Star Trek: Markets on the Edge

In my earlier publish, I mentioned why Star Trek’s Federation, regardless of its requires peaceable variety, fell only a bit in need of their purpose. On this publish, I swap gears from tradition and beliefs to economics.

Within the Federation, most items and companies are produced through replication. The necessity for manufacturing and commerce through the division of labour is vastly diminished (although there’s demand for luxurious artisanal, non-replicated items, as proven by culinary enterprises like Chateau Picard and Sisko’s Creole Kitchen, in addition to bodily books and different objects). Thus, the Federation appears to have overcome a lot of the information drawback round satisfying dynamic, subjective preferences and effectively allocating scarce sources with competing makes use of. It’s an economic system of abundance past even the desires of most economists or sci-fi writers. That is coupled with egalitarian values and the self-important assurance that the Federation is populated by digital saints solely all for self-actualization and common brotherhood.

In contrast nevertheless, outdoors (and generally inside!) the Federation’s utopian core of planets, folks typically battle over inadequate replicators, scarce equipment, meals, drugs, and different sources. Provide ships are important for bringing scarce objects to distant worlds, and for transporting items that may’t be replicated, resembling dilithium and uncommon medicines. Mining appears to be an necessary business throughout the galaxy. 

As Benjamin Sisko bitterly admits:

Notably, whereas replicators can recreate nearly something, it seems that replicators themselves can’t be simply reproduced. Trek by no means tells us if creating replicators is expensive. But it’s obvious that replicators can’t be supplied simply for all. Opposite to Jean-Luc Picard’s assertion that “…the acquisition of wealth is now not the driving pressure in our lives” the Federation has not overcome self-interest, greed, or different constraints of human nature. It has merely modified the transaction prices of battle by exploiting know-how that severely reduces shortage. When shortage returns, so does battle over sources.

Job allocation provides additional assist to the view that the Federation depends on superior know-how greater than it does a sci-fi model of the New Soviet Man or Rawlsian ideally suited concept. It’s unclear how the Federation incentivizes folks to tackle jobs which can be much less fascinating or whose social significance is much less well-understood; provided that job alternative is supposed to be pushed by no matter a person perceives to be public-spirited, in addition to no matter they assume will assist them self-actualize (two objectives probably in stress) with out adjudication by the worth mechanism. 

And it’s by no means defined how folks (particularly non-Starfleet civilians) are incentivized to decide on menial, comparatively unfulfilling work that can also be socially obligatory, like cleansing. Nevertheless it additionally stays a thriller why such a sophisticated technological and egalitarian society wants professions resembling bartenders or janitors within the first place. Notably, Starfleet workers’ devotion to obligation doesn’t forestall them from on the lookout for methods to restrict their workload or evade disagreeable duties, whether or not by buying and selling duties or by creating buffer time. 

A (Certified) Protection of the Ferengi

Right here the Ferengi have benefits that the Federation not often acknowledges. The Ferengi are routinely portrayed as a venal, egocentric species and are a comic-book caricature of capitalists (in addition to being genuinely virulent misogynists). Nonetheless, their single-minded pursuit of revenue and appreciation for the financial mind-set opens them as much as potentialities which can be in any other case closed to the Federation and Starfleet.

Think about Quark’s resolving of battle between the Maquis rebels and the Cardassians with some easy sport concept, providing an answer that was opaque to his “rational” Vulcan interlocutor. His attentiveness to revenue and loss permits him to acknowledge {that a} profitable finish to any battle is concerning the relative worth of peace over struggle:

For Federation residents, fascinated by the chance prices of their selections will not be a daily train. Pampered by materials abundance and an idyllic type of deliberative democracy, they additional limit themselves from fascinated by tradeoffs by adhering to easy and rigid guidelines such because the Prime Directive. After they do select to violate an ordinance just like the Directive, not often do they observe up with the society through which that they had concerned themselves, leaving no matter large social adjustments they’ve wrought for the natives to cope with (that is significantly evident in sequence like TOS, but additionally in TNG). The Directive’s non-interventionism could in lots of situations replicate a form of implicit Hayekian or Austrian faculty knowledge, however not often are completely different sorts of involvement given an intensive comparability by the Federation. There’s a large distinction between commerce and cultural engagement and the disestablishment and reconstruction of native establishments by elites from above.

