Star Trek envisions a utopian future where everyone belongs, everyone’s needs are met, and people work for the joy of contributing to society, not just for survival or subsistence. Money does not exist because this socialist utopia has been achieved. It is a time of true post-scarcity and unlimited abundance. Any material thing at all can be magically created by a replicator, and the universe is open and spacious. However, things still need to be done, and many of these things are not particularly fun or fulfilling. It begs the question: if there is no way to compensate someone, using money or anything else, how do employers fill the less desirable jobs? How does anyone acquire a thing they want that cannot be made in a replicator? There are examples of these throughout the show, implying that the replicator’s reach is not infinite.
Although the question of how the money works on Star Trek has come up frequently throughout the show’s history, there has never been a fleshed out explanation. The shortest answer is that the creators never thought of it too deeply. The franchise has seen many writers over its decades long existence, and not one of them was really tasked with formulating a new economic system from scratch in which money does not exist. It would be a monumental task for an economist, let alone a writer. Artists craft stories, and worlds, and these writers wanted to imagine a utopian post-scarcity society without money, so they did. If the exact mechanism was not important to the plot, which it never was, then there is no need to detail said exact mechanism.
Since the creative talent behind the show left us with very little, we can only speculate as to how a society without money could possibly work. Star Trek seems to imply that the people in it are just psychologically built different. They have different values and goals, and they work for the joy of it. That is hard to believe given what we know of human nature, but if you have a system that takes care of every material thing, perhaps work would have no other purpose than to give you purpose.
In one scenario, there could simply be no incentive structure, and people go to work either for purpose or because there is nothing else to do. Star Trek shows the coolest people doing the cool jobs, with no attention as to how this will work for the crap jobs. Although many people are not incentivised by money for its own sake, it is still the best way we have so far to get someone to do something they would not normally do. Unless the Enterprise enforces a chore rota, internal motivation may not be enough. There is very little joy in a crap job. At the heart of our token economic system is a way to exchange any kind of work input into a mutually agreed upon promise that one will be compensated with whatever one needs in return. Money is one of the most straightforward, organically implemented system of transferring value for things which cannot be exchanged in a barter economy. So, how does the Star Trek universe function without money?
One theory is technological: the invention of a replicator enabled every individual to have access to unlimited resources, thereby creating a post-scarcity economy. This would explain the fulfillment of any material needs, and eliminate entire industries surrounding manufacture, shipping, sales, or even storage of inventory. Some things cannot be replicated, but for the most part, any day to day items can be, and certainly all the ones important to immediate survival. However, what about service roles? In addition to Starfleet personnel, we see tailors, restaurant owners, gardeners, barbers, and maintenance professionals, along with possibly many more essential workers who are hidden from view. The inner mechanization of a civilization requires immense input to keep things running smoothly. Even with much automation, there would still need to be at least a skeleton team of humans to keep the automated systems functioning. Funny enough, we hardly see any automation in the first five TV franchises. Lt. Data, as well as Voyager’s holographic doctor were both new innovations and poorly understood. It is safe to assume that copies of them were not running things in the background for most of the Star Trek we see.
Another viable theory is that the Star Trek economy trades in something other than money. We have already seen alien currencies such as gold pressed latinum, as well as barter systems, but the writers often imply that Starfleet officers do not regularly use either of these. Instead, the main ‘currency’ within Starfleet…is energy. From a story point of view, one of the primary sources of conflict and value are things like dilithium crystals, or some other warp core component. These things will always have intrinsic value because they are essential to all Starfleet vessels, and they cannot be replicated. How convenient. In short, the energy needed to power warp capable ships is defined by the writers as scarce, and therefore valuable. Its scarcity has been the subject of many plots, in which the crew is low on necessary energy components and must therefore barter, locate, or possibly steal what they need. Voyager, the ship that got lost, specifically finds itself in this predicament many times throughout its journey home from the Delta Quadrant. The ship has limited power reserves, so everything from propulsion to replicators had to be rationed until they could replenish their energy reserves.
Therein lies the heart of the issue: the replicators are tied into this system. If Star Trek presented us with a post-scarcity economy, in which everyone’s basic needs can be materialized, one would assume that this technology would completely rework the whole economic system. It does to a point, until your replicator runs out of power, rations, replicator reserves, or whatever the base material is called. Energy flows, but matter recycles. According to the conservation of mass, matter cannot be created or destroyed, so the replicators must use something. However, it is also implied that the replicators cannot use just anything, or else Voyager would have been able to collect a random asteroid or space junk to re-synthesize in their replicators. Instead we are told that their use must be rationed. They even go so far as to cook meals the old fashioned way to preserve whatever it is that the replicators use, implying that this was the cheaper option. This may have been an oversight in writing, whereby the writers needed to create more hardship for Voyager specifically and forgot to consider that the ability to tear molecules apart and reshape them into anything should work for all molecules.
However, it makes sense that some substances may be easier to reform than others. Bonds between molecules must be broken and different chemical substances vary in bond strength. It is possible that the ideal replicator fuel is some mushy, weakly bonded proto-substance. Again, the writers were elusive as to what this might be, but on top of the replicator input material, these machines would also need maintenance, new parts, and patterns. The last of that list may require skilled coders and some sort of proprietary ownership. The replicators themselves created a level within the economic system where anyone could potentially manufacture anything they needed, thereby eliminating entire manufacturing industry and most material scarcity, but at the same time, their requirements necessitate a whole new economy, and one that may not be too different from our own. It is not that money does not exist in the Star Trek universe, money has simply taken a whole new form, and unfortunately, it is one that does not eliminate scarcity completely. Technology can only do so much. Even if we discover the magic and pixie dust which enables us to create anything we need, we may still be left with wealth disparity. Only when we can find a way to evenly distribute the energy or other underlying currency which underpins the system can a true post-scarcity society be replicated.
Hopeless Trekkie 