Star Trek: How We Will Abolish Money
My wife and I are avid fans of Star Trek (no surprise there right?). Having grown up watching Star Trek: The Next Generation and continuing on to Deep Space Nine and even a little Voyager, but recently we’ve been watching the four seasons of Star Trek Enterprise. It’s the one with Scott Bakula as Captain Jonathan Archer of the NX-1 Enterprise (there it is to the right) and the only one set in the near future. I have no idea how the seasons were received when they aired but we’re really enjoying them because it’s not set hundreds of years into the future, only a hundred and fifty. In future Earth, we’ve developed warp drives, transporters (though we’re not comfortable using them), and have made contact with alien species (no universal translator, just a really good translator).
One of the interesting aspects about Star Trek is how it treats money. Even a mere 150 years into the future, there is no concept of money. People do their jobs because they take pride in their work, satisfaction in their accomplishments, and work hard because they don’t want to let down their peers or their society but receive no monetary compensation. While they get all of their needs satisfied (food, shelter, entertainment), no one is saving for retirement because there’s nothing to save.
It was always difficult for me to see the logical jump from society today to anytime in the future where money is obsolete. Entire industries exist solely because money exists (mortgages, finance, banking to name a few) and you can bet your last dollar they’ll do anything it takes to make sure money keeps on existing. So how are we supposed to get from our money driven world to one where money has no meaning?
By having social norms overtake market norms. It’s an idea I first read in Predictably Irrational. In one of the chapters of Predictably Irrational, Dan Ariely talks about how in the workplace we’ve replaced a bit of the market norms with social norms. In the days of Ford and the assembly line, workers punched in and punched out. They worked for the paycheck, trading in their time, effort, and expertise for money. It was a clear trade, punctuated by the sound of time card machines. As we’ve moved away from a labor based economy to a service based economy, social norms have begun to replace market norms.
I have friends who work 40+ hours a week but are compensated for only forty, the extra being spent “to get the job done right.” I routinely worked a few hours over forty myself to get the job done because I didn’t want to let my team down (I was very fortunate to be on very strong teams that didn’t find ourselves under the gun or behind on deadlines). I didn’t work those extra hours out of the goodness of my heart but I also didn’t do it for direct compensation. I worked those hours because I knew I had an obligation to both the project’s clients and my teammates. It was the social norms, not the market norms that compelled me, and so many others, to work without direct monetary compensation.
It’s an interesting idea and while it clearly doesn’t explain everything, it’s the first time I’ve read of an idea that will even take us in that direction. Eventually social norms can overtake market norms, a social support infrastructure will be put into place, and we’ll have abolished money, developed warp drives, met alien species, and find ourselves cruising among the stars in one of these:
(Both photos by anthonygrimley)
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There are 17 comments, add your thoughts now!
It all boils down to energy. In that future, energy is easily changed into matter, so just plug in your replicator and voila! You can change electrical energy into dollars, or gold, or lobster tails, or whatever you want. Then the theory of diminishing returns starts to come into play…and FAST! If you had one machine that could change any form of energy into matter of any type, why would you need to retire, why would you need more gold, why would you go to a bank, or a restaurant, or any retail store?
Once we can ever figure out a way to make the change from matter to energy to matter to energy to matter … all bets are off. Until then, we will continue to have money of some sort.
Doesn’t this have a shade of communism?
Soviets/Russians have been successful with their space program. Perhaps the reward of money is not always necessary when there are clear higher rewards like going where no one has gone before.
Seems as if I’ve heard of this before. Oh, that’s right, Karl Marx and the Communist Manifesto. No thanks. Hardwork needs to be rewarded, else there is no need to strive to work hard. Just my two cents.
. . . and unfortunately survive a 3rd world war.
Ah! Utopian Society.
When Jamestown was first settled it was to be “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need”. Didn’t work out too well, then; Not sure we’ve advanced enough now!
I also just read of an Engineer in Japan who officially died of “overwork”. Guess social norms got the best of him.
Since the beginning of civilization, people trade their labor for goods and services, whether it be cattle, wheat, tulips, gold or paper money. I cannot think of any time in history where people worked for the sheer joy of it and were taken care of according to their needs. Wait a minute….perhaps slavery in the Old South qualified….but who wants to do that! (Like “Animal Farm,” some animals are better than others….) Society of the future may not have “money” per se but will have to give something to reward the fruits of their labor. After all, man does not live by “atta boys” alone!
What did the crew do with the “money” they always seemed to be playing cards for?
I’m with Ron on this–it’s all about energy. With nearly unlimited energy, the market value if labor would drop significantly. If this happened in a somewhat gradual or controlled manner, the market value could be replaced by social value (to follow along with Jim’s theory).
Interesting discussion here.
If you follow Maslow, it always seems like the people on Star Trek have had almost all their lower needs fulfilled and are striving towards self-actualization, or becoming what they can be.
In the way of money: I agree with the earlire commenters that energy will have to become ridiculously cheap, and the other costs of living will have to become ridiculously cheap.
I partially disagree with the commenter about hard work having to be rewarded; it does not have to be rewarded with money. Academia, for example, pays comparatively lower but the people work for prestige and reputation, same thing on the interwebs. People put in a ridiculous amount of work to create things and put them online for free, and not always for the financial reward.
