The Economy is Complicated (This Isn't About Politics)

I thought I should point that out.

No, I'm as sick and tired of watching political ads as you are, dear readers, but we can all agree that the economy is often the subject of those ads. Unlike the regular economy, however, fictional ones can actually be a bit interesting, if still difficult to understand.

For example, I'm working on a short story for school and in the process of brainstorming the world in which the story is based, I came across a concept I'd heard of before, but didn't know a lot about: a post-scarcity economy.

A post-scarcity economy is one in which everyone has everything they want. In other words, no scarcity. Now, despite even the best efforts of science fiction (not to mention reality), I'm not familiar with any  economy that's truly post-scarcity due to the simple fact that human beings are capable of wanting a lot.

A classic example would be Star Trek. I really haven't watched very many of any season of that show, but I know that it's in the future, and replicators and (essentially) free energy mean humanity is capable of creating anything they have the energy for. You want a diamond the size of your house? No problem. You want more food than you could eat in a hundred lifetimes? You got it. But material goods aren't the only sorts of thing that human beings want.

Take the Enterprise, for example. There are only so many seats aboard that space ship. If there are more people that want a space on it than there are spaces, then there is a scarcity of them.

Now, one way of getting to a post-scarcity economy is by a change in human beings. If we no longer care about originality or physical presence, then a molecular copy of the Mona Lisa is just as satisfying as the real one, or a teleprescene/virtual reality simulation of the Enterprise is just as good as being there in the flesh. How we value things will change whether or not those things are capable of being scarce.

Getting back to my story, I'd created a fantasy world with a nation that was, if not a post-scarcity economy, then sort of close to one. My problem lay in the fact that my nation had two neighbors, and if you have everything that you want, how can you trade with somebody?

I realized that economic sanctions (it is illegal to copy this product) would help a little, but eventually decided on culture. One nation is essentially able to mass-produce recordings of dreams (like full-sensory movies), which becomes their biggest export to my P-S economy. The other one has lots of tea (or tobacco, or coffee, I haven't decided). 

So, yeah, I figured out how to base an economy on dreams. Go me.