If you want to explain, in an honest and open exchange, what you meant, then we can do that in email. If, on the other hand, you really just want to play "I can bitch slap Survivor with my 1337 knowledge", then we can find someplace to play without bugging KDW.

I realize there has been speculation about bubble worlds before, but this one is fleshed out pretty well. There are places where his descriptions just do not build pictures in my mind, but that may be me and not his skill as a writer. Still, I’m finding it fascinating to journey through this place which is a big bubble of air and water with small fusion suns in it and cities that are buildings roped together and some that spin to give gravity. And humans living there.

The human civilization inside the bubble is the same old mix of styles we have today, but halfway through the book he hints at another civilization outside where something makes things for people and people have lost the ability to sort of connect with reality. As I said, it’s only hints of that, but, since it is purported to be a trilogy, I assume we’ll go out and roam around in that more variant civilization eventually.

So, how would an economy work where everyone has all/anything they need and desire?

I can’t imagine humans not wanting more or pushing to be more whatever that someone else. Without exchange of goods and work, what values might run society? Prestige? But based on what? Breeding, background, genetics? A little of that seemed like it might be what’s going on in Iain Bank’s EXCESSION.

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So, how would an economy work where everyone has all/anything they need and desire?

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I think there is a natural hierarchy of desires. It starts with bodily requirements, things like food, water and satisfying apetites. Once these things are fulfilled then we move on to wanting the praise and or admiration of others. Once that is fulfilled we move on to wanting wealth, power etc. Once we have all these external desires met, where do we go? It has to be inward, to the conquering of self.

Doesn't it?

But I have drifted away from the question.

IMO

In a self-contained society where everyone TRULY has everything they could possibly want the economy would have to rely on diversion or the introduction of a perception of a lack. The creation of diversions and/or false-anxieties would become industries.

OR

In a society that was not self contained, the desire to expand altruistically into other less-abundant societies would be almost unstoppable. This is diversion.

Thought that stems from the idea of diversion: What if society/technology got to such a point that humans could generate their own universes in endless parallel planes and tweak them from the outside (without messing up the basic laws) and dwell within it when or if they should desire to do that. The people would be wholly consumed by the monitoring and desire for the welfare etc of the inhabitants of these microverses/universes or whatever you may call them.

(I've just had an idea for a short story: For Sale — Second-hand Universe — Unfinished Project.)

I don't believe a society where all the needs are met could be achieved and maintained without some unifying indoctrination of the populace. Some philosophy that actively causes people to believe they want exactly the same things as everyone else or limits their desires to that of homogenous mediocrity OR switches people's focus from their own need/desires to those of other people.

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For the record, no real economist I've ever talked to has ever thought me ignorant on the subject. So your last comment makes me extremely doubtful that you actually have anything useful to say. But I'm still willing to hear your reply.

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And I want it known that "The armchair economist" is not supposed to be an insult. It would be a great and worthwile read to even Keynes or Smith or Marx, etc.

What if some societies could molecularly create whatever they needed? Or maybe all citizens trade goods and services? Without the impetus to wrangle over or struggle for material things, or even territory, what is left? What would happen to humans or beings? Wouldn't they turn to inward speculation or invention, or more altruistic persuits? Only to be thwarted by less developed societies? Or maybe without "struggle" all sentient life would hang in peril of total disintegration.

In any case Who knows. Take away what we now understand about human behavior and what have you got? And don't say "The lack of any tension in a very blah story." A clever writer could figure it out. And maybe someone has already written this?

If things are limited to light speed (as, is probably but not definitely, the case in "real life"), transit time would be in years and centuries. "Wealth" probably would not survive such a journey. Trade would be virtually impossible. An interstellar economy would be impossible

If it's weeks and months, then trade and wealth and exchange rates and all that economic stff comes into play. (It'd be that way within the solar system---voyages to the planets won't take any more time than it used to take to sail the oceans.)

But if it's days or hours, it'll be all one economy and one kind of money.

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Without the impetus to wrangle over or struggle for material things, or even territory, what is left?

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In your example there is no material scarcity. The laws of economics would demand the society to be lax and non-productive. For lack of incentives to do otherwise. They would devolve back to the point where there is again scarcity.

