PRAISE FOR MANU SAADIA “Manu Saadia proves that Star Trek is an even more valuable cultural icon than we ever suspected.” —Charlie Jane Anders, Hugo Award winner, editor in chief, io9 “In Trekonomics, Saadia reminds us of what made Star Trek such a bold experiment in the first place: its Utopian theme of human culture recovering from capitalism. Smart, funny, and wise, this book is a great work of analysis for fans of Star Trek and a call to arms for fans of eco- nomic justice.” —Annalee Newitz, tech culture editor, Ars Technica “To understand the fictional world of Star Trek is to understand not only the forces which drive our real world, but also the changes that are necessary to improve it. Manu’s book will change the way you see three different universes: the one that Gene Roddenberry created, the one we’re in, and the one we’re headed toward.” —Felix Salmon, senior editor, Fusion TREKONOMICS TREKONOMICS MANU SAADIA Copyright © 2016 Manu Saadia All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher. Published by Pipertext Publishing Co., Inc., in association with Inkshares, Inc., San Francisco, California www.pipertext.com www.inkshares.com Edited and designed by Girl Friday Productions www.girlfridayproductions.com Cover design by Jennifer Bostic Cover art by John Powers ISBN: 9781941758755 e-ISBN: 9781941758762 Library of Congress Control Number: 2016931451 First edition Printed in United States To Lazare, our chief engineer, and to my father, Yossef Saadia. CONTENTS Foreword by Brad DeLong . .xi Introduction: “Dream not of today, Mister Picard” . .1 Chapter 1: “. Money went the way of the dinosaurs” The absence of money in Star Trek . 19 Chapter 2: “. Why is everyone so worried about holograms taking over the universe?” The meaning of work in Star Trek’s society . 41 Chapter 3: “Tea, Earl Grey, hot” The replicator . 65 Chapter 4: “. Only a fool would stand in the way of progress” Natural limits and technology substitution . 87 Chapter 5: “. The thought that warp engines might be causing some kind of damage” Free riding and negative externalities in a post-scarcity world . 109 Chapter 6: “. That future, that space station, all those people—they exist . .” Sources of trekonomics in classic science fiction . 137 Chapter 7: “There are still many human emotions I do not comprehend . .” The psychology of utopia . 165 Chapter 8: “Never be afraid to mislabel a product” The Ferengis, interstellar capitalists . .187 Chapter 9: “I live in the hope that you may one day see the universe for what it truly is . .” Prospects for trekonomics in the real world . 209 Conclusion: “Live Long, and Prosper” . 237 Acknowledgments . 243 Further Reading . .247 Star Trek Episodes Cited . .255 Science Fiction for Further Reading . 259 About the Author . .261 List of Patrons . 263 “I have shown how the ideas of progression and of the indefinite per- fectibility of the human race belong to democratic ages. Democratic nations care but little for what has been, but they are haunted by visions of what will be; in this direction their unbounded imagination grows and dilates beyond all measure. Here then is the wildest range open to the genius of poets, which allows them to remove their performances to a sufficient distance from the eye. Democracy shuts the past against the poet, but opens the future before him.” —Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America “It no longer seemed so important whether the world was Adam Smith or Karl Marx. Neither made very much sense under the new circumstances.” —Isaac Asimov, I, Robot FOREWORD BY BRAD DELONG “Live long and prosper.” “Beam me up, Scotty.” “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one.” “Fascinating.” “Make it so.” “Logic is the beginning of wisdom, not the end.” “I’m a doctor, not a bricklayer.” “Highly illogical.” “You can stop it!” “Stop it? I’m counting on it!” Over the past half century Star Trek has woven itself into our sociocultural DNA. It provides a set of powerful, striking, and benefi- cial ideas that help us here in our civilization think better. Even those of us who are economists. Why should the imaginary dreams of science fiction help us think better? Back in 1759, the man who was to become the first economist, young Adam Smith, a Scottish moral philosopher on the make, wrote in his Theory of Moral Sentiments of how “a stranger to human nature, [seeing] the indifference of men about the misery of their inferi- ors . [would conclude that] pain must be more agonizing, and the xiv Foreword convulsions of death more terrible, to persons of higher rank, than to those of meaner stations.” There is no such alien stranger. Smith is