Summary: Will our future be like Star Trek or Jupiter Ascending? Star Trek shows us a world beyond scarcity where everybody benefits. In Jupiter Ascending the 1% takes the wealth produced by technology and uses it to rule us. We can choose to make Star Trek our future if we are willing to work for it, but now we’re condemning our children to live in Jupiter Ascending. {First of two posts today.}
Consider the increase in the West’s wealth since 1750 and the advancement in technology. Imagine similar progress for another 250 years, to the time of the original Star Trek TV series. Rick Webb describes that world in “The Economics of Star Trek: The Proto-Post Scarcity Economy“, a market economy whose productivity allows the government to easily provide a high basic income allowance to everybody.
The amount of welfare benefits available to all citizens is in excess of the needs of the citizens. … Citizens have no financial need to work, as their benefits are more than enough to provide a comfortable life, and there is, clearly, universal health care and education. The Federation has clearly taken the plunge to the other side of people’s fears about European socialist capitalism: yes, some people might not work. So What? Good for them. We think most still will.
Discussions about Star Trek often focus on what we do with the abundance of goods and services produced by their fantastic tech. It’s fun, like composing fantasy football teams or designing the ideal Prime Directive.
In our world the 1% shows us an alternative to Star Trek. The largest fraction of America’s increased income since 1970 has gone to the 1% — and even more to the .1%. They could share the booty (nobody can consume a billion dollars in a lifetime), but prefer instead to amass wealth and power. Why would this change with the invention of robots and replicators? Continue current trends for a few centuries and you reach Jupiter Ascending
This is the natural course of events for our future. Increased productivity comes from machines and intellectual property. Those who build them earn a living, while the wealth they create goes to those who own them. Software engineers live in nice homes while plutocrats own estates, yachts, submarines, and jets.
Our society has begun to adapt our new reality. The institutions formerly supported by the middle class, such as magazines and charities, find rich patrons to survive. Unions, the center of organized opposition to the 1%, have faded to shadows of their former strength. The major Republican candidates for president agree that taxes on the rich must fall and social services for the rest must be cut. Hillary, like her husband, likes the current rate at which the 1% grows in power and wealth, but wishes to tinker at the edges.
Visions of a great future, like that of Star Trek, can inspire us to act. But the window to do so will close eventually, if the 1% gains enough power that they become invincible. We will leave a dark future to our children if we continue our passivity. Perhaps that fear can shake us from our apathy.
For More Information
See “Star Trek Economics: Life After the Dismal Science” by Noah Smith (Asst Prof Finance, Stony Brook U) at Bloomberg. Also see the bible: Making of Star Trek
If you liked this post, like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. See all posts about the 3rd industrial revolution now under way, about inequality & social mobility, and especially these…
- Will our future be like Star Trek or Jupiter Ascending?
- Why Americans should love Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings – we live there,
- The coming big inequality. Was Marx just early?
- Why Elizabeth Bennet could not marry Mr. Darcy. Nor could your daughter.
