I love Star Trek. It’s had its ups and downs over the years (I will avoid controversy by withholding specifics on that here), but for me there’s no question that it’s more often been good than bad, and moreover has had a unique and positive influence on our society. We often hear how it has inspired people because of its progressive outlook, and how people have been motivated to take up careers in science or service because they grew up with Star Trek. Many inventions (such as cell phones) and other scientific developments (such as Alcubierre warp drive) have been inspired because someone watched Star Trek and wanted to make some aspect of it real. This diary is written in a similar spirit.
[Thanks everyone for your comments! Just wanted to acknowledge that the diary right below mine in the Community Spotlight is excellent, and the discussion there covers some similar ground.]
By way of introduction to my main topic, I acknowledge that like many Trekkies (or Trekkers if you prefer), I am a nitpicker. Here is one somewhat irrelevant example of this, to be followed by a more relevant one. One often hears people say things like, “Captain Kirk had a cell phone [communicator] in the 23rd century, but we already have cell phones now!” Well, not exactly. Our cell phones can’t, on their own, reach people thousands of miles away, or in orbit. They work in conjunction with a huge supporting infrastructure, including whole networks of cell towers. In contrast, Captain Kirk could use his trusty communicator to contact other team members on the surface of an unexplored planet, or talk to people on his ship in orbit, without the need for such infrastructure. So no, cell phones aren’t the same as communicators. I have a similar reaction when conservative Trek viewers (ah, finally, some politics!) go off about there being “no money” in Star Trek, and how that must imply the creators of the show were naïve or inclined toward communism. Such viewers often seem to like the big starships and the pew-pew but often disdain or ignore a lot of the social commentary that Star Trek provides. And no money?? “That’s just a bunch of communist BS,” is the typical response. But, no. Just like with the cell phone example, it’s a misunderstanding and an oversimplification.
Below is an outline of what I believe to be the economic situation in the Star Trek universe. I think that like many aspects of Trek, it can serve as useful food for thought, and even as a kind of inspirational road map going forward.
1) Everyone is rich
It is worth noting that we (that is, most of us in the developed world) are super-rich right now, compared to just about anyone 1000 or even 200 years ago. Take someone, even a rich person, from the Middle Ages and imagine changing places with them. How would their food look and smell to you? How would you feel during hot humid weather or during a really cold winter? What would you or your kids do about a toothache, a broken limb, an infection? And how would that Middle Ages person react to your life: your education, entertainment options, food choices, opportunities for transport and travel? I realize that there is still poverty and inequality in the Western world now, but even a simple lifestyle in the 2015 US would have to seem like unimaginable luxury to a peasant from 1000 years ago. This is the result of average personal wealth slowly climbing up, maybe a few percent a year on average, over a long period.
So now, project this trend forward another few hundred years. If average wealth continues to increase for that long, even if the increase is quite modest in annual percentage terms, what you end up with by the time of Star Trek is an ultra-wealthy society where everyone (in present-day terms) has millions or even billions of dollars. So you can think of Starfleet crews as large groups of super-wealthy people, who have made the choice to go out into “the final frontier” despite the safely and comfort of staying at home.
“But wait, how could there be a whole society where everyone is rich? How could that possibly work?” Well again, look around you and imagine yourself answering that same question about your own situation now, if a peasant from 1000 years ago asked you. A description of your world would seem like the most absurd science fiction to them (actually, science fiction itself would be a new concept for them). So how does our own society do what it does now? Why are things (arguably) so much better now than they were hundreds of years ago? One answer might be that we’ve learned a lot since then. A lot of that knowledge is dangerous (nuclear, biological, chemical weapons), but enough has been harnessed for productive purposes that society as a whole has benefited. We also seem to be quite a bit nicer in general about things like not enslaving each other, not looking the other way so much when animals or other people are treated abusively, and so on. Why are we nicer now? I don’t know. But I’d like to think it’s that way because we behave better as we learn more, and in general society learns more as time marches on.
