I agree, but, there’s always something that there isn’t enough of. Like beach front property, mountain cabins, NYC penthouses, prime New Orleans restaurant properties: these have to be allocated somehow.
Or more to our 21st century sensibilities, what if I want YOUR house. There must be a system that tells me NO with finality. Without us fighting it out in the streets.
I’ve been watching reruns of Deep Space Nine on BBC America. In one episode, one character presented another with an old-fashioned hand bell in a nice presentation box and in another, one character presented a flute, again in a nice presentation box. Now the station where they are is really far out, so it seemed unlikely that either item was ordered from a catalog, so I’m guessing it’s cheap and easy to order physical goods from the replicator.
To some extent yes, but the amount of that stuff and its availability is now amazingly vast. You can’t think in terms of 21st century scarcity norms. It’s not just that there is unlimited energy and matter conversion, it’s also that transportation and transaction costs are a millionth of what they once were. Much of what holds you back from having beachfront property now is gone in Star Trek. The cost of the beachfront home itself is minor, because most matter is easily created and converted. You can put the home on any beach, because the cost and time to get anywhere else is negligible and in a world where all nations are united, one country’s as good as the next. It doesn’t matter if you’re close to a power grid because a power generator can be put into any home.
Today’s scarcity norms would be incomprehensible to people in the past. Today, people in the developed world don’t put much thought into affording food; in fact, we spend more time worrying about how to eat LESS of it than we do about how to get it. That’s an idea that most of the humans who ever lived just could not understand; for most of our history, securing and keeping adequate amounts of food was something people spend a substantial amount of their lives trying to do, and worrying about, and organizing their lives around.
Those people would find our current food situation almost hard to understand. A modern grocery store wouldn’t be much less amazing to them than transporters seem to us.
As far as beachfront property is concerned it would not surprise me that the Federation has banned it for the greater good of protecting beaches and/or oceans/lakes.
One thing is helping here and there for a special ocassion and another is working full time for a year picking up plates when you don’t have to.
The Star Trek economy is hard for us to grasp because it revolves around a mind set that doesn’t currently exist (also the shows keep it purposely vague).
One thing I read in one of the RPG supplements which makes a lot of sense to me is the Federation economy is based on how much you contribute. Everyone’s needs are taken care of by technology but to handle things that are of limited quality you earn credits based on what you contribute to the betterment of society. That is also vague and someone from our present would roll their eyes but in the Utopia that is Star Trek it could work.
We have a small corner of the society / economy now that’s mostly post-scarcity. It’s the Internet.
Right now it’s still being used in many ways simply to feed the regular profit-centric money economy. But there are corners, such as our part of SDMB, if not the ownership’s part, that are examples of non-economic behavior in the absence of scarcity. The general open source software and creative commons movement is another.
So if we squint hard, and imagine some genetic engineering to breed extreme selfishness and greed out of the worst 5-10% of the population (or simply abort them when detected regardless of age), we could see the outlines of the ST future.
But as @Quimby just said, it’s pretty Utopian.
And outright ignore examples of less than utopian actions and outcomes. 
They have all the petty politics, jealously, careerism, deprivation that we do and its depicted almost simultaneous to their assertions that they don’t exist anymore.
As @Alessan posits upthread its doublespeak. They don’t have money and a military except when they totally do.
Isn’t that exactly what a money-based economy does? In such a society, people can increase the share of resources allocated to them by providing some kind of good and services to others, in exchange for which they earn money. Of course the valuation process that determines how much the goods or services provided are worth is decentralised; that valuation is undertaken by the buyer, who decides how much he’s willing to pay. It’s not done by some centralised planning agency. But it is there.
Apologies if this was mentioned somewhere up thread and I missed it, but does someone have a cite for “no money in Star Trek”?
I’ve been a fan for years and I’ve never heard this. In many of the episodes they use credits to purchase things. Just yesterday I re-watched the Trouble with Tribbles episode and the tribbles are being sold for credit’s at the space station bar. Obviously that’s currency/money.
What am I missing here?
No doubt other civilizations have some form of money/medium of exchange. Maybe credits are a universal cross culture “money”.
In Star Trek IV (aka, The One With the Whales), when the crew disembarks in the 20th Century, Kirk says, “They’re still using money. We’ll have to get some.” Later, when he sticks Catherine Hicks’s character with the bill in the restaurant, she says, “Let me guess, you don’t use money in the future.” Kirk replies, “Well, we don’t.”
I think that’s the chronologically earliest reference to the Federation not using money. By the time of TNG, it seemed to have become an accepted fact, although I’m not sure how explicitly it was ever said. On DS9, they were always talking about “gold-pressed latinum” as a medium of exchange, but it seemed to be a medium that was external to the Federation. You needed it if you wanted to buy a drink in Quark’s bar, but Federation officers don’t use it between themselves.
Star Trek is a TV show, not an economic and political treatise, so they never do explore any of these things in very great depth. Thus, we don’t get much detail about how it all actually works. We’re just supposed to accept that it does. In retrospect, I’ve always thought it might have been better if Kirk had just told Catherine Hicks that he didn’t have any money that a 20th century restaurant would accept, and left it at that.
That wasn’t a Federation station.
The thing is, because Star Trek shows tend to focus on ships or stations on the borders of Federation space and beyond, we actually know far more about day-to-day life in other cultures than we do about life on Earth. The cultures we see all have money; the one culture we see little of supposedly doesn’t.
