Scare and general opposition to left wing ideals.
I'd suggest that it's because of shows like Star Trek has kept the flame of social justice and social political ideas alive in a world where right wing and neoliberal obsession with capitalism is failing.
Kirk should be completely comfortable in 1986.... he and Spock spent a couple weeks in 1930 and it was even more primitive.
RIGHT!!!! That always bothered me!
That is a great point! They are veteran time-travelers, though Spock at that time was still a little confused.
But no-one called Kirk a dumbass in the 30s, unless I missed the "Double-Dumbass" moment in the episode said to McCoy for screwing up the timeline.
Also, people drove slower. Car accidents were... almost unheard of. >.>
Yo Steve, please make a short from 21:35 that gives us your talk of what we could change in our soceity. I would like to share that. I think our world need more of that stuff. That is one of the reasons i personally became a Trekkie in the first place.
I do like that in the novels Ralph Offenhouse found his 24th century destiny - he became a key member of the Starfleet Diplomatic Core specializing in negotiations with the Ferengi, and ended up being the Federation’s first permanently stationed ambassador in Ferenginar - as diplomacy on Ferenginar is just representing your government as a broker on the stock exchange.
"A lot has changed in the past three hundred years. People are no longer obsessed with the accumulation of things. We've eliminated hunger, want, the need for possessions. We've grown out of our infancy."
@@laughablelarry9243
Quark's isn't in The Federation. Cisco's Restaurant though. Maybe the wait staff work for the tips. But what would they be.
Compliments?
Fashion advice?
Invitations to parties?
@@alanpennie8013 In the Orville, they say that after they stopped using money, people used reputation as kind of a measurement of wealth, if we could assume the same thing happened in Star Trek, we could assume that those wait staff are probably just beginning their careers, and they want to build a reputation of themselves so that they can get the opportunities they want (even though anyone can do anything, there's still limited spots, for example, there are only as many captains as there are ships and installations to be run). And in the old constant cycle of "can't get job because of lack of experience, can't get experience because of lack of a job" to attain some reputation they had to start somewhere, and why not wait tables?
matheusGMN -- one of the key conciets of Star Trek has always been the idea that attaining and applying new knowledge is the highest pursuit mankind can engange in. Sisko is a Gourmet Chef trapped in an officer's uniform, Picard is a frustrated wannabe-archeologist-turned-diplomat. However, like Kirk both men became Starfleet officers because only the most elite of elites even manages to graduate from the academy and only a fool would pass that up.
I for one really do wonder what the world would be like if the top 1% of the top 1% of society running things were all scientists and artists and certified geniuses.
Anyone here ever work in Silicon Valley or a public hospital?
@@Grizabeebles I'm an artist.
Post-scarcity economy is near. The resources already exist!!! It's just a matter of prying the resources from the cold, greedy hands of the crazy rich folks.
That’s exactly why it’s not going to happen soon. Also, people focus on the super rich, but if you’re living in a developed country, have the leisure time to watch this video, and a device and access to the internet with which to view it, chances are you are far richer than most of the human race. People like you and I have and waste more resources than we need too, so we’d likely have to give up a lot to balance things out too. This is not something that most people are truly willing to do, so things are not going to change any time soon. Even ignoring poverty, our consumerism is literally killing the planet and we just keep ramping it up. I think that we it will take something catastrophic or fundamentally world changing to make us change, just like in Star Trek.
We need a philosophical shift. Since the industrial revolution and computer age, peoples' livelihoods have become so niched down that meaning is gone. These changes also brought about the death of God, essentially, and humans are kind of rudderless now, accumulating money and prestige while worshiping republicans&democrats, football teams, coke & pepsi. Until we realize a new purpose and define a reason to exist, we're going to continue going on like ants, building, eating, birthing, fighting, dying. If you can answer why life exists and what it's purpose is on a cosmic level, I think you could start to convert people to the mindset necessary to begin letting go of some of the capitalistic trappings of the world... I think I figured out why we're here, why everything is here after a recent brush with death. I'm almost done writing it down, then I will distribute it for free. Followed by a video (because people don't read much anymore, congrats if you made it this far) and distribute that. We're at a crossroads right now, so do we want the utopia after world war 3, or can we just skip the massacre?
Eh, the resources exist but not on Earth. We can probably get to an interim state between here and there where everyone's basic needs for food, water, shelter, and clothing are met, but if you think everyone's getting an iPhone and a computer with what we have here, you're far off the mark. We're already using four times the materials the planet can generate in a given year, so it's going to take settling our current population on four separate earth sized planets, and telling them not to grow their populations much, to even begin to get there.
@@jayb8934 The hunger was in my mind the whole time!
@Jay B
You are quite correct there.
I constitute one of the poorest people in my own country, but on a global scale that still puts me in the top 10% of the world's wealthiest people.
Most likely the majority of commenters here are too.
That's not to say this is always 'real' in the same sense.
