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Reputation and the money-less economy
malakhglitch
Member Posts: 55 Arc User
*** No this is not about the Reputation System ... at least not exactly. ***
In a post-scarcity society where the basic necessities of food, clothing and shelter are no longer the driving force behind society, it is quite possible to have a money-less economy. Instead there may rise a reputation economy based on 'personal brands' or what a group perceives to be your capabilities and feedback on your ability to deliver on promises made. In current terms this might be near to an anarcho-communist philosophy.
While I know that STO was made the way it was because it is essentially a cookie-cutter MMO I cannot help but think up of ways its economy could have been made closer to what has been mentioned in canon; that the UFP has a money-less economy.
Reputation could have been a better way of mimicking the money-less economy of the Star Trek Universe. You would start out with a basic Reputation score and build it up by completing missions (replays would not give Reputation). As your Reputation score grows you open up access to more stuff.
From the tired mind of a wage slave 10 minutes before closing time... forgive the rambling.
In a post-scarcity society where the basic necessities of food, clothing and shelter are no longer the driving force behind society, it is quite possible to have a money-less economy. Instead there may rise a reputation economy based on 'personal brands' or what a group perceives to be your capabilities and feedback on your ability to deliver on promises made. In current terms this might be near to an anarcho-communist philosophy.
While I know that STO was made the way it was because it is essentially a cookie-cutter MMO I cannot help but think up of ways its economy could have been made closer to what has been mentioned in canon; that the UFP has a money-less economy.
Reputation could have been a better way of mimicking the money-less economy of the Star Trek Universe. You would start out with a basic Reputation score and build it up by completing missions (replays would not give Reputation). As your Reputation score grows you open up access to more stuff.
From the tired mind of a wage slave 10 minutes before closing time... forgive the rambling.
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
Post edited by malakhglitch on
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Humans have evolved to not need money, that does not mean every planet in the federation does not have its own economy. it also does not stop humans from winning and spending latinum either. (there is just no urgent desire to do so) or that starfleet officers dont have a ration system because its mentioned several times.
the federation will also have the need to trade and while perhaps not using currency will need resources to barter with.
You must have missed the explicit statement by Picard in First Contact that "money doesn't exist in the 24th Century".
Simply put, Capitalism isn't a desirable economic system, it's merely the most functional system we've devised up until now(and even that is debatable - economic theory's advanced a lot since "righteous capitalists vs godless commies", not that you'd know it by academic curricula or the business press). With technologies like the Replicator, it becomes an undesirable AND untenable system; you have what amounts to an Open Source philosophy among creators of content and ideas, who have the ability to produce anything they imagine at-will with no cost other than energy(which would be free and ubiquitous with solar, fusion, and M-AM tech fueled by automated resource extraction) or whatever junk-matter they have lying around. There's just no way for a monetary system to survive that combination.
As for your other examples; the "ration system" primarily comes from Voyager, and was a result of their circumstances - most Federation starships will never encounter circumstances where limiting energy use would be a problem, and with the functionally unlimited energy on a normal starship you could turn the place into a perpetual orgy-barge and still never run out of anything. Latinum has nothing to do with the Federation, and that Federation personnel would use it in circumstances where it's the local custom to do so says more about their willingness to accept foreign cultures than it does their own economic inclinations - DS9 was a Bajoran station remember, and it's made clear on several occasions that Bajoran and Federation law aren't the same, their economic ideals are no doubt similarly disparate. The conflation of "trade" and "fiat and/or standard-linked currency systems driving a Capitalist greed-based economic system" is one of the most irritating aspects of the whole edifice, IMO - anything could be a "trade", hell, you could consider your family's Christmas/equivalent holiday gathering a "trade", where multiple parties exchange items while attempting to provide roughly equivalent value to all other parties; a "gift economy". "There are more things in heaven and earth.." mate, a sentiment Capitalists would do well to take to heart.
Anyway, back to Trek-specific points; if the Federation doesn't have a moneyless economy, why have we never seen anyone pay for things? There isn't even a till(register for you yanks) in Sisko's, nobody ever pays for their food there, and they're never asked to. When Harry encounters the alternate timeline in "Non Sequitur", he never pays for his coffee from that shop, and nobody else seems to bother to either. Even the "frontier" border colonies in the Cardassian DMZ have free access to replicators whenever they choose to, going by "Preemptive Strike". In ST4, Kirk and the others appear totally baffled by the concept of money beyond the idea that it exists and they might need some.
Why do luxury goods cost money? Because they require resources and labour. Well, ubiquitous access to Replication technology and abundant energy makes any resource requirement meaningless. So what about labour, why does that cost money? Because necessities cost money, as they also require resources and labour to produce, and so people who expend labour in the creation or production of luxury goods have to be compensated so they can afford to live. Once you eliminate the resource and labour costs for necessities, and the resource costs for luxuries -which Replication, abundant energy, and advanced automation would do- there's no longer any necessity that those involved in the creation of luxury items be compensated. Doubtless, some people would still insist that they should be compensated even were it unnecessary, falling back on the concept of Intellectual Property(a meaningless and counterfactual construct the moment you step outside Capitalist economic theory), but that insistence would be irrelevant in a post-scarcity world, because after the introduction of the technology there would be a tipping point, a "critical mass" in the number of creative people willing to do their work for reasons other than financial enrichment - for personal satisfaction, because they like attention or acclaim, because they want other people to experience and enjoy their work, because they believe that people who are able to help others and enrich their lives should do so simply because they can, etc etc etc.
Once that tipping point is reached, demanding financial compensation for something becomes pointless, since a potential consumer of your content/product/idea can simply turn to any one of a hundred others who'll do it happily and for free, and then it becomes only a matter of time until social attitudes shift and demanding "compensation" for sharing the things that you enjoy doing anyway becomes seen as nothing more than selfish spite, like a child snatching their toys away from other children and yelling "mine! mine! mine!" even when they have no intention of playing with them.
We are PWE. Your forums and game accounts will be added to our own. Your community will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile.
A better term than using Reputation I would say, is to use Requisition. You accumulate Requisition points based on your Performance/Reputation and in turn are allowed to Requisition new, better or different equipment from Starfleet. This essentially mirrors "rising in the ranks".
In a way that is how the Energy Credits works if we evaluate how it is set up mechanics wise for the game, when purchasing equipment from NPC vendors. The way we earn them and are abler to trade them however is a bit more contrary to a more "true" requisition system.
My mind veered away from using Requisition because I am a great Dawn of War fan.
Except that the drops system really throws it all off. I would actually prefer drops to be in the form of EC and the vendors have a wider range of stuff to"sell."