Technology changes. Over the eons of human history, mud brick villages, straw huts and buffalo skin tents become houses, castles, cities, skyscrapers and even permanent antarctic and orbital outposts. We can travel across the world or to the stars. We form complicated theories of economics, most of which never stand up to the test of time, but the reality is that at the core we use systems of exchanging money for goods or services, easily discernible a thousand years ago.
While we have long ago moved away from the Gold Standard and we have replaced currency that has a face value, such as gold coins or silver, with paper currency backed by money on deposit (Though of course we still use some coins with silver in them) we have never advanced economically, nearly as much as we have advanced in every other area of technology.
Our biggest switch has been to move from a value based economy to a credit based economy. The earliest form of currency was of course barter. You exchange my donkey for two sheep or my spear for your chip of stone. Turn a valuable barter item into standardized currency, such as a gold coin or a sack of salt, and you have standardized a system of exchanges that allows you to conduct larger economic activities against a simple standard. When you can measure the value of property in gold coins or silver, then you have achieved a consensual standard of value. This is still essentially the economy we exist under, except we have increasingly transformed or undermined it by recreating it as a more abstract credit economy increasingly devoid of literal value.
The credit economy exists by driving people into debt, rather than driving them to exchange value for value, debt itself becomes the currency of speculation. Consumers shop for items they cannot afford with credit cards and take out loans to obtain educations with which they can hope to earn money with which to shop and take out mortgages on homes they pay off gradually and take out loans for cars and live a life in which they are perpetually in debt and living under a debt umbrella. Short term PayDay loans cover weekly needs. Longer term loans cover larger property acquisitions.
The debts themselves in a credit economy generate income through interest which keeps banks and companies afloat, profiting not from the value, but from the penalties and accumulated interest. The debts themselves are recognized as properties and can be bought and sold and passed on, again and again. In a credit economy, debt itself is the fundamental form of value. Creating consumer debt is the goal of companies which seek not to simply exchange currency for goods and services, but to create debt in exchange for goods and services.
Companies in turn profit as much from their own credit rating, as from their profits. CEO's struggle not to realize a profit, so much as to appear to be likely to realize one by next quarter. A rise in stock price increases the value of the company, regardless of whether the company itself has risen in value or whether it had a good quarter. With the importance of the stock price dominating the interests of CEO's, stock price becomes the tail that wags the dog, rather than the other way around. In a credit economy, perception of value matters more than actual value. Advertising dominates markets and companies prioritize their brand image over their product quality, prioritizing perception of product over product.
The question becomes, what is the next step? What will the economies of the future look like? Science Fiction holds a variety of answers to that question. Generally speaking, despite its loftier ambitions, most Science Fiction works presume that most things will remain as they are now. Thus endless novels and stories foresee space merchants traveling between the stars, factories covering entire planets churning out goods to be transported along the trading lanes of spaces and a system of interstellar and even intergalactic commerce covering even alien species. Poul Anderson's novels are an excellent example of such a vision. This is of course a purely Western and American mindset which presumes that assemblies of races would manage things in a simple, if occasionally, cutthroat capitalistic system.
Occasionally interesting adjustments are made in adapting the capitalist system to an interstellar society. For example Kristine Kathryn Rusch's "Retrieval Artist" novels have a capitalist Earth interacting economically with other races at the cost of allowing their criminal laws to apply on Earth, leading to a brutal system that allows aliens to enter Earth and kidnap and murder humans who violate their laws, and even abduct their children. Ultimately though while the "Retrieval Artist" novels factor in exotic alien mores and customs, they still presume a pretty straightforward form of capitalism existing on Earth with the alien laws only coming about as part of the trend of removing barriers to international trade that we have been seeing since the latter half of the 20th century.
Plenty of Science Fiction goes further presuming a corporate takeover of society in general with everyone becoming subservient to a corporate capitalist superstate. Such stories were particularly popular in the "Greed is Good" days of the 80's and quite a few used the Japanese as the predictable evil culprits of the capitalist state spinning outright racist scenarios of a Japanese takeover that would have made even Robert A. Heinlein who had authored the quite racist "Sixth Column" blush. The super capitalist state is of course a flawed assumption based on the use of a "If This Goes On" form of thinking that makes a straight line extrapolation between a modern day trend and a future one, thus giving us extreme utopias and dystopias, without recognizing that every society and system is in actuality filled with grey areas, complexities and contradictions.