telling us of somebody who does not exist. It’s a very short eighteenth-century science-fiction story. Why? Because we love to tell one another false stories, to con- verse about imaginary people, be it in philosophical treatises or in television serials. It is what we do as humans. If an alien intellect, vast and cool and unsympathetic (or vast and warm and sympathetic), were to scrutinize us from afar, it would inevitably conclude that telling each other false stories is a major part of what we are, and it would wonder why we communicate—or miscommunicate— in this way. Everyone is engaged in dream-work. Everyone chatters about their imaginary friends. Some are ascribing agency, motivation, and intelli- gence to patterns of societal forces that are the emergent properties of distributed interactions. Others are writing—or filming—fiction. Our fictions are, collectively, the dream-work of humanity. We dream these dreams to amuse ourselves, but also so that we will be more sane when we awake. No wonder, then, that investors and economists also gab about imaginary friends, frenemies, and unfriends with names like “Ms. Market” and “confidence” and “global risk tolerance” as they try to understand things called “asset prices.” They too are doing dream-work. But in some ways the most profound thinking, the deepest dream- work, is being done by science fiction. That’s because science-fiction writers and fans are explicitly aware that what they are engaged in is humanity’s dreaming. TREKONOMICS xv The Prime Directive of Star Trek: The Original Series was a way to process America’s 1960s misadventure in Vietnam. I first recognized that Star Trek was a very different kind of show back in the 1960s, when at the end of “Arena,” Kirk neither killed nor civilized nor brought democracy to the Gorn, but let him go to make his own destiny. Gene Roddenberry mostly wanted to find a way to get people to pay him to make up stories, so that he wouldn’t have to take a job that required a lot of heavy lifting. But he also wanted to tell particular sto- ries. The stories he wanted to tell were those that would be the dream- work for a better future. He wanted to tell stories of a progressive humanity. He wanted to tell stories about people in a better future in which governmental insti- tutions were smart enough to stay out of Vietnam and people weren’t obsessed with leaky roofs and food shortages. He wanted to tell stories in which racial prejudice was as silly and stupid as it, in fact, is. He wanted to tell stories in which it would be normal for a woman to be if not number one at least number two as first officer of a starship. He wanted to tell stories in which everyone—even the disposable Red Shirts—was an officer, a trained and well-educated professional treated with dignity and respect by her peers and superiors. In turn, Gene Roddenberry’s successors—showrunners, writers, actors, set designers, and all the rest—took on the same project: to do the dream-work of a better future. As North Atlantic civilization bobbled the historical opportunity that was the collapse of the Soviet Empire, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine pointed to better directions. Gene Roddenberry made Star Trek a collective dreaming about a better future, and not just a Western xvi Foreword or a medieval romance with lightsabers, whooshing spaceships, and exploding planets bolted onto it. Four hundred years ago, in almost all human societies, being rich relative to your neighbors mattered a lot. If you weren’t rich, you were malnourished—perhaps not getting the nutrients for your immune system to function well, perhaps not getting the calories you needed to reliably ovulate, and probably losing at least one tooth with every baby. And, you were short. In the eighteenth century, Adam Smith’s England was the richest society in the world, yet the orphans sent to sea by the charity that was the Marine Society were close to eight inches shorter than the aristocrats’ sons sent to Sandhurst to become army officers. Plus, your roof leaked. Today, in the prosperous North Atlantic, food-related public-health problems are no longer predominantly problems of malnutrition and caloric scarcity but rather problems of overabundance. And it is not just in food that those of us in the developed world’s bubble have abundance. You only have to go down to Long Beach and look at the containers being unloaded to convince yourself that our current eco- nomic problem is not one of need. Roddenberry’s dreams, Star Trek’s dreams, help us to think through what it would be like to have a society of abundance, of logic and rea- son, and of inclusion.