One epside of TNG the Enterprise picks up a pob with 3 people who were crygenically frozen whilst still alive but carrying terminal illnesses.
They are revived and cured of those ilnesses - which had been the intention of those that had been frozen in the first place - as a very long shot last chance of survival.
One of those frozen is a mega-rich individual and during the course of the episode the crew seem somewhat bewildered at his drive to acquire obscene aounts of wealth for himself in his previous life.
The crew seem to have difficulty understand the concept or the point of being so hugely personally rich when it seems others could make better use of it whilst the mega-rich dude is merely piling it up for little benefit to anyone else.
Seems to me that in the Starfleet universe there has been a conceptual change about allocation of resources and how they should be used. Achievement and fulfillment is now indicated in some other way, perhaps through respect of personal status or maybe even altruism.
If the idea was to show altruism then having your most important space vessels being classed as warships kind mitigates against such an idea, and perhaps the idea that war is about self protection only and not colonisation or wealth acquisition.
That may be what the tv show is attempting to portray is the role of the Federation but it isn’t hard to dig down and posit flaws in that thinking
Scarcity isn’t the only thing that drives an economy… people compete and collaborate for a host of reasons. Or, thinking of it another way, in a post-starvation/homelessness/disease society, other human behaviors and endeavors become commoditized and used in lieu of currency or trade for food, housing, etc.
Is it that different from current organizations who use money to trade with external partners, but allocate resources (time and materials) internally without explicit monetary transactions? Thinking of peers in schools, the military, corporations, library systems, Burning Man, etc. A mixture of top-down planning and peer-to-peer resource distribution, a mix of command and barter economies. Yes, there are budgets and bookkeepers, but most employees in such systems aren’t fighting for food per se, and choose to collaborate in their organizations for the vague notion of “advancement”, which doesn’t necessarily just mean more/better food, but include prestige, power, creative freedom, whatever. In the present-day military, everyone is fed and housed, and still there are different roles, responsibilities, and ambitions. Perhaps the Federation’s basic unit of currency isn’t a dollar but some measure of time, with organic lifespans and warp engine speed limits (or post-warp tardigrades) being the scarce resources most commonly encountered…
In terms of Maslow’s, the higher tiers of the pyramid don’t disappear once you’ve fulfilled the bottom rungs.
I guess more interesting is how the Federation trades with external actors who DO use monetary systems. How are exchange rates set in a world with replicators, faster-than-light warp, time travel, and the ability to destroy or create new planets? What do you peg any sort of stable currency to, when entire civilizations can be discovered or destroyed in the span of 45-minute episodes? All the credits Quark accumulates… where does he end up spending them, and will they still be worth the same tomorrow?
Not so sure about that, the “Deep Space Station K7” administrator is being given direct orders by the “Federation Under Secretary for Agricultural Affairs”. That strikes me as pretty Federation.
This is exactly what I always thought, their basic life needs are always covered: food through the replicator’s and some sort of housing, so they required no money for those. They earned credits through work to pay for more luxurious personal items. To me it has always seemed like as a society they did had some sort of currency.
I agree, it does seem to me to be a poorly thought out line that adds confusion or even created the whole “no money” trope. Although this isn’t the first or last contradiction in the series. SD has many threads about exactly this type of contradiction.
Yeah, Memory Alpha (not that that’s necessarily 100% authoritative) calls it a Federation station.
Gold pressed latinum, remember? The handwave explanation was that latinum is unreproducible by replicators, so it’s rare, and thus used as a form of currency by the Ferengi.
I imagine that’s just with the Ferengi and their sphere of influence; other civilizations might use different rare elements or compounds as their currency.
As another concurrent thread indicates, Cash is no longer king.
I would assume that in such a post scarcity society, everyone’s needs are taken care of, and that most of their simple wants are as well.
If everyone simply has essentially a UBI with more money coming in than they could easily spend, and automatic transactions taking place without them even pulling out their card, then it would be easy to see a world where the citizens never think about money.
You go to a restaurant, order what you want, it comes out, you eat and leave. Your “credits” are automatically deducted from your personal account, without you doing anything.
Same with most mundane and regular goods and services.
It would only be when you start abusing it, or trying to buy up all the beachfront property in the world, that you would find yourself running into the limits of your personal credit.
Then there would be interpersonal transactions. If you go to a place of public accommodation, that would be linked into the overall computer network, but if you are just wanting something made, or a service from an individual, then you may be directly giving them something of value in return. Whether that be favors or something more tangible would be left to the involved parties to determine.
So, “there is no money” isn’t something that really could work. “We never think about money” seems pretty feasible.
Anyway, no source or cites, just speculation on how such a system would work.
Not just Ben Finney and his one mistake, but in TNG, too. Case in point: the differences between Westly and Broccoli - I mean, Barclay.
Wes is literally a genius, and while trying to get enrolled in Starfleet Academy, aces spontaneous tests in the hallway (the senior officer that accosted him in the hallway*), but still can’t get in.
And then Reg - guy has no self confidence at all, has obvious personality issues, and yet, there he is on the most prestigeous posting in Star Fleet.
AND the rest of the “enlightened” crew all make fun of poor ol’ Reg, including Picard.
*speaking of, how did THAT guy ever get into Starfleet? Accosting and insulting random fellow officers. Forget Wes respecting his differences, maybe that doofus should learn a little respect for OUR culture. Ya think?