Comment by Mistletoe

Star Trek presents a super idealistic utopian post-scarcity society, probably naively so, but it's primarily intended as an inspiration.

Very good science fiction depicting post scarcity society are Iain M. Banks Culture novels. To me it feels like a far more realistic post-scarcity future than Star Trek (although The Expanse feels more likely than either).

In the Culture there are AIs which remove the need for humans to do any more work and at times in the book he mentions how citizens find meaning to their existence despite a lack of drive for wealth or materials.

In one book (I can't remember which one) in passing it talks about a spaceship being somewhat pointlessly assembled by people, not because it's needed (AI and machines can do it), but because those people wanted to do something they thought would be interesting, I guess they thought of it like building a cathedral.

In the Player of Games, the protagonist prides themselves on being able to master any kind of (non-sports type) game and has built their social status and identity around it.

Despite the utopian existence, messy situations do arise and the stories tend to revolve around an organization within the Culture called "Special Circumstances", which exist to handle "Special Circumstances" which is anything outside of the usual, sometimes covert, sometimes diplomatic, sometimes crisis solving.

Anyway, I highly recommend them if you're into reading.

It didn't really even work on Star Trek. They could pretend it did as long as they were on a ship that flew away at the end of every episode. But on DS9, since they were stationary and had to deal with other economies, the issue of money came up fairly often.

The post-scarcity thing didn't hold up to scrutiny either, even fictionally: there was nearly a civil war on Bajor because the Federation couldn't come up with enough soil reclamators to prevent a possible famine at one point. Any time something needed to be scarce for the sake of the plot or drama, it was.

I have thought many times about what I would be doing with my life if money was no object. If I just had "everything" I needed.

For me the reality is, I would still want to be doing something. I would be more picky about what I would be doing but at its core I would likely still be doing work similar to what I am doing now, just instead I would make sure it is working towards something I have a passion for.

Otherwise, what are you doing with your life? Just sitting at home all the time, that is boring.

If all your material wants could be supplied by replicators, and your service wants by an GAI computer, the need for most commerce would go towards zero. At that point, I can see people mostly having hobbies, whether its cooking so you open a restaurant or exploring on the Enterprise.

But in all those cases, you wouldn't need to charge, because what would you spend the money on?

People band together for sports teams, open source software, volunteer fire brigades, drinking clubs, fantasy football leagues, cover bands, all kinds of things that require all kinds of levels of investment, toil, coordination, and subjugation to a greater cause without monetary gain.

Now, how prime real estate is doled out back in earth...

Canonically, the moneyless economy precedes the invention of replicators. It arose from humanity rethinking its life choices in the aftermath of WWIII, and first contact with the Vulcans. Humans did "evolve", to become capable of that kind of economy, but it was a cultural evolution, not a biological evolution.

Gotta remember that the people on Starships are an elite, largely self-selected group of military personnel.

And if you want to deal with money there are plenty of opportunities at the fringes of the Federation and beyond.

> It’s why Communism is a great idea but fails miserably every time it’s implemented

I think it unfortunately only works on a small scale where humans have a reason to care about each other, where they personally benefit from "sticking together" or the risks of not doing so are high. I.e., a village or small tribe (Native Americans were essentially communists), the crew of the Enterprise, a kibbutz or small colony, etc. Once you scale it up, people just don't care enough about the millions of others to be willing to do anything other than looking out for themselves.

> It’s why Communism is a great idea but fails miserably every time it’s implemented.

I think it fails because the only people who want to lead a revolution are megalomaniacs who get into power after the revolution and turns it into a dictatorship instead of turning it over to the people. The average person just wants to live their life which is why populist strong men who promise more of the same old life are getting voted in.

edit: As for no money, they have replicators so the barrier to production is pretty much free making money mostly unnecessary. If I can walk up to a machine and have it produce a perfectly cooked steak with only energy and some form of matter input (air?) there's no need for cattle, ranches, ranchers, transport, slaughter, butchering, more transport, markets, etc. Basically the entire supply chain has been eliminated. And if that replicator makes more replicators, batteries and PV or whatever then yeah, game over for money.

"I’m not sure how a society like that would ever work."

This is essentially why I stopped reading books that exist solely to push some economic philosophy or something. You can make anything work in fiction. Here, watch:

"On Dysokis, the fifth planet settled by Earth, everyone is happy and healthy and lives in perfect harmony all the time, working together to advance the common good."

That was easy to write. It's not particularly any harder to expand it out into a story. But it doesn't mean anything. It doesn't mean I have a path to that any more than anyone else does, or that if I do expand it out into a story, or a massive multi-decade shared franchise, that it has anything that can be practically obtained or emulated.

What "The Federation doesn't have money" really means is, we don't want stories about Geordi worrying about how he's going to pay his nephew's rent or Data arguing about whether or not he his patent for some $TECH is being violated and he's not getting paid out properly. We don't want stories about how some medical issue could be fixed but Ensign Bob can't afford to pay for it. We don't want stories about Commander Sally arguing about her pay raise. I know that's not what Roddenberry would have thought, but it's what it comes out to practically in the end in the shared universe.

And it works, and on the net despite its unreality I think it was a fantastic thing for the franchise. In the end, despite my disagreements with it being possible, the fact that I don't think Roddenberry meant it that way, and the fact that I don't even think Roddenberry was a particularly good guy, I think he backed into something that is a great deal of what made the Star Trek universe very special and why so many of us have enjoyed it so much. There's nothing wrong with the science fiction that explores societies that still have money and still have the resulting conflicts, but there's also nothing wrong with sometimes saying "Hey, that's not what this franchise is about" and using that as a way to explore into story spaces that the other franchises really can't, because money and conflict and such are forced by the logic of that particular franchise to wedge their way in and essentially dilute the rest of the story.

Would The Measure of a Man (can Data be dissembled and studied by Starfleet against his will?) been improved by adding a subplot about an argument about the size of the bond that should be posted before the trial? Would the Dominion War have been improved by an extensive plot about bribery causing substandard war ships to be created because someone at Utopia Planetia was just straight-up lining their pockets? There's nothing abstractly wrong with these ideas and they've been used in other series to good effect, but it's nice to have a series that spent no time on that particular aspect. And there'd be nothing wrong with some other franchise focusing almost exclusively on such a story.

But I don't think of the Federation "not having money" as anything other than a story device, and were I in charge of the franchise I would have written straight into the story bible that this is a framing device and authors are not to sit there and try to examine the details too closely, or try to write stories around how the idea doesn't really work. There's nothing to emulate there, there's no path from here to there, it just doesn't work. At least not with the model of human that I live with.