The utopian economic Science Fiction perspective can probably be best embodied in "Star Trek" that has Captain Jean Luc Picard proclaiming on "Star Trek: The Next Generation" in the episode entitled, "The Neutral Zone" that we have moved beyond money. In an exchange with a revived 20th century banker, Picard lays out Star Trek's clearest position on economics that at the same time speaks to the fundamental problems of the utopian position.
PICARD: That's what this is all about...A lot has changed in three hundred years. People are no longer obsessed with the accumulation of "things". We have eliminated hunger,want, the need for possessions. We have grown out of our infancy.
RALPH: You've got it wrong. It's never been about "possessions" - it's about power.
PICARD Power to do what?
RALPH:To control your life, your destiny.
PICARD: That kind of control is an illusion.
RALPH: Really -- I'm here aren't I? I should be dead and I'm not. That's what money did for me. That's the kind of power I'm talking about.
Picard unsurprisingly has no rebuttal to offer and instead the script diverts the scene. Of course it's probably wasteful to expect a serious defense of the irrelevance of money from a Hollywood production in either case, but the exchange is instructive. The future can abandon money in currency and even credit form, but money is ultimately just a tool for leveraging power and as any society will have to distribute power and resources, it must ultimately have some form of economics.
Eliminating money does not necessarily create a better world, only perhaps a more regimented one, where there are more restricted and linear means of maintaining and distributing power. In that same episode, in closing Picard attempts to sum up the alternative values the world of the Federation emphasizes, in opposition to the discarded ones of collecting material possessions.
RALPH: And then what will happen to us? There's no trace of my money -- my office is gone -- what will I do?How will I live?
PICARD (amused) This is the twenty-fourth century. Those material needs no longer exist.
RALPH Then what's the challenge?
PICARD: To improve yourself... enrich yourself. Enjoy it, Mister Offenhouse.
One possibility of the future, as expressed here, is that material possessions are no longer significantly a factor in human drives because technology can fabricate sufficient quantities of any possession, making all possessions valueless, except for their practical use. When you can have a 100 couches or a thousand gold watches any time you want them, material possessions appear to become irrelevant.
Certainly that is the Star Trek universe which postulates the replicator as the logical successor to the transporter, a technology that can transform energy into any form of physical matter ranging from a delectable meal arriving already prepared to a bejeweled necklace. In Damon Knight's Science Fiction novel, "A Is For Everything" however the widespread distribution of a technology that can easily duplicate any item, results in a feudal slave state. The logic of "A Is For Everything's" alternate outcome is that in an economic system where all goods have lost their value, only human will matters resulting in instant enslavement.
There is a certain logic to this if you consider that a key element in the elimination of slavery, was its replacement with industrial slavery. As human labor had to be better educated in an industrial society, slavery became senseless. A means for easily duplicating goods essentially destroys the industrial society reverting man right back to the feudal age of serfs and barons, with barons being anyone who can get together enough conscripted serfs. Human labor becomes the only worthwhile property, but it can no longer be paid for in goods and services, nor can anything, and with that humanizing element removed from industrial capitalism, it reverts back to its native state of pure slavery.
Would such a technological Pandora's box that can provide endless goods revolutionize the human character resulting in the economic system of "Star Trek" where everyone has turned their backs on material possessions or that of "A Is For Everything" where human slavery becomes the sole worthwhile object worth possessing. Science Fiction writer Joe Haldeman envisions in "Forever Peace" a nanotechnological based system that can create any object, but is artificially limited in what can be created. While the society Haldeman envisions is a dystopia, it nevertheless represents a realistic balance between the extremes presented by "Star Trek's" utopian vision and"A Is For Everything's" feudalistic nightmare.
"Star Trek" itself eventually was forced to introduce Gold Pressed Latinum as an official currency, Latinum being a substance that could not be replicated, thus making it naturally scarce and an item of currency. This suggested that even in a system where endless material abundance was possible, the economic system sought out a means of creating scarcity through a system of currency.
"Star Trek" had also employed an economic system described as based on "Credits." While it was never confirmed whether these were work credits or energy credits or a more conventional form of electronic currency, this suggested that even utopia had to have an economy. The possibility that these were energy credits is reasonable because ultimately the replicator and therefore the entire premise of the anti-materialistic society "Star Trek" embodies ran on transforming energy into matter. Energy may be plentiful but it is not infinite. Energy must be gathered and that requires human labor. Therefore even with the elimination of material possessions, energy and human labor would underlie any such economy.
Additional Science Fiction economies have focused on systems of exotic currencies of pleasure and pain, in organs and memories and dreams. But few if any have escaped the need to have a currency. Ultimately mankind cannot escape economics, even if it escapes to the stars.
