I’ve never really seen any show in the Trek universe highlight any Federation economic issues, or budget constraints, or really deal with how things get done in the Federation with respect to how goods and services are paid for, or otherwise allocated in the Federation. It’s just sort of assumed there’s plenty of resources to do whatever needs to be done. The crewmen are never discussing what they’ll do with their salary (are they even paid a salary?) or fussing about a retirement/pension plan.
Has the Federation economic system ever been detailed in any of the ST series or books?
Well, in the original series, there was some sort of money. Crewmembers got paid; credits or something like that.
In The Next Generation, however, humanity had evolved beyond the use of money (yeah, uh-huh). So, there was pretense of a money-less Federation. But, there seemed to be an awful lot of poor people kicking around for money to not exist.
Anyway, I’m sure someone with a more detailed explination will be along shortly.
The most I ever saw on the subject was the second of a two-part episode where the crew goes back in time to 19th Century San Francisco and accidentally brings Mark Twain back to the future with them. Troi is showing him around the ship, and says at one point that the discovering they ere not alone in the Universe “united humanity the way nothing else could.” Troi said because humanity realized its inter-stellar future as a species depended on its unity, crime, corruption, and poverty were virtually done away with. My memory is a bit fuzzy on specifics, but she outlined a culture that sounded an awful lot like global communism. And I mean genuine communism, where everyone pitches in for the common good, not a dictatorship controlled by one person.
With the prevalence of replicators, there really is no need for money in the 24th Century since anything that anyone would need could be made with a command. There are obviously some cases where that wouldn’t be true, like on the frontier (DS9), and I assume in those instances, people are given precious materials like gold, platinum, latinum, etc to trade with “lesser evolved economies” like the Ferengi and so on.
In an episode of DS9, didn’t Sisko say that when he was a Starfleet cadet he used up almost all his credits paying to take the transporter home every night?
Also, Sisko’s father ran a restaurant in New Orleans, and I gather that human services still require payment of some kind for their time and effort.
While any ordinary matter can be synthesized / replicated, I always thought that esoterics like latinum and dilithium were non-duplicateable. They have to be mined as a primary resources.
Finally of course, there’s a flourishing trade in illegal goods of every description, from drugs to Orion slave-women.
So far as replicators are concerned, I had the impression that ‘replicated’ food was not considered quite as good as ‘real’ food. Kinda like a frozen entree you pop into the microwave when you come home at 7pm and want to eat now. Otherwise why have galleys like you see on the Enterprise or restaurant chefs like Sisko’s pop in New Orleans? You could easily replicate an etouffe from a master made by the old boy himself in your home replicator.
How an economy works depends on resources, technology and WHAT PEOPLE WANT. If women decided to not give a damn about diamonds then the price of diamonds would drop like a rock into a black hole.
If the social-psychology of people changed significantly in 200 years the economy could be completely different. Of course some people wouldn’t want the change to occur.
Is the purpose of television advertising to keep us thinking illogically? WHY SHOULD I GIVE A DAMN WHAT ANYBODIES CAR LOOKS LIKE? SO YOUR COMPUTER IS FASTER! YOU CAN’T TYPE FASTER.
Even the original series dismissed the value of diamonds (“Catspaw”), or at least gemstones generally, when Kirk said he could manufacture them in quantity aboard the Enterprise (he might have been bluffing, though). “Credits” were pretty generic currency (and tribbles went for one per). Next Generation, though, looks like it was conceived as some kind of anti-yuppie, anti-Reagan, new-age touchy-feely pile of dog-crap at Gene Roddenberry’s behest. There was a lot of sanctimony about us primitive 20th-century types and our greed and wars and whatnot. In the pilot episode, Q appears in an American World War II uniform and criticizes human savagery, and Picard agrees (!). Now, had it been a Nazi uniform, I could see the point, but geez!
Heck, NextGen even hinted at mind-control in one early episode, suggesting children were commonly having undesirable traits programmed out of them. Ironically, in trying to present a future in which humanity had allegedly improved itself, Roddenberry made it a lot creeper in a crypto-fascist-socialist kinda way.
They toned it down a little when the show hit its stride sometime around the third season, though.
