What is civlian life like in the Federation?

[bbjeg]

^ I dunno about that. Sure, some of our current diseases and illnesses might be cured, but we still see people like Christopher Pike and Mark Jamison in fancy wheelchairs. And futuristic science always seems to discover some new disease incapacitating half the crew every other week.

Yeah, alternate Bones said it best; "Space is disease and danger..."

 

[T'Girl]

^ Wrapped in a flaky pastry shell.

 

[RandyS]

^ Wrapped in a flaky pastry shell.

Now I want a doughnut.

 

[Clark Terrell]

It mostly consists of wearing horrible looking clothes

Like Kyle Riker's outfit in "The Icarus Factor."

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

^ Maybe that's why anbo-jytsu has those full face masks. So you don't have to look at the horrible outfits.

 

[Clark Terrell]

^ Maybe that's why anbo-jytsu has those full face masks. So you don't have to look at the horrible outfits.

Every time I watch that episode, I root for Riker to take his staff and beat his father over the head with it.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

^ Switch Rikers, and I'm cool with it.

 

[Johnny]

I do think that most people's jobs are in the scientific, engineering, academic, creative fields. But that doesn't mean their lives are boring. They probably party all the time in their time off. You think we have a lot of entertainment with Netflix and such, they have all that only with 400 years of media at their fingertips.

I'm not so sure that it's all scientific etc. I saw Sisko Snr bring back veg back in a bag in some episode. So there's obviously a place he went and picked it up rather than replicate it, which means there must be some form of infrastructure to shipping fresh produce around the planet/galaxy. Shipping companies etc. That company doesn't have to be money making, but it's best to wrap all your trading routes in a brand from the start.

I would assume that people do the work for two reasons, they either love the job or like the people/situation they work in. I would also assume that it's fairly frowned upon to waste away your life doing absolutely nothing! Personally I'd get bored.

 

[Push The Button]

^ I dunno about that. Sure, some of our current diseases and illnesses might be cured, but we still see people like Christopher Pike and Mark Jamison in fancy wheelchairs. And futuristic science always seems to discover some new disease incapacitating half the crew every other week.

Pike being mute, disfigured and confined to that armored wheelchair may have had to do with the fact that he was being played by a different actor. If they somehow could have gotten Jeffrey Hunter to reprise Pike for The Menagerie, he most certainly would have been able to at least speak in his own voice.

 

[Johnny]

Civilian life in the Federation future of the 24th century is so dull and boring, they don't make tv shows about it. [...]

I just watched End Game and there's a TV there, as she's watching the news (or some news based transmission).
I always thought it was weird that we didn't see a 24th Century version of Friends!

 

[Mary Ann]

I've always had issues with no one working for any kind of monetary-type reward. When Picard says humans no longer have money he may not being including the credit system encountered from time to time. The way I see it everyone starts off with having a roof over their heads, clothes on their backs and food in their bellies, but if they do work they do receive some kind of reward for it, perhaps more replicator energy or credits for more travel, things like that. The extra rewards would not be in keeping with the idea of 21st century wages, but they would be enough incentive for someone to don some industrial gloves and clean up the holosuite after Riker and Worf.

 

[T'Girl]

I would assume that people do the work for two reasons, they either love the job or like the people/situation they work in.

There probably would be a third group (if not more groups) that work because of the advantages work provides. Credits/money, social status, etc..

They don't necessarily like their jobs or the environment, but the end results of their work is enjoyible.

The way I see it everyone starts off with having a roof over their heads, clothes on their backs and food in their bellies.

I do think there would be protections so that people didn't "die in the streets," but you might be sleeping in the same room as dozens of other people in your same situation, the social safety net could be deliberately geared to be such that you did want to stay there.

'0'

 

[Arpy]

Trek's always been anachronistic, but there's a line between charmingly so and being mockingly so. And in sci-fi, silly is death.

The reality is that technology will make work unnecessary. There's a guy space-sweeping in ST:II? Who cares. They've already invented the Roomba. By TNG they had the good sense to come up with, "The ship will clean itself."

Hell they're already developing software to get rid of lawyers, architects, and doctors.

