This was the product of one shower's-worth of thought, and was meant to be more worked-out than a Facebook comment, but hardly a deep work of philosophy. As Rick's link above, shows, others have put WAY more thought into Trek-based economics.
"you enormously enhance the *power* of the government officials who make this decision"
Yep. In the FB thread (on Rick's FB) that inspired this, Steven seemed fairly convincing to me that the Federation is, for most practical purposes, a military dictatorship, albeit a reasonably benevolent one.
"constraints like the fact that SUCs can't be inherited: that powerfully incentivizes people to gather and hoard *stuff* instead of money"
If I was going for a purely original utopia, I would certainly do things differently. I believe that inheritances are largely negative now, and would be completely so in a properly post-scarcity society. (The irony that I am living off one myself is not lost on me, but I don't have other viable options.) However, any Trek-based economic model has to deal with the elephant that is Chateau Picard. If I was defining headcanon at a more fine-grained level, I would say that keeping the vineyard in the (clearly old money) family was part of a clearly corrupt bargain made during the process of getting to (semi-)utopia. Precisely because of the greedy, power-hungry humans you note.
[As a complete side-note, the last time I did worldbuilding for an SF novel (which I will never actually write), the "one handwaved technology" I put in the deep background was a cheap, easy, foolproof way of detecting "degree of sociopathy" in an individual. This eventually (after some considerable World War-sized upheaval) led to a world where sociopaths are second-class citizens, forbidden from holding significant governmental or corporate power. Which, I posited, would then let you achieve something close to a utopia. But I digress. It might be possible to crowbar such a thing into Trek history, but it wouldn't be easy, and I don't recall any evidence suggesting such an effort.]
"Many people -- not just the outliers, I mean *many* people -- find it fun to get one-up on The Man, and break the rules."
Trek seems to consistently claim that Federation society is past that. Like their claims about money, this claim largely exists in a magical handwaved vacuum, with no notion how it was achieved. If one grants that -- somehow -- it was achieved, I think it's reasonable to think that it could be maintained.
"You often refer to "late-stage capitalism". Far as I can tell, it's more the case that we've reverted to *early*-stage robber baron capitalism"
Well, according to people who have studied a lot more Marxism than I have, The New Deal was a desperate (and -- temporarily -- successful) patch to keep capitalism from self-destructing. Hence, it managed to, if you will, reset the clock from "late" to "middle". But since ~1980, as you know, that's been steadily eroding.
"not least the notion of mandatory negative interest"
I'm sure I didn't invent negative interest, though I don't recall where I first met the notion.
"the system essentially forbids large-scale private enterprise (since you don't allow for contracts, which means you have basically forbidden monetary property), which means that *investment* in is largely impossible"
I don't forbid contracts per se, just contracts involving SUCs. I haven't thought out what circumstances they would still make sense under, but I presume there are some.
As far as private enterprise and investments, we don't seem to see much evidence in Trek of (non-government) investment or private enterprise existing. Certainly nothing on the size of Google, Boeing, General Motors, or Disney. There are reasonable arguments to be made that this is a negative quality of the Federation, but it is what we appear to see in the canon.
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Date: 2020-05-11 04:40 am (UTC)"you enormously enhance the *power* of the government officials who make this decision"
Yep. In the FB thread (on Rick's FB) that inspired this, Steven seemed fairly convincing to me that the Federation is, for most practical purposes, a military dictatorship, albeit a reasonably benevolent one.
"constraints like the fact that SUCs can't be inherited: that powerfully incentivizes people to gather and hoard *stuff* instead of money"
If I was going for a purely original utopia, I would certainly do things differently. I believe that inheritances are largely negative now, and would be completely so in a properly post-scarcity society. (The irony that I am living off one myself is not lost on me, but I don't have other viable options.) However, any Trek-based economic model has to deal with the elephant that is Chateau Picard. If I was defining headcanon at a more fine-grained level, I would say that keeping the vineyard in the (clearly old money) family was part of a clearly corrupt bargain made during the process of getting to (semi-)utopia. Precisely because of the greedy, power-hungry humans you note.
[As a complete side-note, the last time I did worldbuilding for an SF novel (which I will never actually write), the "one handwaved technology" I put in the deep background was a cheap, easy, foolproof way of detecting "degree of sociopathy" in an individual. This eventually (after some considerable World War-sized upheaval) led to a world where sociopaths are second-class citizens, forbidden from holding significant governmental or corporate power. Which, I posited, would then let you achieve something close to a utopia. But I digress. It might be possible to crowbar such a thing into Trek history, but it wouldn't be easy, and I don't recall any evidence suggesting such an effort.]
"Many people -- not just the outliers, I mean *many* people -- find it fun to get one-up on The Man, and break the rules."
Trek seems to consistently claim that Federation society is past that. Like their claims about money, this claim largely exists in a magical handwaved vacuum, with no notion how it was achieved. If one grants that -- somehow -- it was achieved, I think it's reasonable to think that it could be maintained.
"You often refer to "late-stage capitalism". Far as I can tell, it's more the case that we've reverted to *early*-stage robber baron capitalism"
Well, according to people who have studied a lot more Marxism than I have, The New Deal was a desperate (and -- temporarily -- successful) patch to keep capitalism from self-destructing. Hence, it managed to, if you will, reset the clock from "late" to "middle". But since ~1980, as you know, that's been steadily eroding.
"not least the notion of mandatory negative interest"
I'm sure I didn't invent negative interest, though I don't recall where I first met the notion.
"the system essentially forbids large-scale private enterprise (since you don't allow for contracts, which means you have basically forbidden monetary property), which means that *investment* in is largely impossible"
I don't forbid contracts per se, just contracts involving SUCs. I haven't thought out what circumstances they would still make sense under, but I presume there are some.
As far as private enterprise and investments, we don't seem to see much evidence in Trek of (non-government) investment or private enterprise existing. Certainly nothing on the size of Google, Boeing, General Motors, or Disney. There are reasonable arguments to be made that this is a negative quality of the Federation, but it is what we appear to see in the canon.