If I move to a poorer country with my current income my standard of living would rise dramatically.
That's because standard of living, and 'wealth' in the sense of how much money someone has in a more objective sense are not direct correlates.
But still... When 26 people have as much wealth as 3.8 billion combined, that's somewhat different than arguing about the 'top 10%'.
We've also got the distinction between the people that can live comfortably, and those that can do basically anything they like (buy anything, do basically anything)
And then we have the category that can do anything they like AND still have so much income that they're getting richer just for existing.
If you have so much money that you could buy basically anything whatsoever and not just basically not notice, but have so much to spare that you couldn't spend everything you've got even if you wanted to....
Well, there's wealth, and there's WEALTH.
Anyway, regardless of where most of us fit on that wealth totem pole (judging by quality of life I'm not so sure it's as clear cut), it's clear that the very richest have the least to lose in any practical sense (since much of their wealth is not something they could personally spend on anything even in theory), and the very poorest have the most to gain.
The first goal is not eradicating inequality, but simply reducing it.
Improve things for the very worst off by taking from those that are at the very top of the pyramid...
And then work up, and down from that as required to make things sufficiently fair that nobody has to miss out on basics like food and shelter and so on.
Once we've gotten to that point we can worry about the broader details and more extensive issues of people's quality of life...
I would love the world to be free from war, hunger or want 🙏
Yes, intergalactic war in 3 fronts sounds way better
One thing is certain in any future...
We will all have plenty of self sealing stem bolts to go around.
I thought of it as a social credit system where you build credits based on your contribution to society. By joining the space core you build it as you work and everything is paid for you. If you choose not to you can build it in other ways. Like an artist may create a work and if it has cultural merit they are issued credit. In that way you could build credit to have a nicer house or fancier clothes etc but it’s about contribution. Everyone has basics like food, travel and housing but if you want more you have to contribute more. That’s why the captain has better quarters than an ensign.
More than any other fictional series, I think, Star Trek has had an impact on our world. Because of Captain Kirk's communicator we had flip phones. TNG's replicators were sited as part of the reason why those who made 3D printers made 3D printers, even to the point where several 3D printers have been branded "Replicator". Uhura, Chekhov, Scotty showed us how to break down racial walls and prejudices (though it did take a while before a colored person was a captain and even longer before a woman, but you know, baby steps).
If one show can influence technology and society, then why not economy?
Well, to be fair, TNG did give us Geordi's mom, who was a starship captain, so the precedent was there already.
There's the fantasy, having us leave behind the mentality "I got mine, bugger off" and the ability to hold power over others.
A money-related quote you missed from ST IV:
Spock: "What does it mean, 'Exact Change'? :)
Another one is Kirk's question, "Is that a lot?" with regard to being paid 100 bucks for selling his glasses to the antique dealer. Then Kirk distributes the $ to each member of the crew sans coins. You would think, though, that instead of walking around in 23rd century Fleet uniforms--Spock is still wearing his robe from "The Search for Spock"-- the crew ought to be able to find a thrift shop to buy 20th century clothes to blend in better among Earth inhabitants.
The philosophy of the (internal) Federation economy can be best described by a quote from Karl Marx.
"From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs."
Personal property is different than private property. So yah this is amazing
I'm not a member of this sci-fi fandom, but it's a world I wish to be in. Where all needs are met and never fearing what will the next day be.
I think a lot of us would love to be in a world like that. :)
Yes…but it is not ‘free’…your social position and productivity are what entitle you to the best assets. So if you don’t want to work for the good of society you’ll not be given much to enjoy or live on. If you think you will get to live like Royalty for no payback…well no, and no one else in the model gets that either.
One of the reasons why the Christian Heaven sounds like Hell to me is that it's a world without struggle where there is no pain or wanting. Being hungry makes the steak delicious. I never want to live in a world where everything I could want or need is handed to me.
Ferengi never had slavery? That's kinda hard to square with the fact that they treat their women like property, women have a second class status, and are expected to be naked at all times.
And they're not allowed to leave their homes, nor to engage in any kind of business beyond personal shopping.
Ferengi's treatment of females is closer to Saudi Arabia's treatment of women rather than full on slavery. It's in the same ballpark though. Quark's point was that of a technicality: even if Sisko thought the Ferengi treatment of women was bad, he knew that humanity's history of slavery was technically even worse.
@@autumndidact6148
Or to say "no" to a proposed marriage contract.
Ferengi slavery is just family business. In the rules of acquisition, exploiting your loved ones is just the done thing.
Alexander Roderick -- Rule of Acquisition #6.
I recommend the book "Utopia for Realists". A historical examination of experiments that have gone well.
I was pleasantly surprised by this guys sense of humor. Your funny dude!!!!! “Lucky for you I can read.” Awesome
i didn't like how that random captain in Picard season 3 episode 1 said something about "they have a higher pay grade than you"