Matt Yglesias

Star Trek

The early gossip around Star Trek had me very nervous. It was clear that the studio wasn’t interested in doing something that, like the TNG-based films, was basically designed to appeal to fans. Instead, they wanted to turn Trek, which has always been a kind of weird thing, into a mainstream broadly accessible movie.

Given those constraints, I thought they wound up doing an extraordinary job of not doing anything that’s outrageous from a real fanboy perspective. Handling the desire to ditch elements of the established history through the mechanism of a goofy time travel plot is very much in the spirit of a franchise that’s full of goofy time travel plots. And under the circumstances, the use of select snatches of homage (the bug like the bug from Wrath of Khan, Captain Pike in a wheelchair, etc.) served to drive home the idea that we’re watching the same multiverse unfold.

That said, I still think the Trek concept has always been something that best unfolds on television. A quintessential Trek scene, from any of the series, consists of a bunch of people standing around on the bridge of a starship (or DS9 equivalent) talking to one another, followed by a cutaway to a shot of a ship in space, followed by a return to the standing around talking. It’s just not something that particularly requires the big screen. And it’d be nice to see the energy and money and talent that was dedicated to re-imagining the Enterprise just put toward doing something original and new.

Heroics for Liberals

Dana Stevens writes:

Star Trek’s vision of the future, as guided by creator Gene Roddenberry, was also a relic of its time, the age of NASA and the Cold War and Kruschev pounding his shoe on a podium at the United States. The show’s faith in diplomacy and technology as tools for not just global but universal peace might seem touchingly dated in our post-9/11 age of stateless jihad, loose nukes, and omnipresent danger. Yet in a weird way, Star Trek’s cheerfully square naiveté makes it the perfect film for our first summer of (slimly) renewed hope. It’s a blockbuster for the Obama age, when smarts and idealism are cool again. In fact, can’t you picture our president—levelheaded, biracial, implacably smart—on the bridge in a blue shirt and pointy ears?

I don’t think there’s anything particularly “weird” about it. In some ways, the original Star Trek is very much a product of the Cold War era. But in a more precise way, it’s very much a product of the high tide of American liberalism that was occurring in the 1960s. That era gave way to a more conservative era, but now, arguably, the pendulum is swinging back to liberalism.

Budgeting for the (Very) Long Run

My eyes sort of glazed over this, but in Paul Ryan’s April Fool’s Budget he has a chart showing that if you give increasing numbers of old people less-and-less money over time you can keep spending flat even as grandpa’s illness go untreated. The savings thereby accrued are, by 2080, really enormous:

Josh Marshall comments:

This is the scoring the House Republicans have provided, tracking Democratic budget policy and theirs over the next 70 years. As you can see, predicting ideological stances over as yet unborn Democratic members of Congress, the GOP scoring appears to have us on track for the government owning about 90% of the economy in the early-mid-22nd second, which if I remember is about the time period of the invention of the warp drive. So I don’t know if they’ve figured that in too.

Fortunately, this is my area of expertise. Thus, we can say conclusively that Marshall has this wrong. According to the Gene Roddenberry Budget Office, Zephram Cochrane is projected to develop warp drive in the mid-21st century and the Phoenix will become the first manned human spacecraft to travel faster than the speed of light on April 5, 2063. Indeed, it’s probably no coincidence that this is about when Ryan stops doing Obama projections altogether because First Contact with the Vulcans creates a lot of hard-to-project immigration issues.

What does happen in the mid-to-late 22nd century is the rise of the New World Economy and the elimination of money from the Earth economy, presumably as part of the roughly-contemporaneous formation of the United Federation of Planets.

Missing Productivity and the Rise of Social Production

A couple of days ago, I was discussing Michael Mandel’s Fake Productivity Hypothesis. In response to this, Tyler Cowen countered with the No Profits Here Hypothesis holding that:

[T]here was some productivity growth but much of it fell outside of the usual cash and revenue-generating nexus. Maybe you will live until 83 rather than 81.5 and your pain reliever will work better. In the meantime you will read blogs and gaze upon beautiful people using your Facebook account. Those are gains to consumer surplus, but they don’t prop up the revenue-generating sectors of the economy as one might have expected.

Good examples of this would have to include Wikipedia (which is hugely useful but doesn’t make anyone any money at all), Craigslist (which has revolutionized the way people do a lot of things but has done far more to destroy other firms’ revenue sources than to make money for itself), and much open-source software (where the absence of copyright-enforced monopoly profits make the product more useful, but less lucrative, than closed-source products). John Quiggin has been pondering the rise of social production for a while and has the following bullet points on the implications:

• If monetary returns are weakly, or even negatively correlated with the value of social production, there’s no reason to expect capital markets to do a good job in allocating resources to supporting innovation. (This point seems rather less controversial than when I made it in 2006.)

