And some writers have more difficulty even wrapping their head around the concept than others *coughronmoorecough*.īasically, the society of the UFP was a blank slate. Different writers seem to imagine it different ways. Well, the truth is, we really don't know. Quark deals with scarcity only insofar as he steps outside of the relatively comfortable sphere of Federation influence on the station.Īnd the occasional fan-written comic resynthesis. He's never priced out of his lease on the promenade, and in fact basically gets a handshake deal from the guy running the place (and ergo from the Federation by proxy) that he gets to keep his real estate and his profit for the price of acceding to a little bit of Play Nice blackmail in the pilot.
#GOLD PRESSED LATINUM TO DOLLARS FREE#
Because here's the thing: Quark does seem to have access, at least on the station, to the knock-on effects of that Federation economy DS9 gets a makeover that no one ever talks about paying for once the Feds show up, Quark's inventory problems tend almost entirely to be related to grey- and black-market items, his bar infrastructure headaches are along the lines of "my (magical free food producing, Federation-provided) replicator is on the blink and hasn't been fixed yet by the (salaried Federation) guy in charge of fixing it", etc. I wish DS9 had actually gon further on that front, because we didn't really see that followed through on entirely. Quark is my favorite Deep Space Nine character for precisely this reason: He clearly doesn't have access to the Federation post-scarcity economy Posted by Slackermagee at 7:38 AM on Novem You'd have enough money to never want for anything short of a mega-yacht nor need to wait longer than a few days (or hours, or minutes) to receive the desired item.
Monetary economies could become novelty economies or morality economies, or money could remain in a vestigial sense to curb truly excessive aggregation of materials (like building an everest sized mountain of plastic). It isn't very often than an author will delve into the rabbit holes of post novelty scarcity (usually via Infinite Fun Spaces or recursively copy&pasta souls to run around virtual worlds making stuff happen that one could then observe and share with other people who had millions of mini-me's running around panopticon simulations). See, Accelerando by Charles Stross or any of The Culture novels by Iain M Banks for infinitely better takes on social issues and interactions that take place beneath a back drop of post scarcity.īut these societies are all post resource scarcity. Star Trek is definitely not what you should look at for a post scarcity economy. Posted by Halloween Jack at 7:37 AM on Novem
Thus, "The Federation doesn't use money" is true in about the same way as "Vulcans don't have emotions", which is to say that it's not really true in a literal sense. If you accept that money does exist in the Federation-as clearly it does, at least as far back as Star Trek III, in which McCoy attempts to charter a private vessel in order to get to the Genesis planet, and I'm pretty sure that TOS' "Mudd's Women" also featured currency transactions, possibly also "The Trouble With Tribbles"-then you could have a system in which, even if the Federation has no currency of its own, it might acquire some in order to facilitate trades with cultures that do have it, and Federation citizens are free to acquire currency of their own. (There are almost always Starfleet personnel at Quark's dabo tables, for example, and Jake works at acquiring some in "In the Cards" so that he can buy his dad a Willie Mays rookie card.) You could think of this as the equivalent of an MMORPG "freemium" system in real life if you're happy with replicated wine, then no prob, but if you want the real stuff you might have to scrape together some latinum to buy a bottle of Chateau Picard. The Federation does, however, interact with many other societies, such as the Ferengi, who do use currency, and therefore some of them see fit to acquire and save money for such interactions. DS9 makes it pretty clear that, in the Federation, money isn't necessary for survival, or even to live a pretty fulfilling life.
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