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Evelyn K. Brunswick's avatar

First, I love your idea of presenting meta-stuff around the story - I'm doing the same.

Second, with regards to economics, I could write an entire thesis on this subject. In fact I sort of am in my Liberal Socialism section. The key point however is psychology. If you are talking about post-scarcity then we are in a situation where there is zero insecurity. Humans only 'behave badly' when they are in an insecure environment - which is, incidentally, precisely how that small minority in charge of neoliberalism currently maintain their social control - in other words, it's not about economics, it is about social control. Money, and its artificial restriction by a privatised banking system (i.e. the money supply), is the most obvious method here, since money is required to buy everything, from necessities to luxuries. Also note that any kind of artificial restriction on what a person can acquire will inevitably lead to negative feelings (social discord and disharmony - divide and conquer etc.).

What I'm really saying here is that if you remove the insecurity (negative emotions) from a group of humans, however large that group is, then you remove vice. People no longer horde, or are greedy. If supply is always greater than demand then there is no insecurity - nor, indeed, 'inflation' (prices don't put themselves up, people do), and you can fix the price of everything. Money then simply becomes a means of making acquisitions easier. In fact, with a sufficiently (emotionally and psychologically) mature population you no longer have money (or credits), because everyone just takes what they want or need. All the 'AI' would do is analyse the stocks and replenish them whenever necessary.

What you then end up with is akin to 'fully automated luxury communism'.

One first step towards this would indeed be a system in which let's say the cost of living (necessities) is 10k credits (per year). So you give everyone 20k per year and say if you want more than that you have to work for it, and how much extra you get depends on your skills, talent, effort, and usefulness to the community. You would also have to set the maximum income at, say, a million a year. Everything would also need a fixed price, of course.

I thought about this wonderful issue when I wrote my own 'long interstellar voyage to another system' story. The massive difference between our two visions, however, is the size of the population. You have a population of 100,000 in your massive toroid I believe. I have a far smaller version, in which the population size is governed by the social cognition number (i.e. Dunbar's number), which is 150 for humans. So the ship starts out with 32 couples (aged 18-22 or so), each of which will have maybe 2-4 children on the 14 year journey to Centauri. The ship is equipped to produce far more than 150 people would ever need. Most of their 'acquisitions' are in fact cultural and leisure, which costs virtually nothing - they have a bar, they play games, they watch visidramas and binge watch retro box sets, put on plays and concerts, make love, that kind of thing.

The other difference is the year of the setting - mine is about 100 years from now rather than your nearly 1000, so there is a big tech difference. But this makes the great irony of my version even more ironic, as far as the present is concerned, because even if they weren't when they set out, by the time they arrive the entire population is irrevocably communist...

Ah - this is also why I believe that any sufficiently advanced lifeform will always be communist.

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Elle Griffin's avatar

I ask this same question when I read various worldbuilding books, but it seems to me that "credits" are often used as a method of exchange in place of money, and yet they seem to function the same way. If you can use credits to buy a dress or get a tattoo isn't that the same as how money is used today? How is this credit system different?

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