The Economics of Star Trek: The Proto-Post-Scarcity Economy

by Rick Webb, Manu Saadia (Foreword)

Five years ago after its original publication on The Economics of Star The Proto-Post-Scarcity Society is finally available in book form, expanded and annotated. When originally published, The Economics of Star Trek garnered over a half a million reads, and was featured twice on the home page of Reddit, in Slate, Bloomberg, Boing Boing, Hacker Monthly, and more. It was a crazy time. In this fifth-anniversary edition, the original essay appears as-is, with extensive footnotes adding new new information, challenging some of the original suppositions, and expanding upon certain points. There are a lot of them. Additionally, there are six new essays regarding Trek and Artificial Intelligence, Bitcoin, Universal Basic Income and the new Trek franchises in film and television, as well as a retrospective essay looking back on the past five years since the original publication. Finally, the book includes an all new foreword from Manu Saadia, author of Trekonomics, which is the other major publication on the topic.

Genres: Star Trek, Nonfiction, Economics

121 pages, Kindle Edition

Published February 10, 2019

About the author

Investor and writer, venture partner at Quotidian Ventures, and CEO of Secret Clubhouse, a coworking space in Brooklyn. Co-founder of The Barbarian Group, served as their COO for the first ten years, and served at Tumblr as a consultant on Marketing and Revenue. Owns a record label called The Archenemy Record Company.

Reviews

[Gerhard · Rating 3 out of 5]

'One of the things I love about Trek is that it provides a compass. It provides a roadmap for humanity.'

As fuzzy-wuzzy as a trouble of Tribbles. Includes observations of the Federation in Discovery S01, but only hints at Picard et al. Foreword is by the author of 'Trekonomics', which Webb acknowledges is a more robust look at Trek and post-scarcity economics. We definitely need an academic comparison of the Culture and Trek. Interestingly, Star Wars is too simplistic to invite any kind of similar analysis.

[Erik · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wanted to like this.

The writing is all over the place. Webb goes from making an economic argument, to undermining his argument as weak in his own footnotes, to summarizing a bunch of other books he's read... This is at the level of a good Reddit comment, which is just about what it started out as.

The layout is amateurish, and the binding cheap -- the pages in my copy were bound in slightly cockeyed. It's also very short, which might be fine for the eBook, but the hardcover feels ridiculous because the text is so enormous to get it to 150 pages. It should have been bound like a novella.

It is just rife with typos, wrong forms of words ("effect" is used everywhere, when in each instance it should have been "affect"), and even misspelled character names (I know it's a made-up name, but it's "Lwaxana") and incorrect scientific terms ("Jules" rather than "Joules").

Nice cover, though.

Not recommended.

[Clare Moseley · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think the concept of this was interesting, but I don't think the author got deep enough. There were some very glaring omissions (in particular, the episode "In the Cards," which does portray Jake Sisko having to fall back onto a barter system due to the Federation's lack of money). The author also goes on an unnecessary tangent about his personal feelings about Discovery, something entirely outside the scope of his essay. It felt out-of-place and meanspirited. There were also some glaring typos, particularly in character names.

All in all, an interesting overview but I felt could have gone further.

[Aaron Schumacher · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read the print version of the blog post, which delivers on the fun of thinking about a world with the economics of the Star Trek future. In the end you can't expect scifi to deliver economic salvation, but imaginative inspiration is a fine starting point for learning and thinking more.

I didn't really find Webb's guesses to constitute a workable system, though I can't really say whether the problem is his, Star Trek's, or the failure of my imagination.

There's also an even more serious book on this topic: Trekonomics, by Manu Saadia.

[Jason Prugar · Rating 3 out of 5]

I take responsibility you're not really understanding what this book was, as I read it to get some ideas for a book series I'm writing. I expected it more to talk about Star Trek in hell they feel monetary system works, but really an essay sort of freeform thought using your examples of what might be happening, but not really backed up with a lot of concrete facts. Still pretty decent and worth a read, but not what was expected.

[Mutant Mike · Rating 2 out of 5]

The essay is pretty short, to say the least. Almost as short as some Facebook posts I've read on the subject. The author opted to print their entire original blog post, spanning around 40 pages, alongside paragraph-long annotations on almost every page. I wish I had ignored these annotations during my first read-through, as they often went off on tangents and, somewhat detrimentally, shot down their own arguments at times. Still, imagining how impactful it would be if replicators were made a reality makes "post-scarcity" a topic that's hard to make uninteresting. This was overall a breezy read.
In addition to the main essay, the book is expanded with some short essays on other present day concepts like universal basic income, blockchain, AI, and how they all relate back to the post-scarcity economy.
Oddly, There are 20 pages or so where the author scathingly reviews Star Trek Discovery before ultimately revealing that the show doesn't provide any fresh insights into their economic system. Deserved or not, the review doesn't really belong in this book. I can't help feeling that I bought something that was overly padded.

[Hendrik Little · Rating 2 out of 5]

Piecemeal and shallow. Readable and entertaining, if you like geeky web articles. Maybe just read the original article for free, online.