Collectivism and Science Fiction, Supplemental: Why TANSTAAFL.
Jason Kuznicki on Jul 7th 2008
Several of the pieces we have read or will read, including Cordwainer Smith’s “Alpha Ralpha Boulevard,” make mention of free food and drink in the future: a sign, the authors suggest, of the vast economic growth between now and then. The same is true in the Star Trek universe and in so many others that I’ve basically lost count.
But it won’t happen that way, and here’s why.
Let’s suppose that food and drink were free, given away by a government that provided everyone with whatever their hearts desired, at least on this front. We’ll assume the existence decent replicator technology, so that I can enjoy guilt-free vegan foie gras whenever I press a button. (Or, for that matter, 50-year-old scotch.)
Did any of these “post-scarcity” writers ever consider the possibility of substitution? When you have a free good, like free food, it can become a substitute for nearly anything else, provided that there is some incremental benefit to using it that way. If all it took were pressing a button, I’d just as soon heat my home with that 50-year-old scotch. I mean, sure, it’s got its drawbacks, but never having to pay heating bills again is hard to argue with. And the home itself? Why, I’d build one out of gingerbread, or at least a nice gazebo. I mean — why not? It smells good. And it’s free, isn’t it? When I get tired of the thing, I’ll send it down the incinerator: more free fuel. When I need compost for my garden, I’ll call up a bunch of vegetable matter. The possibilities are limitless.
And the problem will be that everyone else will do the same. Economies of scale would emerge in the replicator-exploitation market, and the state would never be able to keep up: When a good is free, there’s no point to ever declining to use it for something. Entire business models would be devoted to making the state work ever harder to satisfy the demand for “free” goods, until the state was forced to stop offering them in limitless quantities. There can never be a general glut, and by the time we’ve arrived at “limitless free food and drink,” we are very near indeed to decreeing that one exists.
How would this problem be solved?
One approach is simply to say that I’ve missed the point of the post-scarcity economy, and to claim that yes, all these things will indeed be free! Post-scarcity economies rely on limitless inputs, so there’s no need to worry.
Yet this amount of consumption would require some limited input, if only time itself, which cannot be reversed or reserved. And it ought to spell trouble that it’s difficult even to say what the other inputs would be: Solar power, perhaps? Fine — but remember, as the demand is infinite, the race will be on to expand our distinctly limited solar power capacity. Economics isn’t about moving things toward post-scarcity. It’s about whatever limits we do have, and finding them, and dealing with them efficiently.
Or is the difficulty I’ve posed perhaps not actually a problem? Can it be that food will one day be as common as air, supplied perhaps by the air itself, in the form of a utility fog?
Even if it were, scarcity — in some form — would remain. Certainly one can point to some goods that appear to be post-scarcity even today, such as air. Few people die from lack of air, right? Well… there still are a few. And air quality already is a recognized question in economics, suggesting that our current supply of relatively high-quality air is only plentiful because we recognize it as scarce, and allocate certain rights regarding it. Meanwhile, if we were legally to treat air as a post-scarcity good, we’d find breathable air pretty scarce in a hurry.
Or could the state solve the problem for us? Sure, the state could enforce rationing, and perhaps every replicator (or every human-utility fog interface) could have a mandatory shutoff valve that stops it after x pounds of output per day. But this would only create a market — one with virtually infinite payoff — for replicator mods to subvert the controls. And the state itself would still have to grapple with the scarcity of whatever inputs the replicators required.
A simpler, more efficient way of dealing with all of this is to take “the scarcity of whatever inputs the replicators required” — and make it, rather than state quotas and state enforcement goons, the basis for rationing replicator outputs. That is, set up a market, in which the scarcity of inputs will influence the price of outputs.
A market would cut out the extra steps of “free” food, state rationing of “free” food, smuggling, and prison time for resistors. This would spare everyone a sordid and decidedly non-future-iffic spectacle. In return, all we’d have to do is make everyone pay for what they get, every single time, even if it is a pittance — and all of this is just as Heinlein famously suggested. Is that so cruel or barbaric?
