Noah May Have Built an Ark, But Moses Built an Economic Arc

For many who look to the possibilities of the future, the Star Trek economy is the ultimate stage of economic development. A time when humans built a space age version of the Garden of Eden. Unlimited energy and automation provide capacity and capability for limitless production – and money again is no longer needed, and the fulfillment of needs is as simple as asking.

I can’t help but think the connection to Moses and the book of Genesis and the story of the Garden of Eden is extremely important. It represents a time when the technology of nature produced all that was needed for a human community to survive and thrive on the planet. The Garden of Eden is the symbolic description of the first livable economy. Which could indicate the ultimate livable economy has been between 2 and 4 million years in the making. Its evolutionary stages are driven by technology – the sum of knowledge, experience, techniques, skills, methods, and processes used in the production of goods or services or in the accomplishment of objectives.

For this blog I have borrowed from an organization known as the Partners for Livable Communities the definition of “livability” and modified it slightly. Livability is defined as the relative sum of the factors that add up to a community’s quality of life—including the built and natural environments, economic prosperity, social stability and equity, educational opportunity, and cultural, entertainment and recreation possibilities.

The first livable economy evolves when the efforts of our ancestor’s population fulfilled what Dr. Maslow called physiological needs of the population – these are biological requirements for human survival, such as air, food, drink, shelter, clothing, warmth, sex, sleep. The economy is a symbiotic part of the community. Fulfillment of the physiological needs means a community will grow. Fail to fulfill the needs and the community fails to survive.

This first liable economy was also a caloric economy, long before markets, money, wages, and wealth. A time when the value of effort is equal to the value of fulfillment. A time when a day’s effort harvested a wage that paid for everything needed to live for a day. The average cost of food, clothing, and shelter.

There is an important distinction the Partners for Livable Communities makes in their principles of livability. A Livable Economy is molecular – or local and cultivated organically. Because it is the efforts of the population fulfilling the needs of the population it adapts to the environment and conditions of the population.

When an economy is functioning normally, the efforts of the population easily fulfill the needs of the population. Common cause variability in the efforts or needs of the economy tend to be random and exists within the processes of the economy. However, special cause variability tends to be the result of influences outside the process. Over time, four ideas are gradually introduced into our thinking about economics – markets, money, slavery, and wealth. These become the factors that ultimately lead to the technology that forms the Star Trek economy.

Markets of course are core to the formation of larger collective societies, like towns and cities. The diversity of markets eventually fuels the need for trade between markets. Money represents ways to capture, store and transport value. Slavery includes the ownership of humans and the intentional manipulation of wages known as economic slavery. The invention of wages creates a way to form two separate markets, one for the value of effort and one for the value of fulfillment. By separating effort and fulfillment, the arbitrage of wages is possible and economic slavery and be used to accumulate wealth.

To counter, labor organizes and strikes for livable wages. Capital then invests in technology to eliminate labor. Without the efforts of labor spending in the market, the economic variation of expansion and contraction increases. Economic swings become longer and deeper – until the need for markets, money, slavery, and wealth are eliminated with the artificial intelligence and nano technology of the Star Trek economy.