One more interesting thing that seems to happen as our society learns more is that we get better at “getting something for nothing.” Solar power is a prime example of this. A few decades ago, many people dismissed solar power as pie-in-the-sky, fantasy kind of stuff. Now, free energy from the sky is providing a large and ever-increasing share of our energy needs. More generally, technology is making a lot of things much, much cheaper and more available than ever before. What happens if this is carried forward much further? The answer: something called a “post-scarcity economy,” in which material needs as we know them aren’t really an issue. However…
2) Everyone is not equally rich
Many conservatives watching Trek get twitchy about its supposed communist leanings. “If everyone is living well, that means everyone is the same, and that means society becomes just like the USSR, right?” The answer to that is: no, don’t be silly. Again, if your peasant friend from 1000 years ago asked you if everyone is the same in our present-day, relatively wealthy society, you’d have to say no, right? And so it is in Star Trek’s society. Some people work more, and some work less. Some people have great aptitude and motivation and do cool things like explore the galaxy in starships. Others are also bright and hard-working but choose to stay on the ground, doing things like running restaurants or doing laboratory research. And presumably, there are a number of other people who are, for lack of a better way to put it, downright lazy. So why don’t we see the really lazy ones in Star Trek? Well, would you really rather watch a TV show about them? The Trek shows focus on people in a rich post-scarcity society who have decided that despite the risks, exploration is more fulfilling than a luxurious life back home.
Any rich society that chooses to do the (IMHO) decent thing and guarantee a minimum standard of living will have to confront the fact that yes, lazy people can just sit and recreate and possibly contribute nothing else to society. But here’s a key point: Guaranteeing a decent standard of living doesn’t mean that everyone is promised equal wealth or status. This counters the straw-man argument that dishonest conservatives use against anything that they see as a threat to the status of wealthy people. I personally think that effort and hard work should be rewarded, and that laziness is not something to aspire to, and I believe most people in the Daily Kos community agree. If you want to be lazy in a Star Trek society, you can, and you won’t be homeless or hungry. But if you want a nice apartment in downtown San Francisco like Captain Kirk’s (seen in a couple of the movies), if you want to fill it with beautiful rare antiques, or even buy a whole planet like someone had in one of the TV episodes (“Requiem for Methuselah”), then you may have to aim – speaking loosely and in present-day terms – for “billionaire” or even “trillionaire” instead of just “millionaire” status. That also settles the question that I’ve sometimes heard asked: “Why doesn’t everyone in Star Trek’s wonderful egalitarian society have their own starship?” One answer is that making sure people are comfortably housed, fed, and educated doesn’t also mean that everyone is handed the keys to their own armed, aircraft-carrier-sized faster-than-light space vehicle. One can also assume that such things would be regulated.
“But if people are allowed to be comfortable and lazy, wouldn’t they and their kids multiply like crazy and lay waste to everything?” Luckily, we’ve already got evidence to the contrary. In the present day, we have seen that as societies transition from “developing” to “developed” status, average family size decreases. In other words, people tend to have fewer kids as they get richer. So even accepting the tendency of some people to be lazy, a Star Trek society shouldn’t have to deal with an exploding population of “freeloaders.” This is consistent with the idea I expressed earlier, that as people learn more, they tend to behave better. A society with lots of opportunity offers people options that are a lot more interesting than just sitting around. If some do choose to just sit around, then that’s their choice, and I think it could be argued that society is still better off by giving them (and their kids) a safe but modest life, instead of turning them all out into the street.
3) Yes, there is money, but hard currency is not in vogue
Here’s where the “no money” idea comes in. Really, I think that the whole “no money” thing is overblown in discussions about Trek, because in my opinion it just comes down to a misunderstanding. In the fourth Star Trek movie, Kirk and company time-travel to 20th century San Francisco and Kirk, seeing someone pay for a newspaper, says, “They’re still using money – we need to find some.” It’s evident that he was referring to hard currency, given that in the original TV series, references were made to a currency called “credits,” and there have been other references to wealth and to buying and selling throughout the whole Trek franchise. So there is still something like money in the Star Trek society, but people don’t have to carry it around. This is not too different from how a lot of people use money even today. So we don’t see people waving wads of cash around in Star Trek, and besides, a society of multi-millionaires probably doesn’t worry too much about who’s going to cover the electric bill each month. Presumably such things are dealt with electronically somewhere in the background, but Star Trek characters don’t spend time thinking about it. As one of them said in the movie First Contact: “The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force of our lives.”
So what should we do now?
There’s obviously a lot of distance to cover before we get from the here-and-now to a Star Trek-style post-scarcity society. But we’re a lot closer to it now than we were, say, 300 years ago. How can we get closer to that ideal of a fair and wealthy society? Here is probably the single most important thing that needs to happen: the benefits of technology – including automation, cheap energy, and near-instant communication – need to be distributed more equitably. All of us who were around a few decades ago remember being promised that technology would bring us less stressful lives, shorter work weeks, and the like. In fact, technology has spurred unprecedented productivity and wealth, but those promised benefits have not arrived for most of us. Why not? Because the profits have been sucked up by those at the top.
