The Economics of Star Trek: The Proto-Post-Scarcity Economy: Fifth Anniversary Edition Revised and Expanded with a Foreword by Manu Saadia

Book excerpt: Five years ago after its original publication on Medium: The Economics of Star Trek: The Proto-Post-Scarcity Society is finally available in book form, expanded and annotated.When originally published, The Economics of Star Trek garnered over a half a million reads, and was featured twice on the home page of Reddit, in Slate, Bloomberg, Boing Boing, Hacker Monthly, and more. It was a crazy time. In this fifth-anniversary edition, the original essay appears as-is, with extensive footnotes adding new new information, challenging some of the original suppositions, and expanding upon certain points. There are a lot of them. Additionally, there are six new essays regarding Trek and Artificial Intelligence, Bitcoin, Universal Basic Income and the new Trek franchises in film and television, as well as a retrospective essay looking back on the past five years since the original publication.Finally, the book includes an all new foreword from Manu Saadia, author of Trekonomics, which is the other major publication on the topic.