• As a corollary, it seems unlikely that large inequalities in income are beneficial to anyone except the recipients of high incomes (this issue is being discussed, in a much more abstract setting, at Crooked Timber)
• If improvements in welfare are increasingly independent of the market, it would make sense to shift resources out of market production, for example by reducing working hours. The financial crisis seems certain to produce at least a temporary drop in average hours, but the experience of the Depression and the Japanese slowdown of the 1990s suggest that the effect may be permanent.
• Creativity, broadly defined, seems likely to become more important, while markets, particularly financial markets, become less so. Firms that want to survive and prosper will have to behave quite differently from the way the did in the past. Google is an obvious example of a firm that is trying to do this, if not always succeeding.

I see two clear areas where the rubber may hit the road on this. One is in terms of working hours. Consider this chart:

Clearly, we’re going to be able to produce more market-value of stuff than the barely-working Dutch are. At the same time, if you visit the Netherlands it’s not as if people are starving in the street. They have plenty of stuff. And, obviously, they have more free time. That can be nice in its own terms, or it might just mean more washing dishes by hand. But in the brave new digital world where it’s possible to engage in endeavors that are useful to other people on a pretty large scale on a hobbyist basis, it also means they have more time to do non-market work—write open source code, record an album and have people download it on BitTorrent, improve Wikipedia entries, etc. Obviously, you couldn’t base an entire economy on this kind of thing, since you can’t produce any tangible goods this way. But 1,357 hours per year isn’t nothing, it’s just a lot less than 1,824 hours per years. And these days, more-and-more of what people are interested in are non-tangible goods.

It’s a bit of a cliché in politics to talk about the need to move from an “industrial age economy” to an “information age economy” but there’s relatively little thought given to what this might actually entail. But it might entail a lot! Among other things, it might entail that certain economic metrics developed for the industrial age are less-relevant, and therefore that appropriate tradeoffs aren’t what they once were. A friend of mine just twittered:

tinyurl is down. these URL shorteners are a real problem: essential but not a viable business, it’s a surefire recipe for tons of lost data.

The real “problem,” though, is broader than TinyURL. And the solution may be hoping that people have free time and, if bored, will be inspired to do something useful. It’s the vision of Marx’s early thought, or Star Trek.

A potentially related issue has to do with broadband infrastructure. My understanding is that the internet is radically faster in some Asian countries, notably South Korea and Japan, than it is here in part because the state has intervened in a more heavy-handed way to ensure that this is the case. Clearly, though, South Korea and Japan are not crushing the United States economically. One potential explanation for this is that all this talk about the Internet is way off-base, and digital communication isn’t actually all that important to the modern economy. I don’t find that especially plausible. Another explanation is the Cowen/Quiggen explanation—the consumer surplus associated with digital communication is only very partially captured as profits. That will predict that absent heavy-handed government intervention, capital markets will underfund broadband infrastructure and you’ll have less of it than would be socially optimal. This is, I think, a fairly reasonable interpretation of the broadband gap.

All that’s very left-wing, but there are also less left-wing implications for fiscal stimulus and the like. Although in either case “be more like Western Europe” turns out to be the prescription.

Only on the Internet

A comprehensive (?) list of times characters have used the word “penny” on the various Star Trek shows. Apparently such “old Earth” adages as “a penny for your thoughts” and “in for a penny, in for a pound” will persist into the distant future.

The Final Frontier

Before posting any additional inflammatory remarks about Gaza, I thought I would address the other controversy likely to provoke lengthy internet feuds — which of the “Star Trek” series is the worst? Yesterday afternoon while awaiting the beginning of the Texas-OSU game, I opined on my public Twitter feed that “truly ‘Voyager’ is the worst of the Star Treks.”

This provoked some dispute from my Twitter followers. The most popular contrary view was that “Enterprise” is worse. But a substantial number of people took the line that “Deep Space Nine” was the worst. That’s just crazy. It’s true that DS9 starts weak, but it actually becomes quite awesome once the Dominion plotline gets rolling. And beyond that, it’s actually a pretty innovative show — it was one of the pioneers in moving the hour-long television drama away from the pure serial mode and toward longer-running narrative arcs.

As for “Enterprise,” I dunno. The Temporal Cold War is stupid. But I think the explorations of the origins of the Federation and the Prime Directive are interesting. Not interesting to normal people, of course, but interesting to fans of the franchise. Whereas “Voyager” just gives me nothing. I appreciate the desire to set a show far, far away from the rest of the action in order to avoid being weighed down by too much existing canon, but an inability to rely on basic familiar pillars (Klingons, Romulans, the occasional emergency sub-space transmission from admiral so-and-so) winds up doing a lot of reinventing the wheel. Except it’s a kind of second-rate wheel.

Star Trek

The preview for the upcoming J.J. Abrams-helmed movie looks pretty good, but the shot of the speedometer early on seems to imply that we’re still not on the metric system in the 23rd century, long after the USA has been subsumed into the United Earth government and then the Federation. My understanding is that Abrams doesn’t really care for Trek fans, and no doubt remarks like this won’t change his opinion of us for the better. But still!