Star Wars, Star Trek, and Macroeconomic Theory
Silicon Valley venture capitalist Peter Thiel, in a conversation with New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, weighed in on that most famous of geek controversies: Star Wars or Star Trek?
Though rich, powerful and at least nominally conservative, Thiel is most qualified to join this particular fray. Though he hasn’t been spotted at many West Coast Comic-Cons, he nonetheless can claim geek cred by way of his investment choices: he pals around with Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. Thiel himself might not pass for geek, but he loves to fund it.
The interview drew the attention of Manu Saadia, who wrote the book Trekonomics: The Economics of Star Trek, which we will be discussing in this book more than once. Writing for The New Yorker, Saadia took note of Thiel’s fanboy preference – Star Wars – and took note of his reason why.
“Capitalism,” he answered.
“The whole plot of Star Wars starts with Han Solo having this debt that he owes, and so the plot in Star Wars is driven by money.
“Star Trek,” on the other hand, “is the communist one.”
Put simply, Star Wars appeals to Thiel’s more libertarian sensibilities, while Star Trek evokes the horrors of a capitalism-free universe with lots of equality, no poverty, and completely egalitarian opportunity. In an essay published by the Cato Institute, he wrote that technology is often a dangerous distraction to social attention; freedom, he wrote, is a product of political thought, not technological advancement. And Star Trek seems to say the opposite.
Star Wars “is in fact much closer to home that Star Trek,” Saadia wrote in The New Yorker. “Forget the lightsabers and the Force: the essential story of the films is familiar, a techified version of a Wild West that existed only in Buffalo Bill’s travelling revue and its celluloid successors, the Westerns. In Star Wars, criminal potentates hire bounty hunters to recover debts from roguish smugglers. Robots are menial servants and sycophants rather than colleagues, and human slavery persists. Unelected tyrants and religious zealots make policy by fiat. A blaster, or a Death Star, is the only real guarantor of life and liberty. Fate and the lottery of birth reign supreme. It is a libertarian’s fever dream, a distilled expression of the idea that the greater good is best served through unfettered (and, if necessary, brutal) economic competition.
“This, rather than the liberal-democratic setting of the USS Enterprise, is the political environment in which Thiel seems to feel most comfortable…in [his Cato Institute essay] he places ‘confiscatory taxes, totalitarian collectives, and the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual’ in opposition to ‘authentic human freedom.’ Only the strong and lucky, like Han Solo, should survive.”
On the other hand, in the Star Trek universe, “technological progress is inseparable from society and politics,” Saadia wrote. “As even quasi-fans will recall, the TV shows and films feature a machine called the replicator, which can produce any inanimate matter on demand – food, drink, warp-drive parts…The replicator solves, albeit fictionally, what John Maynard Keynes once called ‘the economic question’ – that is, the imbalance between supply and demand, and the resulting need for markets and price mechanisms to allocate scarce resources. The society of Star Trek has decided not to exact a fee for the use of the machine. Thus the replicator can be an engine both for the equal distribution of wealth and for personal enrichment. It does not bring about social change on its own. The post-scarcity world in Star Trek is the result of a political decision, not of pure technological progress.”
It’s an interesting new take on a very old debate: Star Wars as a ‘libertarian fever dream,’ Star Trek as the ultimate ‘liberal-democratic’ ideal. Yet it’s spot-on accurate as sociopolitical characterization, when we consider the feudal mythologies that inspired George Lucas and the contemporary philosophy behind Gene Roddenberry’s overt humanist manifesto.
In the Star Wars universe, life is cheap and freedom precious, because it’s in such short supply. Authoritarianism reigns, in constant tension with the rage of the oppressed, with survival-of-the-fittest as the rule – and technology is leveraged only to serve this dynamic, never to rise above it.
In the Star Trek universe, life is revered and freedom the default, in bountiful supply. Egalitarianism reigns, and the right of self-determination is the highest rule. Technology is leveraged in its service, overtly bolstering equality, rather than enabling its antithesis.
This leads us to a very interesting question: what, exactly, is the difference in these two universes, this opposing visions of human socioeconomic order?
The Star Wars-Wild West analogy might lead us astray here. It seeks to situate Han Solo, Luke Skywalker and company in a resource-sparse economy, where smugglers thrive, moisture farmers eek out a living wringing water from the air, and energy is flat-out hard to come by. Poverty is always within shouting distance, and human beings are used as beasts of labor.
Star Trek, on the other hand, shows us a society built on an energy-rich economy, where no one goes hungry, every living being is respected and nurtured by the society, and boundless accomplishment is possible.
It is easily argued that free and plentiful energy is the key difference between these two socioeconomic models.
But that argument is just as easily dismissed. In the Star Wars universe, all weapons – even swords – are energy-based; ships that are orders of magnitude more massive than the USS Enterprise roam the stars; planets can be blown to pieces. If anything, the Star Wars economy is more energy-rich than Star Trek’s.
We’re looking, then, not at technology, nor even at energy supply, to pin down the critical difference in these two economies. And Peter Thiel’s attitudes, per Saadia’s essay, underscore it:
“What is anathema to Thiel in Star Trek is the notion, drawn from Isaac Asimov’s fiction, that the market is but a temporary solution to imbalances in supply and demand, and that technology and plenty will eventually make it obsolete. Star Trek replicators are nothing but Asimov’s robots disguised as coffee machines, let loose on the world as a public good. They dissolve the need for a pricing mechanism. They represent the logical endpoint of the Industrial Revolution, when all human labor has been offloaded to machines. Star Trek and Asimov remind us that the market and all the behaviors associated with it are temporary and historically contingent. If that is so, then what Thiel thinks of human nature and motivations – that people are competitive, acquisitive, greedy – is temporary and contingent, too.”
And there we have it.
Star Wars and Star Trek are not simply two very different visions of human society. They are two very different – and competing – views of human nature.
Are human beings competitive, acquisitive, greedy? That’s an easy argument to make.
The follow-up questions are not so easy: have we always been so? And are we necessarily so?
Star Wars says Yes.
Star Trek says No.
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