TenForward: Where Every Vulcan Knows Your Name

It is beyond all scarcity, though. Even pre-holodeck matter replication is supposed to be cheap enough relative to the energy density that it's cheaper to replicate food than store supplies. I mean, think about it. They are coaxing energy together so hard it makes atoms, and arranging them so precisely they 3D print objects. In a matter of seconds. Either the Federation has the most disproportionately expensive space program in the universe or making stuff is entirely trivial. Keep in mind that if you live on Earth you aren't doing FTL travel at the same time as you replicate stuff, so all that energy production should be going straight to making things.

And post-holodeck you can have literally anything you want as long as you have access to one. Zero limits beyond your physical body staying inside the room. That seems to be the sole difference between Federation members and the Q. They just seem to put a big cultural premium on "real" stuff, which I guess makes sense in a world where everything is 3D printed and every civilian has the fashion sense of a 1970s lounge chair that exploded onto a person for some reason.

Sure. And you might even have people who become addicted to consumerism. (Replicator use disorder?). You can still cut those individuals off and credibly claim to have a post scarcity society.

The point of post-scarcity is that, on average, you're not making difficult choices about which goods and services to consume.

But if it’s true, then we only have a 25% margin on food (10/8), and to my engineering mind that’s not enough. We gotta pump those numbers up.

Or, and I'm just spitballing here, we should make sure everyone gets enough food first, then work on increasing production. What's the point in getting to a 50% or even a 100% margin on excess food production if people are still starving to death because we can't get it to them?

Also, if employers know that you could quit tomorrow and have housing, food, and health care while you look for another job, they would be incentivized to make it not so shitty to work there.

There's a few reasons why the advanced technology might be easier to accept without question than the society without money.

1. FTL and other advanced technologies are core elements that are essential to the premise and genre, things which you are asked to accept right up front. Those same elements might very well be hard to accept if they weren't part of the show from the beginning, and therefore were not part of your expectations. You would probably have a lot of people get pissed if they showed up in a Lord of the Rings movie or a typical police procedural, just like you would probably piss off a lot of people introducing real magic, ghosts, and angels in Star Trek.

2. Advanced technology is in every episode. Trekonomics is not. Something that is constant is probably going to become tolerated and/or ignored fairly quickly, or it's likely to drive me away and I probably don't become a fan. Something that pops up occasionally stands out that much more because it is only there occasionally.

3. The average person is going to find it easier to have nerdy delight in robots, spaceships, and pew pew lasers, rather than economics. We are much more accepting of the things we like.

4. Most people have very little personal, hands on experience with space travel and the obstacles to FTL. But the audience generally does have experience dealing with other people, including the types of interaction that involve money, labor, goods, services, favors, bartering and so on. Accepting something that goes against what you know on a purely intellectual level is a lot easier than accepting something that you feel contradicts your lived experience.

5. They talk about trade and commerce all the time, which can seem contradictory to the whole lack of money thing. Bones says he has money in Star Trek 3, but as soon as Kirk can't pay for pizza in Star Trek 4, we don't have money in the future. But we still visit alien worlds and buy things at markets, negotiate trade agreements, and so on. It's similar to how I can accept a seemingly endless stream of ridiculous sci-fi concepts in Stargate SG-1, but I can't just accept the lack of explanation for why everyone speaks English, because they have a linguist on the team and keep drawing attention to the fact that there are also alien languages.*

6. Because the science behind the advanced technologies is very soft, mostly handwaved with technobabble, and therefore there isn't much substance to pick at. Ships go really fast because they do, and there's no larger implications to that because communication is instantaneous somehow, as are sensors I guess. Any nitpicks that come up beyond that can be handwaved away with more random nonsense pretending to mean something, the technobabble giveth and the technobabble taketh away. Because money, trade, labor and the distribution of goods and services touches almost everything in one way or another, the complexities of civilization as a whole are there for a critic to work with and extrapolate from. Replicators solve many problems, but there's still jobs that must be done which are unpleasant and which few people would find fulfilling. The federation has not relied on robots for most such tasks, and when such things do come up, it's almost always presented in a negative light. Why does the Picard family get a whole vineyard, and who decides how land can be used and who gets to live where? Is there really no conflict over any of this? And even if we just accept that humans have "evolved" beyond such things, what about immigrants from other worlds with other cultures? If earth is such a paradise, one would expect a lot of people on other worlds to want to move there. There's only so much room on the planet, especially if we want to leave nature intact.... and I could go on.

* Start Trek isn't immune to the language thing either, even with the universal translator. Why do Klingons switch in and out of Klingonese, even when on their homeworld, at their official hearings surrounded by their own people?

You know I never really thought of it from that perspective before. That is kind of insane. I guess not super surprising. With every Trek and something new people get really upset about something that is different than what they're used to. Why wouldn't that apply to certain parts of the whole core concept? Does seem like it requires some loopy cognitive dissonance to get to that.

That is a fascinating observation. FTL, replicators, transporters, etc. DS9 kind of ruined the illusion since they toyed with latinum so much with the Ferengis

Somebody explain to me how come Quark gets to charge people for a cup of tea in that context.

Simple.

He's a greedy Ferengi and not part of the Federation.

Also: The Bajorans down on the planet you speak of exchange currency. The planet doesn't have the infrastructure to be post-scarcity... That's, like, the entire premise for the show. They're getting assistance from the Federation to help rebuild after the Cardassian occupation while also petitioning to join the Federation.

The most flimsy explanations are actually just how Earth operates a currency-less society. They trade. They barter. They simply don't have money. Most every race that isn't capable of producing a resource they want trades. And some of those races also happen to value currency in the form of liquid metal wrapped in gold. 🤷🏻‍♂️