And Survivor was dead right when he suggested there would still be "scarcity" in human relations. Things like affection or respect or even fear are scarce resources. Therefore while this is going on the resource being fought over would probably be power.

For whatever it may be worth, at the University of Utah (when I attended, though I think it's still the case) the economics department was part of the college of social and behavioral sciences and not the college of business. I believe the reason for that is that economics is much more closely related to psychology and sociology than it is to finance and marketing.

I also understand that it is a much tougher field to understand than something simple like accounting, partly because economics is much harder to quantify.

While an interstellar economy would be tricky if you only had lightspeed travel, it would be so because most wealth would be better employed locally now than in another star system years down the road. If some system produced something that was unique enough and couldn't be easily replicated elsewhere, then some trade could exist. Since artworks from very different cultures could probably meet this standard, there would be some trade, even if it were only "virtual" (in other words, just beamed transmissions). Information in a technologically advanced civilization can be reproduced for very low cost, and it would be highly valuable to a civilization that couldn't produce that same information independently.

If we assume that things like dark matter or whatever exist in substantial quantities, and have properties other than being "dark" and "massive", then probably advances in science would yield the potential for trade of these materials should different types have different abundances in different systems. You know, like "Elerium-115" (I think there's a wikipedia article about how that should actually be 115ium-4xx, though of course we don't know the exact isotope number because we don't have any to study) of X-Com fame, which made interstellar travel feasible.

We have travel anywhere in the world in hours/days, but we still don't have a single currency standard because of political obsticles. A star system might choose to use idiosyncratic currency for any number of reasons, only some of which would be simply as a barrier to trade. For instance, if the local culture produces and consumes primarily products that are only valued in that culture, it wouldn't make a lot of sense to put up with the vagaries of the outside economy controlling your currency supply. Or if your culture was hostile to the culture that dominated the monetary policy of the rest of the interstellar economy, it might make sense just as a way to avoid potential economic sabotage if you genuinely believed that culture was likely to enact foolish monetary policy.

The problem is that a human society has to deal with human motivations and human limitations. Just saying that you don't have money doesn't mean that eveything is free, someone still has to do all the work that goes into building up your military. You have to work out a system of assigning rewards for making and maintaining all those weapons, or the soldiers have to fight with their bare hands. You have to produce and distribute food, or the workers starve.

Money is a natural part of human society, men have coined/adopted currency of various types since long before anyone understood economics and monetary policy. It is impossible to imagine a human society more complex than simple clans that didn't use some kind of currency.

I suppose that if you had a warlike race that established social dominance through individual martial prowess, that might work. Such a system can't work for humans because humans must be prepared to fight to the death to establish martial superiority, because some humans will insist on dying before giving in, and they make that decision for reasons totally unrelated to relative martial prowess. So you can't easily build a complex heirarchy based on rational assessment of superior fighting ability. The human version of a feudal society needs money just as much as any other human society. But a species with a different evolutionary history, perhaps one based more on pure predators than on scavenging omnivores, might be able to carry on such a moneyless economy.

I guess someone would have to administer the system and of course therein is the lie.

But we don't have to tell anyone that someone else is in charge.

After a while humanity would be down to a single individual, either one male or one female the embodiment of the human race. Then that person was cloned (perfectly, not degradation of dna) into billions. Everyone would be equal because they'd all be the same -- equal. No sexual tension. No preference because of being related. There would be some differences due to environment. Environment would at last have triumphed over heredity in the old question of which has the most effect on humans.

And they wouldn't be equal by any means. You'd have an original, and a second batch, and a third...it would be impossible to expect the original to raise more than a couple at a time without any human assistance, and human children need human contact from the very beginning, you raise those kids in isolation while only taking care of their physical needs and they'll definitely become sociopathic or retarded. Raise them in batches of age contemporaries and they'll be barbarians, with whatever childish notions of "civilization" they developed on their own.

It would take couple of centuries to get a population of billions, even if you push the process to its limits, and they will have a rigidly heirarchical society due to the demands of establishing generational tranmission of civilization under such extreme conditions. Or you can have a billion murderous savages in a couple of decades. All equal, thus all forced to establish dominance by dint of simple, lethal force.

I suppose it could be entertaining, in a way...if anyone else were around to watch