Star Trek can’t calculate
May 11, 2009 – 8:51 am by JohnI like Star Trek a lot despite its absurdly unrealistic vision of the future of humanity. In what is probably the funniest drama ever made, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, Admiral Kirk goes out to lunch with a woman in 20th-century San Francisco, and when the waiter brings the check and Kirk just kind of looks at it, she asks, “Let me guess: you don’t have money in the future?” to which Kirk responds, “Well, we don’t!”
Then in at least one episode of The Next Generation, Captain Picard explains to some visitor from the past or something that, here in the United Federation of Planets in the 24th century, they don’t use money or do things for personal wealth accumulation; they work for their own enjoyment and for the betterment of human society. Now, Gene Roddenberry created a pretty visionary TV show and obviously founded a spectacularly successful TV/movie franchise, which has produced some amazing television and cinema over the years by attracting some sharp science-fiction-writing minds. But he knew little about sociology and less about economics.
Prices on the market in terms of money, not the absence of both, are a manifestation of the cooperation of mankind. The more people provide goods and services that others need, the more they trade in a peaceful manner according to their subjective preferences, desires, and goals, fulfilling each other’s wants and needs even as they satisfy their own. Prices reflect the subjective relative-preference scales of all the individual people in the economy. Only by the spontaneous and dynamic price system can a large number of people’s desires be known and satisfied by others, cooperatively and selfishly at the same time. Without prices to let customers and businesses know how much of something there is and how much things are desired, no rational allocation of resources can take place. It is not impractical or improbable; it is literally impossible.
(The recent J.J. Abrams movie, which I highly recommend to non-fans and which I don’t need to recommend to current fans, is what reminded me to write this post. There is no economics and not much philosophy or sociology in the movie, so don’t expect the socialist-calculation absurdities to come up.)
3 Responses to “Star Trek can’t calculate”
Hah the Ferangi(?) were the most money obsessed alien race in the Star Trek series and they were ugly and not well liked or trusted lol
By Azrael on May 11, 2009
Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention that.
Also here’s a good article about Star Trek’s anti-money problem from a one-time Star Trek writer in The Freeman.
http://www.thefreemanonline.org/featured/the-economic-fantasy-of-quotstar-trekquot/
By John on May 11, 2009
I’m an occasional fan of sci-fi, & I’ve seen similar gimicks in many other sci-fi movies/books that take place in the future. Neal Stephenson is the most guilty of this.
Such authors will just throw in a non-essential detail that’s a little different from our current world, & it’s then intended to leave the audience pondering about the author’s vision before getting back to the story. Sometimes it can be humorous or even effective, but more often than not it’s a philosophical cheap-shot: Just b/c you depict a hypothetical future w/this little change doesn’t make it realistic. It’s a similar impetus I’d imagine that spurred the utopian-socialism scene, although I haven’t read much of that genre.
Moreover, it’s what separates good sci-fi from bad, b/c good sci-fi largely hinges on the author scrutinizing even those small details & making them a part of the story, rather than just sprinkling them in wherever. (See for example Bradbury’s short story A Sound of Thunder.) Seriously, if you’re going to screw around with reality, you might as well have a good purpose & think it out ahead of time.
Anyway, good post!
By kerrjac on May 13, 2009