The Economy in a Post-Scarcity Society
The first in a series of companion pieces to my novel, Journey to Kyron, in which I invite you to come play with me.
Remember when you were a kid and every sentence started with “Pretend that…”? I don’t know about you, but those were my favorite games.
“Pretend that we’re mermaids and we live underwater.”
“Pretend that you’re my teacher.”
“Pretend that we have a pet robot.”
Every day was an excuse to imagine a new world and play inside it, usually as a fantastic character with a name like Wanda or Crystal.
We hold onto that desire for alternate realities as we grow up, but instead of playing them out in scenes with our siblings, we watch them on screens, listen to them as songs, invent elaborate fantasies, and in the case of creators, write them down.
We build worlds.
But it’s not enough to just say “Pretend that we all live in a giant rocket and we’re going to another planet.” (The premise of Journey to Kyron (J2K).)
We lay down ground rules to make it believable and coherent.
Otherwise, you’re bound to end up arguing over where you’re going, who is the captain and who the crew, or whether the rocket is going to malfunction.
Creating content as an adult means you need adults to hop onboard - building a solid background to paint your action onto, but avoiding punching readers in the face with it.
Brandon Sanderson has a series of lectures on worldbuilding that give a good set of elements to include:
Magical systems or technology
Culture and societies
Geography and history
Economics and ecology
He recommends having a notebook to keep track of your world and build it up in layers, starting with broad strokes and filling in the details as you go.
For J2K, I have a notebook with sketches of maps, calculations, and story points. I have loose pages tracking continuity issues. I have Google docs with brainstorm ideas and bits of feedback. I have a spreadsheet with tabs for Timeline, Character Arcs, Technology, and Kyron.
And now, I’m making a companion series.
Why? Because I want to worldbuild in public and crowdsource ideas.
How will it work?
Well, pretend that you’re my sister and we’re mucking around imagining we live on a rocket going to explore an alien planet.
For each chapter, I’ll write a little bit about a certain aspect of the world of J2K and ask for comments, feedback, pushback, and new ideas to help shape the story as I write. It’s looking like each chapter will take 3-4 parts, so I’m guessing I’ll do a monthly companion piece.
Today, I want to explore the economy onboard the ships.
In Chapter 1, Part 2, we see Josinda making a video of what she saw on the bridge during the passage of Kyron (our destination - a moon around a gassy planet called Xenon - points if you can guess why I picked the name Xenon) past its star, Pollus. We find out that she regularly makes videos, but that only her friends click on them.
She received creativity credits, which she supposed was as valuable as the attention of her crewmates.
This is the crux of my system. The crew receive credits for any work done, whether in technical or maintenance roles, creating entertainment or information content (whether anybody enjoys them or not - it’s the act of creativity itself that earns points), scientific investigation, or caring for others.
Since the population lives inside a closed system where resources are carefully monitored by AI, their basic needs are provided for, but if they want to buy other items, like clothing or decorations, they need credits.
There are a couple of issues with this system I can see. For one, it requires constant oversight, presumably by AI, to see what people are doing all the time. One solution could be self-assessment - residents could turn on a monitor when they’re working. Of course, different people would make different choices, but there would be guidelines.
But it still boils down to a judgment call on what is considered work. It also means an allocation of value on the work done. For example, individual work might be credited less than collective work towards common goals.
How about we decide these things…wait for it…with committees? I know, they’ve got a bad rap, but as Yuval Noah Harari (of Sapiens fame) points out, if our future economy is so complicated that nobody is capable of understanding it, then we risk our society’s long-term stability. People should keep a finger on the pulse, if they want to maintain control. As AI gets more sophisticated, the temptation is to turn to bots for our needs. Hell, I’m asking ChatGPT the same questions I’m asking you, and I can guarantee it’s giving me longer, more thoughtful answers than you will. Partly because I don’t have a large audience, and partly because it exists to answer our questions and expects nothing in return.
The other issue to consider is on the purchasing side. In a future chapter, we’ll see Josinda buy a dress. Clearly a luxury and not a necessity, but it’s not always so clear. Later on, she’ll get a tattoo (or several). Should the artist be paid as much as the shopkeeper?
These things are relevant in our own society. I think in the future, the definition of work should become broader and include our creative exploits, raising children, and household chores. As work to provide for our basic needs becomes less prevalent, we must think about the allocation of reward according to people’s productivity.
In this way, we can remain motivated and productive and creative even as our usefulness dwindles.
What do you think? Do you want to play?
Have a think about some of these things and any others that occur to you:
In a post-scarcity world, what is necessary and what is luxury?
Should AI be involved in any of the decision-making around what constitutes work, or should its role be observational only?
If you had to assess your own work hours, what would you consider work?
Is there a greater value of collective work over that of the individual?
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.
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?