![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Star Trek, money....
Mar. 16th, 2013 01:26 amObviously the idea that humans gave up all money altogether is absurd when trade still goes on and real things are still preferable to replicated. And certainly Star Trek is by no means *consistent* from episode to episode about this concept of "no money for humans". And yes, it makes no sense - are we expected to believe that Quark just gives humans free food, drinks, and holosuite time? Does Starfleet have a pay scale that simply excludes humans? (If so, that explains why humans dominate the force! Cheap labor!)
But when Jake spends serious time trying to explain "no money for humans" to Nog, and then a human wins the auction for the baseball card, that is just lazy, lazy writing. Is it really so hard for them to be consistent within a single episode? Memory Alpha says that the writers thought the lack of money was simply ridiculous, so maybe they were rebelling, but that's hardly a good excuse.
Of course, if you spend too much time on it, you realize that there is no way to make the economics work even without that glaring inconsistency. There are books on the physics of Star Trek, for the so inclined, but nobody has even tried tackling economics.
But when Jake spends serious time trying to explain "no money for humans" to Nog, and then a human wins the auction for the baseball card, that is just lazy, lazy writing. Is it really so hard for them to be consistent within a single episode? Memory Alpha says that the writers thought the lack of money was simply ridiculous, so maybe they were rebelling, but that's hardly a good excuse.
Of course, if you spend too much time on it, you realize that there is no way to make the economics work even without that glaring inconsistency. There are books on the physics of Star Trek, for the so inclined, but nobody has even tried tackling economics.