Right now in the US, although income is going up when considered in aggregate, this increase is being driven completely by gains at the top income levels only. In my opinion, the cleanest solution to this problem is the introduction of an unconditional “basic” or “minimum” income. Details vary depending on how it is carried out, but the gist of it is this: Every month, every adult citizen gets a certain amount of money from the government. This is different from a minimum wage: everybody gets the basic income whether or not they are working. One earns more than the basic income by doing the usual things one does for money: having a job, starting a business, or what have you. But the basic income is there to make sure people have a guaranteed minimum even if other income sources fail. As our society gets richer, the basic income should go up, year by year. By Star Trek’s time, the payouts would presumably be vast by present-day standards.
At its present level of wealth, our society probably cannot offer a very generous basic income. A recent proposal in Switzerland would have established a basic income there of about 24000 USD per year, but that proposal was defeated. Maybe that amount was a little high to aim for at present, but it seems likely that such measures will continue to be proposed there and elsewhere, even if more modest amounts are involved initially. Despite its apparent socialistic underpinnings, the idea of a basic income receives support even from some conservatives, who agree that the concept makes sense, in part because its cost could be partially offset by eliminating many welfare-type programs that governments currently spend a lot on anyway.
On the other hand, any such proposals will certainly meet resistance from people like the Koch brothers, who prefer that the benefits of an increasingly wealthy civilization should accrue to a few individuals such as themselves. They and their many lackeys will refer derisively to such attempts to alter the status quo as “communist” and “utopian,” and plenty of misguided people, including middle- and lower-class victims of the right-wing noise machine, will believe them and will fight against their own interests.
Final thoughts
Although we do not yet live in “post-scarcity” times, many useful things can now be had very cheaply:
- Lots and lots of access to information; storage and manipulation of large amounts of data
- Near-instantaneous communication over long distances, whether text-, audio- or visually-based
- Renewable energy: increasingly competitive with non-renewable sources, and prices are falling fast
- Labor: more and more tasks are being automated
As things currently stand, such a situation is not all good. A huge worldwide pool of human labor, along with increasing automation, leads to falling wages, in turn leading to exploitation and hardship. Information technology, particularly the Internet, has made it very difficult for many companies following older business models to survive. Newspapers and bookstores are struggling. Creative people such as musical artists and book authors are having to deal with piracy of their works on a vast scale. Many people spend time writing long and fascinating tracts like this one that may become widely read, but will never be paid for it because so many other people are doing the same thing. With the basic income, these problems would be mitigated, and the benefits of technology would be felt by society in general, not just those at the top.
But then, what about this typical objection to a Star Trek society: “If everyone is rich and comfortable, who would they find to do Job X?” Typically, “Job X” is some dirty and disreputable occupation – working for Fox News for example. OK, I kid. Usually the example is sweeping floors or similar not-so-glamorous work.
One answer is that market forces could be harnessed when attempting to motivate some people to do necessary work that others don’t want to do. This could lead to patterns that might seem counter-intuitive by present-day standards, though I think some examples suffice to show that we’ve started to head in some such directions already. We’re already seeing that globalization causes salaries to fall for skills that can be done remotely, even if those skills are otherwise valued or difficult to acquire (e.g. professional work like computer programming being outsourced to developing countries). On the other hand, some things can only be done in person, so that for example, the cost of hiring a plumber might not be too different now compared to what it was pre-globalization. A person living in Medieval Europe or ancient Rome might be very surprised indeed that right now, someone who does sports or entertainment for a living might be paid 100 or 500 times as much per year as the leader of the world’s richest country. Whether or not such a situation makes sense in the grand scheme of things, it’s true right now and we’ve all gotten used to it. So who knows – in the wealthy 23rd century economy, someone willing to pitch in with some janitorial services might make an extra 10 million a month, despite how unintuitive that sounds now.
In a Star Trek future, many things would no doubt seem confusing or mystifying to present-day people – even threatening to some – but on balance I think it’s a future worth striving for.
I apologize that I’m too unskilled (or lazy, underpaid, etc.) to embed links into this article, but for those interested, here is some relevant background info:
Post-scarcity economy: http://en.wikipedia.org/...
Basic income: http://en.wikipedia.org/...
Star Trek economics: http://en.wikipedia.org/...
Star Trek being influential: http://en.wikipedia.org/...
Alcubierre warp drive: http://en.wikipedia.org/...
And here’s a really good exploration of the same themes, with some of the details different from mine:
https://medium.com/...