Filed in The Boardroom, The Bookshelf
I’ve been told that in star trek they tried to get around the problems by suggesting the characters had some kind of higher morality that meant they would automatically ration themselves for the greater good.
The same source also told me that they tried to suggest, in the later series anyway, that star trek people would be too moral for conflict then had to constantly seek out ways round that restriction when they realised just how dull the stories would be.
Well, you could maybe rationalize that both in Alpha Ralpha Blvd and in Star Trek the food ports seem pretty small, so you’d have to commit more time and energy to abusing the resource than it’s really worth. I mean, you’d be standing in front of that microwave-sized replicator a loooong time before you got enough gingerbread to shingle the roof with. Plus, in both those worlds it seems like all resources necessary for life are free, not only food. Which I realize just generalizes the problem.
And yeah, like Matt said, I think Rodenberry rationalized that the human race in his universe had morally evolved to the point where it didn’t need the incentive of payment to work, they just did it for personal fulfillment. Which is pretty weak, but he was obviously not interested in the pragmatic economic/political implications of his story. I mean, I watched every episode of Next Generation growing up, and damned if I can even tell you whether they have elections, let alone how their economy runs. There’s probably some deep insight about human nature in the fact that it’s easier to imagine the mechanics of a dystopia than a utopia.
It’s also worth noting that we already have circumstances where resources are available for free, and they don’t seem to be abused much.
After all, I don’t have to pay my water bill–My landlord pays it. Something that’s true for a lot of renters.
I could, were I so inclined, rig some sort of hydroelectric generator in my bathtub to take advantage of this free resource. But A) that would require more time that I want to spend, and B) my landlord would notice and cut me off.
And you’ll have a hard time convincing me that those disincentives will change drastically when you put a government in charge.
After all, I don’t have to pay my water bill–My landlord pays it. Something that’s true for a lot of renters.
But this is the very sort of example for which TANSTAAFL was coined! You do pay your water bill, it just goes by the name of, and under the cover of, “rent.” It’s included in the price, which your landlord has already passed along to you.
Also, you in effect pay a premium over most other consumers of water for the convenience of getting it “for free.” The landlord accepts a risk — the risk that you will waste water — and he prices that into the rent, too.
Moreover, you will also tend to use more water than those who have to pay for it individually. I have seen statistics suggesting that in a closely related field — energy use by renters — there were massive decreases in use once renters had to pay their own itemized bills rather than paying as part of a single-price rent. I can look these up if you like, but trust me that they are significant, and you really are not getting anything for free. On the contrary, if you are at all frugal about your water use, you are almost certainly getting ripped off by your wasteful neighbors. And you’re calling it a bargain.
But presumably the folks in Star Trek ‘pay’ for their food in a similar fashion. The food isn’t free per se. It’s just so cheap and plentiful that there isn’t really an incentive to charge for it on a per-use basis instead of through starfleet taxes or whatever.
And things really can be that cheap. Web pages are worth money, but readers don’t end up paying–the costs of processing such a transaction are so high that there’s no point.
So really, it’s not that Star Trek is saying that there IS such things as a free lunch.
They’re just saying that any sufficiently inexpensive lunch is indistinguishable from free.
Of course, things only get worse by Star Trek: The New Generation. To paraphrase Arthur C. Clarke, a sufficiently realistic holodeck experience is indistinguishable from reality, raising the question how it is Star Fleet manages to get presumably volunteer crew members to sit around doing what still looks like mind numbingly boring jobs when they could be indulging their every fantasy in the holodecks back home.
In any case, it appears that intelligence is still a scarce and unequally distributed good in the Star Trek universe, else the crew members would have learned by now not to wear the “I’m expendable” red shirts when they go off with the stars in a landing party.