As people become less necessary, the question will become not of what we need with each other but of what we want with each other. ...I think that is in part why the future has "better" people in it. They've had to learn to appreciate what they actually like about each other rather than be forced to smash against each other to survive.

Trek's done a worse job of showing civilians than soldiers I think. The starfleeters are interesting in part because they're not only soldiers, but scientists and diplomats as well. There's a touch of the warrior-priest Jedi in them that makes them additionally intriguing.

The civilians on the other hand often are presented more lazily, like the crazy-admirals-of-the-week. The boring-civilian-of-the-week is easily identifiable as a 20th/21st century restaurateur or barber or whatever with less the charming futurism of the starfleeters.

What's civilian life like in the 24th century? I imagine there are many professions that we have today but also a bunch that we don't. How many people work in IT or office jobs in our contemporary service economy vs. back during our founding? We're staggeringly different from how we used to be yet not unrecognizable.

And it would be fun visiting strange new professions. Psychohistorians, feeling artists, genetic-engineers, alternate-universe observers, hologamers, anti-time physicists, neobankers, exosexologists, existential detectives, holophoner musicians, saints, sinners...you could build an episode around an incident involving any of these as easily as you could an alien of the week.

I wish they'd try harder to show more of the staggering differences the Federation future would look like without fearing we'd find it unrecognizable.

 

[T'Girl]

The starfleeters are interesting in part because they're not only soldiers, but scientists and diplomats as well.

And explorers, just as soldiers have always been.

 

[Nightdiamond]

Civilian life on earth = paradise. Sisko and the UFP said it. But it looks kind of really safe and bland--like something almost out a super fundamentalist religious pamphlet.

If you ever see background shots of humans doing things, they're always laughing and smiling and wearing those pale clothes that cover up everything. (see Nemesis, wedding scene, Wesley and the girls outake)

And for drinks it's always tea, tea tea tea And the higher arts of course. Couldn't they have jazzed things up a little?


Civilian life in NU Trek looks more contemporary and fun, crazy drinks, sleek clothing, contemporary language.

but a little too much like our own times- as if nothing has really changed except the technology.

So the answer is ..there's obviously lots of tea

 

[BMariner]

I've always been confused by the whole no money, no poverty concept. Has Trek ever explained how this works? Somebody's securing materials for ships and cities, somebody's building them, and somebody's doing the technical research to make all this happen. What is their motivation? Is it purely creative/altruistic? I'm cool with money and poverty being eradicated, but if Trek is going to hype that utopia, I wish they'd explain what exactly makes it tick, and how it is sustainable.

It's one thing to aspire to this type of society, but it's quite another to back it up politically, mathematically, economically, etc. I imagine however it works, it requires some serious central planning, with large, overreaching government branches with their tentacles in every nook and cranny of everyday life. I'd love to be able to spend my days writing poetry and tending orchards, but I'm not sure I'd take the trade-off.

 

[Shik]

Personally, I like the theory put forth by James P. Hogan in Voyage From Yesteryear, wherein the currency is competency. Consider this passage:

Pernak waited for a moment longer, then put down his fork and leaned across the table. "On Chiron, wealth is competence!" he said. "Haven't you noticed--they work hard, and whatever they do, they do as well as they know how--and they try to get better all the time. It doesn't matter so much what they do as long as it's good. And everybody appreciates it. That's their currency--recognition, as you said . . . recognition of competence." He shrugged and spread his hands. "And it makes a lot of sense. You just told us that's what everyone wants anyway. Well, Chironians pay it direct instead of indirectly through symbols. Why make life complicated?"

The suggestion was too extraordinary for Lechat to respond instantly. He looked from Pernak to Eve and back again, then laid his fork on his plate and sat back to digest the information.

"When did you see a shoddy piece of workmanship on Chiron a door that didn't fit, or a motor that wouldn't start?" Eve asked him. "Have you ever come across anything like that anywhere there? It makes what we're used to look like junk. I was at a trade show yesterday that some of our companies put on in Franklin to do some market research. The Chironians thought it was a joke. You should have seen the kids down there. They thought our ideas of design and manufacturing were hilarious. Our guys had to give it up as a dead loss."