The way I see it going down is such: Technology increases help cause costs of living go down, basic cost of living functions are absorbed into the government, which, though inefficient, there’s enough to leave things in its hands (extrapolating from the long-term trend over the last century of social insurance, medicare, universal health care in Canada, welfare, etc.) Perhaps there will be some sort of food stamp system where you can go pick what you’d like to have, within a certain amount of things. Money will still exist but will really be only used to buy luxury or exotic items, so if you wanted a big box of swiss chocolates, you could go for it, with your own cash. Eventually, once money becomes immaterial to actual existence of people, the other industries built upon money will just disappear, and money will eventually disappear, too.
However, human beings seem built to be incentive/goal-driven, and as Star Trek suggests, I believe that human beings will start exploring various spaces (we’re also hardwired to explore), including our own psyches as well as outer space, and so forth, for the sake of their own actualization and for the respect and admiration of others.
Of course, I don’t expect of this to happen for another few hundred years, and if the North American civilization goes down, as all do; the process may be delayed or changed. Also, if they invent a thingy that converts energy into any sort of matter as in Star Trek, that’ll also change the situation radically.
Money is an evolved solution for a huge variety of problems, and it will have to evolve into the next stage where it no longer exists. Does this sound like socialism/communism? I was somewhat shocked to realize that it does, but then realized that trying to force this to happen wouldn’t work, but you have to let it evolve on its own.
I think if we take the energy into matter bit plus maslow’s hierarchy, with social transactions replacing market/money transactions, we can see a path towards a world in which money isn’t necessary the medium of exchange.
I do agree that hard work must be rewarded but I’m with RT, it’s not always necessarily with money and my example of my friends who worked 40+ hrs a week but only get paid 40 is in line with this. They are “paid” in reputation, camaraderie, and greater future salary raises.
Also, just because money doesn’t “exist” doesn’t mean that a proxy for it doesn’t exist. We are increasingly living in a world in which money is abstracted and is merely a number on a screen.
Star Trek has never reflected well the reality of our self centered existence. We crave money for many reasons; but at the end, we’re selfish. Without money, we’d be left struggling for something else over our fellow men… We might crave control, or power, or status, or popularity.
Star Trek reflects the ideal of communism - everyone is almost always content in their position, with their level of power, status, and popularity (and energy, per the earlier discussion). We know in practice, however, that “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” never works. In the remaining communist countries in the world that don’t allow the free hand of the market to move, other self-centered forces drive them just the same - its just not as clear as capitalism, that benefits from the best possible way to allocate scarce resources.
Everyone else caught it already - but I was going to say… have you been sharing notes with Karl Marx? haha
The Ferengi(sp?) were always after some sort of money or profit….
I have just started getting into the ST:Enterprise with Scott Bacula and it is pretty good.
(Ron@WisodmJournal is right on the money with his comment about energy.) The “logical leap” from where we are today to a trek-style money-less society has little to do with logic and more to do with sheer technological innovation.
It’s all about the replicators. If they were a ubiquitous feature of our present realities, money as a concept would not survive.
Obviously, with a replicator you can just make whatever you want and never need to buy anything ever. Under such conditions, money naturally becomes obsolete. There are also the problems that counterfeiting would pose to maintaining a post-replicator money system.
Money is both abstract labor AND abstract scarcity. The replicator transcends both and all meanings of money. There is no need to complicate the accounting of symbolic exchange when all commodities invariably come from one common source, in this case, the energy that powers the replicator.
Eliminate scarcity and money will become useless. Fighting scarcity with more money will create more scarcity.
Well, one thing that you might want to buy is energy, but if the governing system supplies enough for all of the population (or you can recycle your scrap with a high efficiency), then I would see no need for money in everyday life.
It seems like you forgot (or don’t know) what happened in the Star Trek universe that lead the mankind to this sort of paradise when you just do your work just because you like it.
Before all that, in 2024 (or so) there was overpopulation and famine, and the civil rights were suspended. The United States created the “Sanctuary Districts” (see episode “Past Tense” from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine) and there were riots and violence. And some decades later there was a 3rd world war, with nuclear exchange… Anyway, there was a time of suffering and hard working before mankind achieve this. Many efforts were dedicated to the starship construction (as an answer to the unemployment problem), and everyone had to put the best just for surviving.
Then Cochrane discovered the warp drive, and because of this we were first contacted for the Vulcans, who shared technology with earth and helped mankind.
And besides it’s true energy is cheap in the future, sometimes it isn’t. From wikipedia:
“Also on Voyager, the ship’s energy constraints on the journey back to the Alpha Quadrant meant that replicator supplies had to be strictly controlled, leading to “replicator rations” becoming an unofficial ship currency. This is also the reason Neelix (aside from providing the crew with a morale boost through the preparation of fresh food) became employed as the ship’s chef. Ingredients came from the ship’s hydroponics laboratory.”
So, as you can see, it was not that easy as saying “mmm… it sounds like communism”.
Money and debt have become invisible chains, turning a population of supposedly free people into indentured servants.
Free energy exists and is being suppressed by the international banking bloodlines.
Until people rise up as one, with open eyes and minds, technology and quality of life will continue to be suppressed.
“My country is the world, and my religion is to do good.” -someone not me
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