At the very least, it’s clear that Federation types need some form of money when dealing with other political bodies. I don’t expect Quark was handing out holosuite time for free. Voyager could duck the issue entirely, since ideally, they never dealt with any alien culture long enough to get caught up in economics, though it was hinted that replicator resources were not unlimited, and that rationing (as well as occasional scrounging) was necessary.
As near as anyone can tell, the economy in the Federation is an idealized form of communism. Everybody takes whatever they need, and everybody works because…well…errrrr…they can?
Allegedly, humans in the 24th Century are more evolved than us primatives, and they never get lazy or try to exploit the system. Yeah, I know that this explanation is lame as hell, but that’s the story we’re given.
I simulposted with Bryan Ekers. I totally agree with his post. The more I think about the Federation, the more it starts to look like a futuristic Soviet Union. Everyone is taught, and believes, that there is no crime and no poverty, and yet there is still an awful lot of suffering going on. They believe that they are inherently superior to their ancestors, but their emotions and actions are still quite familiar to us “barbaric” 21st Century folks.
As for money (or the lack of it): Remember the first episode of Star Trek: Voyager? It starts with Voyager docked at Deep Space 9. As we go inside, we see Quark trying to sell some sort of souvenir to Harry Kim. Obviously, Harry must have had some way to pay for it, or Quark wouldn’t have given him a second glance. This, combined with the reference to transporter credits in DS9, leads me to theorize that they probably use a system of credits to pay for goods and services. Starfleet personel might get to use replicators for free (as an incentive to join the military), but civilians would have to pay a certain number of credits to have something replicated or to be transported somewhere.
At the very least, there would be a limit as to how much energy is available to do all this replicating and transporting. There would have to be some way of rationing energy usage. They may not call it “money,” but something that serves that purpose would have to exist.
From the little we see about non-Starfleet life, it looks like a form of ‘perfected communism.’ Apparently everyone in the Federation is skilled enough to warrant being given a huge studio overlooking the Golden Gate bridge. Maybe they’re conditioned to not be as materialistic in that time, since all the living quarters seem to bear one bed, one couch, one table, several chairs, and a replicator.
That being said, how do Federation crews get paid? Does Quark walk up to Sisko (Kira now, I guess) with a receipt for all the drinks ordered by officers and get repaid in replicated alcohol? Did Guinan never get a tip?
The actual answer, of course, is that the “Star Trek” universe never decides what type of economy it’s running on. Sometimes we get the standard polemic about how hunger and poverty have been eliminated, and sometimes, apparently, it hasn’t been eliminated. Money doesn’t exist, but it does (gold-pressed latinum.) Things can be endlessly replicated unless it’s convenient for it to be impossible to replicate them, such as latinum and dilithium crystals. In “The Wrath of Khan,” Dr. Marcus’s pitch video for the Geneis device mentions how there are problems with food supply, a supposedly replicable thing. They never quite decide.
It’s odd, but I always interpreted some of these things as meaning that future earth became more capitalistic than less. the money system seems to be based on “credits”. These seem to be some form of electronic money. I seem to remember lots of traders engaging in business. While they don’t show the crew members recieving wages, they don’t show them going to the bathroom either.
** Rickjay ** * The Wrath of Khan * is set before replicators are invented, meaning there could be problems with the food supply. Though with advanced techology they had in the future, I don’t see why they couldn’t farm enough food, even with todays tech the world can feed 6 billion; the only reason there are still hungry people is distrubition problems.
In The Voyage Home, when Kirk takes the cute 20th century scientist out to dinner, he tells her that they don’t use money any more, so they’ve apparently done without money well before TNG. Either that, or Kirk was just a cheap bastard.
I always guessed credits as being sort of an enforced suggestion. like the way you can only check out 30 library books at a time. like transporters cost credits because they have a limit to how many people can at once, so they make it ‘cost’ something so you don’t tie it up all the time.
replicators seem like they are not duplicating machines, that they are just teleporters teleporting stuff into another thing, so if you want to replicate dilithium you need some dilitium from somewhere else. and if you want a pie you need some organtic goo of some sort to rearange into pie.
The explanation for replicators is that they convert energy to matter. Picard mentioned it once, I believe in the ep where they find the cryo humans from the 20th century.
