Must-Read: Noah Smith: Star Trek Economics: Life After the Dismal Science

Must-Read: Noah Smith: Star Trek Economics: Life After the Dismal Science: “I grew up watching ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation’ (easily the best of the Star Trek shows)…

…There’s one big, obvious thing missing from the future society depicted in the program. No one is doing business…. Food and luxuries are free, provided by ‘replicators’…. Scarcity… seems to have been eliminated. Is this really the future?… Current world annual gross domestic product per capita… is only about $13,000–enough to put food on the table and a roof over one’s head. What happens when it is $100,000, or $200,000?… This is the basic Star Trek future. But actually, I think that the future has a far more radical transformation in store for us. I predict that technological advances will actually end economics as we know it, and destroy scarcity, by changing the nature of human desire…. Instead of a world defined by scarcity, we will live in a world defined by self-expression. We will be able to decide the kind of people that we want to be, and the kind of lives we want to live, instead of having the world decide for us. The Star Trek utopia will free us from the fetters of the dismal science.