Comment on Was it a good thing that SNW explicitly said the Federation is socialist?
ElderWendigo@sh.itjust.works 5 months agoLike why would someone pay for a drink at Quark’s when every residence on DS9 has a replicator?
Because the scarce resource at Quark’s isn’t the food or drinks, it’s the atmosphere and the experience, i.e things the replicator cannot provide. Quark controls the holodecks too, but even if he didn’t the scarce resource would be authentic (not replicated) food and experiences. It’s been shown pretty regularly on the shows that some people prefer non-replicated food, non-synthohol drinks, and real people. It doesn’t really matter in that context if those are technically indistinguishable from the real thing (but even in canon there is a measureable difference between them and some things the replicators can’t do).
I don’t really believe there could ever be a post-scarcity world in which we don’t create new scarcities to demand.
bionicjoey@lemmy.ca 5 months ago
Again, the Ferengi are a bad example since they aren’t part of the federation. But my point was simply that this stuff wasn’t thought through. Why do the Ferengi exist? Because the writers wanted some capitalists to use as a contrast to the Federation.
I firmly believe that ST’s worldbuilding mostly handwaves the questions of economics and scarcity, at least within the Federation. The writers didn’t want to come up with good reasons for these things that actually make sense when you think about them.
It’s a great franchise, but we shouldn’t try to apply real-world economic ideas to it when that was so clearly not at the front of the writers minds when they created it.