Star Trek economics
An interesting article over at Medium. It discusses how we might move from current economics based on scarcity towards one where it may be assumed everybody already has everything they need, as increasingly is the case. The writer studies Star Trek to see how we may come up with an intermediate form, that doesn’t do away with economic incentives, but just formalizes the decoupling from labor and reward, as is aptly illustrated by this quote:
In reality,the market already basically dictates this, for who can claim that a Wall Street banker works more than a teacher?
The writer theorizes the actual ‘currency’ might be the Joule, because in the end, shouldn’t cost be about the energy it takes to make it happen? I however always thought be should be looking toward entropy for a definition of currency, because in the end we move Joules around, they’re not used up. Doesn’t it makes sense to take some thermodynamic definition of Work for… work?
Anyway, the article is a good read!