"That's how they get rich," Pernak said. "By being good at what they do and getting better. Who but a crazy would do anything and stay poor by choice?"

"You mean by reputation, or something like that?" Lechat asked, beginning to look intrigued.

"That's part of it," Pernak replied, nodding. "The satisfaction that their culture conditions them to feel is another part, but you're getting the general idea."

Lechat picked up his fork again. "I never looked at it in quite that way. It's an interesting thought." He began eating again, then stopped and looked up. "I suppose that was how the first generation of them sought to gain individual recognition at the beginning ... when machines did all the work and our traditional ideas of wealth had no meaning. And it's become embedded in their basic thinking." He nodded slowly to himself and reflected further. "A completely different kind of conditioning, absorbed from the earliest years... based on recognizing individual attributes. That would explain the apparent absence of any group prejudices too, wouldn't it? They've never had any reason to feel threatened by other groups."

"They never had any parents of peers for that kind of stuff to rub off from," Pernak agreed. "Classes, echelons, black, white, Soviet, Chinese ... it's all the same to them. They don't care. It's what you are that matters."

"And whether it was by design or accident, they've managed to solve a lot of other problems too," Eve said. "Take crime for instance. Theft and greed are impossible, because how can you steal another man's competence? Oh, you could try and fake it, I suppose, but you wouldn't last long with people as discerning as Chironians. They can see through a charlatan as quickly as we can spot ourselves being shortchanged. In fact to them that's just what it is. They have their violent moments, sure, but nothing as bad as what's coming in from Africa on the beam right now, or what happened in 2021. But it never turns into a really big problem. There's no motivation for anyone to rally round a would-be Napoleon. He wouldn't have anything to offer that anybody needs."

After another short silence Lechat said, "It's a strange system of currency though, isn't it. I mean, it's not additive at all, or subject to any laws of arithmetic. You can pay what you owe and still not
be any poorer yourself. It sounds --I don't know impossible somehow."

"It's not subject to finite arithmetic," Pernak agreed. "But why does it have to be? Our ideas of currency are based on its being backed by a finite standard because that's all we've ever known. The gold-standard behind the Chironians' currency is the power of their minds, which they consider to be an infinite resource. Therefore they do their accounting with a calculus of infinities. You takesomething from infinity, and you've still got infinity left." He shrugged. "It's consistent. I know it sounds crazy to us, but it fits with the way they think."

So...consider that the Federation (or at least Earth) is, for all intents & purposes, a post-scarcity economy. It's been oft stated that "humanity works to better itself". The above huge quote may in fact be the basis of their "economic" system, perhaps combined with a Quinnian neotribal "get support to give support" base ethos.

 

[BMariner]

Shik, it's a nice thought and I appreciate the book excerpt, but this seems too much of a stretch for me. A) How did we transition to a post-scarcity economy? B) What about that inevitable percentage of any given population that could care less about competency or recognition? Obvious exceptions aside, isn't career/business success to some degree a measure of competency? And what of the person who isn't in it for competency, but to put food on the table? Drives me nuts how Trek is always recognized for its positive, utopian outlook on the future, but nobody (at least in canon) actually lays out exactly how we got there. I suppose that means I should assume that nobody's yet pulled a plausible economic basis for it out of their arse.

 

[Shik]

Shik, it's a nice thought and I appreciate the book excerpt, but this seems too much of a stretch for me. A) How did we transition to a post-scarcity economy? B) What about that inevitable percentage of any given population that could care less about competency or recognition? Obvious exceptions aside, isn't career/business success to some degree a measure of competency? And what of the person who isn't in it for competency, but to put food on the table? Drives me nuts how Trek is always recognized for its positive, utopian outlook on the future, but nobody (at least in canon) actually lays out exactly how we got there. I suppose that means I should assume that nobody's yet pulled a plausible economic basis for it out of their arse.

