rcxdude
Joined 15 years ago
Joined 15 years ago
It's worth remembering that social organization (currency, capitalism, democracy) is a technology as well, and we should not expect that a sci-fi author can explain the advances in that technology any better than they can explain a warp drive. (one nod to this I think is telling is one scene in the movie where they travel back in time and Kirk is telling the others 'they still use money' in much the same way that he would say 'they still use guns'. They have replaced guns with phasers and replaced money with something else and Roddenberry can give us the blueprint for neither).
I think it's a sign of the times that people are kind of forgetful that this is an area in which we could advance - either insisting the status quo is somehow the best possible or even completely god-given natural or insisting that the answer is really obvious and doesn't require deep thought, research, and experimentation.
(I do agree that there is a tendency to overestimate just how much wealth is available, though. People often get the idea that if there were no billionaires that everyone would be comfortably well off, and the maths doesn't quite check out on that, though you could probably improve the lives of a lot of people at the lower end of the spectrum. There's also a tendency to over-estimate what being in the 1% of wealth gets you: this is rich, for sure, but it's not 'private jet and luxury yacht' wealth by a long way)