The Federation can also be not well-equipped to acknowledge prices and tradeoffs in these areas the place shortage has not been eradicated, significantly of 1’s time. That is the place the Ferengi save the day. When Chief O’Brien is unable to get the stabilizer he wants, Nog manages to amass it for him by creating a posh system of barter throughout Starfleet. Equally, Nog leads Jake in a sequence of trades that enable them to amass an vintage baseball card for Captain Sisko. In doing so, they take over the disliked duties of (supposedly work-happy, purely altruistic) Starfleet workers, bettering everybody’s lot within the course of. In contrast to the Federation, the Ferengi are entrepreneurially alert to assembly folks’s preferences and making environment friendly use of sources. The Ferengi dedication to revenue even pushes them to ditch their sexism, within the true spirit of Gary Becker. As the Grand Nagus factors out, discrimination is unhealthy for enterprise and wastes precious human capital. 

The Ferengi had been additionally well-placed to assist Bajorans throughout the Cardassian occupation. Ferengi served as arms sellers to the Bajoran rebels and provided Bajoran employees employment alternatives comparatively higher than what they had been pressured into by the Cardassians. Although pushed by revenue, the Ferengi’s standing as impartial retailers allowed them to interact in entrepreneurship that improved the Bajoran state of affairs, not less than on the margin. In contrast, as enemies of the Cardassians, the Federation was unable to do a lot and took time to even acknowledge Bajor’s plight, regardless of the valiant efforts of Ensign Ro and others. 

Between the Federation Structure and Ferengi Guidelines of Acquisition

The Ferengi arguably exemplify humanity’s long-standing cultural antipathy to retailers, businessmen, and financial middlemen, positions typically held by the despised minorities the Ferengi appear to resemble. How we take into consideration the Ferengi displays how properly we perceive the challenges of cooperation, particularly with outsiders, and the prices and tradeoffs inherent in all elements of life. After all, the Ferengi have many deficits, starting from their sheer love of greed a la Gordon Gekko to their ugly sexism and speciesism. But they typically present a helpful corrective to the Federation’s extreme idealism and failures to coordinate. The Federation could dislike the Ferengi, however the Ferengi have many helpful classes to impart. 

Nonetheless, the Ferengi even have one thing to study from the Federation. The lacking core of Ferengi values is the Federation’s respect for the equal freedom and dignity of individuals as sentient beings. Whereas the Ferengi are good at recognizing the prices and advantages of their actions, a mercantile tradition and not using a bigger philosophy of how folks ought to be handled is, in Deirdre McCloskey’s phrases, “soul-destroying.” As McCloskey factors out, a worldview targeted solely on self-interest and prices and advantages has a really actual hazard of lowering folks to crude calculating brokers, perpetually in search of to use and cheat each other, each in concept and in observe. We’re not, and shouldn’t be, easy profit-seekers in {our relationships} with others, the character McCloskey calls “Max U” or “Mr. Most Utility.” 

On this respect, Trek could educate us one thing necessary concerning the inherent limitations of various worldviews. The Ferengi’s chief fault is that they’re egocentric utility maximizers even to the purpose of gross immorality, whereas the Federation has not absolutely reckoned with an imperfect world filled with self-interest, shortage, information issues, and tradeoffs. Ferengi relativism leads to Quark’s dilemma about whether or not there actually is something mistaken with being a weapons service provider (fortunately his conscience wins the day). Federation absolutism leads to Starfleet failing to avoid wasting billions of lives as a result of nothing can sanction breaking the Prime Directive, (fortunately sure officers’ conscience generally overrides their obedience). In a world of deep complexity and competing values, we’d like each the Ferengi Alliance and the United Federation of Planets. A messy combination to make certain, however one higher in tune with the universe we really inhabit, even in fiction. 

Akiva Malamet is an M.A candidate in Philosophy at Queen’s College (Canada). He has been revealed at Libertarianism.org, Liberal Currents, Catalyst, and different shops.