Trekonomics

Posted on December 31, 2021Comments Off on Trekonomics

Science fiction provides the perfect thought laboratory to explore strange new worlds – and to see how they might work.

The Star Trek universe has sparked a huge amount of commentary about what might indeed be possible. And here is one from the French economist Manu Saadia – as reviewed by Tim Worstall, a fellow at the Adam Smith Institute (where he writes their blog) and regular author at the Telegraph:

Star Trek Economics Is Just True Communism Arriving

Oct 5, 2015 Tim Worstall

There’s an interest in the economics of Star Trek. Not just on the grounds that the economics of such a world are interesting but because there’s a book just about to come out on the subject. And there’s really two things that we can say about that Trekonomics, that economics of Star Trek. The first being that you can’t, on logical grounds, actually have an economics in such a world. And the second being that you can, but it will be the sort that Karl Marx was talking about. For the basic premise of the Star Trek universe is that we’ve conquered scarcity. And as Marx was most insistent about pointing out, communism couldn’t arrive until the absence of scarcity.

Brad Delong has had a chat with the writer of the Trekonomics book which you can see here. And Noah Smith wanders through the subject here:

“There is also the problem of the dignity of work — people enjoy feeling needed. But human values change over time, and there seems no obvious reason why people couldn’t get their self-worth from artistic self-expression, or from hobbies.
This is the basic Star Trek future. But actually, I think that the future has a far more radical transformation in store for us. I predict that technological advances will actually end economics as we know it, and destroy scarcity, by changing the nature of human desire.”

So, there’s that one sense that we can’t have an economics of such an environment. For economics is the study of the allocation of scarce resources. But if resources aren’t scarce then how can we study the allocation of something that doesn’t exist? Of course, you might think that most economists are only discussing angels on pinheads anyway. And if we’re honest about it all economists would insist that at least one current major theory is nothing more than that. But in the entire absence of scarce resources, economics would be even more like that. Akin to asking whether those angels could waltz or jitterbug upon their pinhead.

However, we do have another guide to what would be happening at this point, in the absence of scarcity. And that’s the Bearded One himself, Karl Marx. And the answer is True Communism. Or at least, the way would then be open for True Communism to finally arrive.

For it’s worth remembering how Marx thought it would all work out. At present we’ve got capitalism and that makes things much more efficient, produces stuff vastly better than all that feudal stuff did. And the next stage after that is socialism, which will be more efficient again. Well, we saw that that didn’t work out. It might even be true that the competition of markets and capitalism is wasteful; but that’s as nothing to how wasteful a system is without them.

But the end point of this productive apparatus getting ever more efficient was that the problem of scarcity will indeed be solved. And at that point we’ve not got to worry about the division and specialisation of labour, the efficiency of its use, the productivity of labour even. At which point we can:

“For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a shepherd, or a critical critic and must remain so if he does not wish to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, to fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening,criticize after dinner, just as I have in mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.”

Which sounds very much like this from Noah Smith, doesn’t it?

“In other words, the rise of new technology means that all the economic questions will change. Instead of a world defined by scarcity, we will live in a world defined by self-expression. We will be able to decide the kind of people that we want to be, and the kind of lives we want to live, instead of having the world decide for us. The Star Trek utopia will free us from the fetters of the dismal science.”

The economics of Star Trek is thus True Communism. Fortunately, without the intervening bit of socialism that anyone has to suffer through…

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I’m a Fellow at the Adam Smith Institute in London, a writer here and there on this and that and strangely, one of the global… Read More

www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2015/10/05/star-trek-economics-is-just-true-communism-arriving/?

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