Blog: Star Trek

What would happen if scarcity were eliminated? Is that even possible? Many works of science fiction envision such a future — Star Trek, for example, has no "money" and people supposedly seek only personal enlightenment rather than material goods. But they still have Ferengi and gold-pressed latinum and space freighters when plot lines demand it. My co-worker Saskia recently posed the question of why the Harry Potter universe has class distinctions based on wealth (the Weasleys are poor while the Malfoys are rich) when they have magical spells to do all the housework, and so nobody should have to wear ragged clothes, for example. But Rowling isn't an economist and good fantasy & science fiction literature is really about telling stories about our society through the mirror of another world, so she uses the same social and economic structures from the world she knows.

In truth, we have no idea what a society without material scarcity would look like. Since human beings by nature compete with each other, we might expect the method of "keeping score" to revolve around something other than material possessions. Would individuals compete on intelligence? Charisma? Ownership of real estate? Our would our desire for material goods, or our population size, simply expand so greatly that no matter how much energy we could gather from the sun and no matter how technology advances in order to use that energy to create material goods, the demand would grow to keep pace with the supply?

Matt Stoller, filtering Stirling Newberry, says that an economy revolves around its bottlenecks. Our bottleneck today is oil. In the past it has been other things, like labor. If we remove one bottleneck we go through a period of great economic prosperity where everyone benefits until we inevitably run into the next one. So absent the development of interstellar space flight, if we somehow develop magic spells or replicators, I'd put my bet on real estate becoming the bottleneck. The population will grow, and now having a single-family home with a lawn and a picket fence isn't so cheap anymore, giving us a future more like Asimov's super-cities in "Caves of Steel".

But then, who's to say magic spells or replicators are any more likely than warp drive? We can't predict scientific breakthroughs, so until there is one, energy is where it's at.