A) I'm sure there are all manner of theories. This is what I wrote in my Trailblazer article:

In the decades since federation, Earth‘s economy had undergone a transformation. The advent of warp drive and subsequent contact with an alien race that occurred in the previous century had radically altered the planet‘s sociological landscape. Despite many regions still suffering adverse effects from the recent global thermonuclear war, the geosocial upheaval and limited assistance from the Vulcans jumpstarted a social revolution so that Earth could seem "worthy" of entry into the interstellar community. Within a half-century of first contact social ills such as intraspecies war, poverty, and indigenous disease had been eliminated, and the building blocks of a unified world government had been established. The advent of colonization as well as increased trade with other worlds signaled the beginning of the end to traditional resource-based economics. By the mid-22nd century, economies all over Earth began to undergo a transformation accelerated by the events of the Romulan War and by the intensified interspecies exchanges formed as an effect of federation. By the start of the 2180s, money had been phased out in all but the most remote and resolute areas of United Earth‘s domain as currency-based supply-and-demand-driven economics faltered in the rise of a resource glut. Humanity now strove to improve itself on the personal and collective scale. These transformations extended to the political arena as well, where the old system of "political capitalism" failed in the wake of a rising socialist technocracy, wherein knowledge and ability became the measure of a person‘s true worth; in this arrangement, no person could truly be poor unless they were completely unlearned. This form of post-capitalist economy soon spread to other worlds in UFP core space and eventually would form the basis of the Federation‘s economic model. However, some form of currency-based system needed to be maintained with nonaligned powers as well as border worlds and planets on the rim that still utilized that model, and so the Federation credit was formed, loosely based on the "social credit" theory developed on Earth some 250 years previous. (A final adoption and move to a true post-scarcity economy would finally come about in the early 24th century with the advent of replicator technology, thus rendering all but the rarest resources worthless in a capitalist sense.)

I chose social credit over the Hoganite theory perviously posted mainly because it's a real thing that people could look up, although the two ideas are not mutually exclusive. If I was forced to choose twixt the two, I'd push more for the Hoganite form with a smattering of social credit. However, trying to explain that without lengthy exposition is difficult.

B) Everyone wants recognition & competency. Ever hear the statement, "Do what you love & never work a day in your life"? This is that taken to global & interstellar extremes. No one has to worry about putting food on the table; the food is there. It's always been there, but by this time people have socially returned to a point where there's no need to lock it up to force people to perform tasks in exchange for it. I work in the restaurant industry; I'm a cook, & a damn good one. I don't want to be a chef, though. I'm OK with that. But I still get better & better without becoming a chef, & I'm proud of that. (Although it causes problems such as last night, when I got into an argument with the Turks about the proper way to keep a kitchen clean...) But it's not the ONLY thing I can do. I can write very well, sing pretty good, fix a few things...& I--like anyone else--am constantly trying to be better. As the passage said (or maybe it's elsewhere in the book), the only people who would be poor would be the willfully lazy. Even criminals are competent at something.

There's another point I just thought of after reading that passage again. Look at the end, where it's noted that for thousands of years, economics has been based on a backing of finite resources. What happens when you've mastered matter/energy manipulation & no longer need to compete for the basics. Oh, sure, there are some rare things that can't or shouldn't be replicated--dilithium, latinum, caviar--but that doesn't automatically make them the new source of economic backing. If it did, people would be hauling crystals around in their pockets, being paid much in the same ways before coinage began. (Remember, in China & Japan, rice was a form of pay--literally working for food, for those that deny the connection.)

 

[BMariner]

Shik, I don't want to come off as dismissing your well thought-out take on this. I really do appreciate it, but re: A) Socialist technocracy? No thanks.

re: B) I value recognition and competency, but if I didn't have to do anything to provide for my lifestyle and family, I think I would do nothing. I'm a project manager. I'm a good project manager. But my growth in this field isn't motivated by passion for it. Although it is driven to some degree for an increase in competency, the underlying reason would be financial compensation. Remove that from the equation and I'm off on a tropical island spearfishing and sitting around campfires for the rest of my life. Now, I'm a pretty responsible, driven person. What about the many, many people who aren't responsible or who don't really care about any particular field enough to excel in it to the point of recognition? I think you overestimate the percentage of people who would actually contribute to such a society.