Star Trek's Glaring Plot Hole
Star Trek is imagined as a utopian future where they have done away with money. But other than the Replicator allowing them to magic up food out of thin air, their world is modeled on our current society and our current society is largely shaped by money being in widespread use in the last 300 or so years.
It's a little like The Flintstones being a caveman society modeled on the 1950s and The Jetsons being a futuristic version of 1950s society. Except most people are keenly aware that's silly in those two cases, yet seem oblivious to the big disconnect for Star Trek.
No one wonders what motivates members of Starfleet to bother to join at all if we've done away with money and everyone can have a replicator and magic up whatever they need. And I think one episode of Deep Space Nine mentions a conflicting detail about Benjamin Sisko being so homesick during college he just transported home for dinner every night for months and his dad said not one word about the bills he was racking up.
I recently watched a Star Trek clip, probably for The Next Generation. I think Data is visiting some world and criticizing their allocation of medical resources where someone responsible for some kind of like continent-wide critical infrastructure is being given life extending treatments and the same treatments are being denied to a sick child.
It's a post-money society but a lot of the themes and plots of the various series are not about a post scarcity mentality. They are episodes which directly or indirectly try to address issues in the world "today" -- issues that existed at the time of writing the episode, mostly in the USA.
And they also do quite a lot of like "what if" alternate history type episodes which I personally like. I like time travel stories because they model decision making trees. And you have to model that because in real life, you make the decision and there's no do over. It goes the way it goes and there's no way to know for certain how it might have gone had you handled it differently.
In The City on the Edge of Forever, Joan Collins guest stars as a female grassroots leader peacenik and Dr. McCoy saves her life with disastrous consequences for humanity where Hitler wins the war or something like that.
So Spock and Captain Kirk need to go back and undo it. And it's intriguing because it's a seemingly rare instance of speculating that good intentions and the works of good people can go bad places. We usually hear that you just need to be an idealist and good things will happen.
So a lot of their stories are clearly deeply thoughtful stories about how society works and if you change one detail, you change everything and yet we do away with money to create our utopian future and other than needing a replicator as a plot device, LA LA LA NOT listening this couldn't possibly have significant impact on how everything works.
Star Trek episodes like the one where I believe Data suggests you don't know what the child could become if he got these treatments are rooted in a mental model where you solve poverty by basically throwing money at it.
People proposing UBI are suggesting the same thing and my recollection is Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. espoused similar ideas in one of his less brilliant moments. And it's a mental model that sees poverty as a lack of resources and not a lack of something else.
Like you solve poverty by just giving poor people the money they lack and voila! Problem solved!
And it doesn't work.
And it's hard to talk about because there are good programs that just give poor people stuff that are very important and valuable.
But food stamps are not really intended to "solve poverty." They are intended to prevent privation from costing society a stupidly large amount financially and in important other ways by reducing crime and medical consequences for poor people.
It puts in a floor and it's a good program that pays for itself because every dollar spent on feeding poor people likely saves the government multiple dollars in emergency medical care costs and law enforcement expenses that would occur if you didn't feed people. And it gives access to existing middle class for profit establishments which are high quality because it's not designed to be charity.
Charitable works are frequently low quality. Government housing projects are frequently poverty housing and this is where we get the expression the projects as a phrase for slums in America.
Poverty housing doesn't mean affordable housing where poor people live. It means housing with design deficiencies that helps keep people trapped in poverty.
Poverty housing is housing that has inadequate access to sustenance. It is located in a food desert in many cases. And it typically lacks ready access to education, jobs and transportation.
Giving poor people housing we dreamed up as a solution to their problem typically results in housing they hate which fosters intergenerational "treatment resistant" long-term poverty.
To give a little perspective, decades ago when I was reading articles on stuff like this, the US poverty rate tended to hover around like fourteen percent. People living below the poverty level one year statistically have higher than average odds of being high earners the next, probably because college students and company founders may be dirt poor this year and in the money next year.
But chronic poverty, typically defined as below the poverty level like five years out of ten, is only something like two percent of the population. So intractable, intergenerational poverty is a serious problem out of step with how most of America works.
So I have spent a lot of years contemplating "If throwing money at the problem doesn't work, what does?"
Project SRO is my attempt to propose market rate housing solutions that are designed to provide adequate sustenance without it being a big burden.
Very Basic Water Infrastructure like tree urinals is a potential solution to the bathroom problem for not just homeless people but delivery people and others who work out of a vehicle all day. And it does so without being a huge burden on local governments financially and in other ways.
Formulary of Life explicitly says it's intended to be medical "kung fu." But that's also the same philosophy behind all my health writing, including this.
And it's not imagined as a post money world and I have at times written about my frustrations with not knowing how to adequately monetize my own work.
We imagine that we can either raise quality of life or solve climate change and never mind STUDIES say that being good stewards of the land and being efficient in industry and not producing tons of trash leads to prosperity. Like people think oxygen has no value because we don't currently charge people money to breathe.
It's not the popular approach because churning out new schlock to sell is the easy answer for lining your pockets and I still have no idea how to fill mine.
But you don't solve poverty by throwing money at the problem. I think of it as more like focusing on rights or designing a better world but I've been working on this for decades and still can't quite put my finger on a catch phrase or whatever.
But I'm clear that poverty is about privation and, say, minimalism isn't about privation.
There's more ways to live well than to be obscenely wealthy and live in a mansion.