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Star Trek
The new movie is a good revitalization of the franchise. It's most enjoyable moments build on, foreshadow and deepen our appreciation of its familiar characters. The casting and actors are all superb on this score. The action is passable, although the fight scenes are poor and I wish they had put more effort into the plot.
Best piece of Star Trek trivia: Vulcan education includes rigorous training in mathematics, physics and economics. (Listen carefully during the education scene!)
Addendum: Aha! I am told unofficially that we can thank economist turned screenwriter Glen Whitman for adding the economics lesson to Vulcan!
Posted by Alex Tabarrok on May 8, 2009 at 02:26 PM in Film | Permalink
Comments
Hmm, no biology? Granted it's not as mathematical as the other three. But I'm deeply curious about the evolutionary history of Vulcans.
Posted by: James Hanley at May 8, 2009 2:38:51 PM
I'm a big fan of division of labor, and the use of action unit directors a la the Bourne series is a big improvement. Good directors are simply not good enough to direct action, and good action directors make crappy movies. There is no longer any excuse for good movies not to have good action.
Posted by: Andrew at May 8, 2009 2:48:37 PM
"Federation citizens possess what a 20th century capitalist would refer to as "money" only in a limited way. What corresponds most closely to "money" in the Federation is referred to as "credits". These are earned by working, the more and harder one works, the more "credits" an individual earns. One can then use these to purchase food, transportation, living space, etc. Once one spends a credit, it disappears, it is not transferable to the store or anyone else (except parents to children). It is simply deducted from one's total. To get more, one must work more. Credits cannot be traded, except for some controlled gamboling instances, and cannot be stolen. The deduction and accumulation of credits is more of a bookkeeping system than anything else. As above, production units that produce transporters, food, etc. do not trade money for inputs, but simply get what was decided upon by the participatory planning process.
Though one can buy and own food, transportation, living space, etc. in the federation, the ownership of the means of production is not allowed. Thus farms, ships, industrial plants, etc. are collectively owned by all, and in a another sense, by no-one."
For more:
http://vanparecon.resist.ca/StarTrekEcon
Its also worth mentioning Krugman's "joke" interstellar trade model which confronts the problem of how to deal with interest rates when speed of light travel causes time to be perceived differently by different agents.
http://www.princeton.edu/~pkrugman/interstellar.pdf
Posted by: Nylund at May 8, 2009 2:59:14 PM
I can't get how they could go to such great lengths to get the characters right and then totaly f-up the time line. Who will ask spock how he feels after he relives now? And who will be there when his dad goes mental in next gen? All I can say is they better pull her out of a buffer or something or why bother with even attempting to keep it Trek.
Posted by: michelle at May 8, 2009 2:59:39 PM
How should we expect a society of perfectly logical individuals to be organized?
Posted by: josh at May 8, 2009 3:15:43 PM
Yeah I loved the reference to non-rivalry in there. cool stuff. Hopefully New Star Trek won't be socialist!
Posted by: Sameer Parekh at May 8, 2009 3:16:56 PM
does that make me a vulcan? sweet!
Posted by: samson at May 8, 2009 3:20:18 PM
I don't think Star Trek will be socialist
Posted by: debt relief at May 8, 2009 4:11:50 PM
I caught that too! Non-rival, non-excludable...public goods!
I wasn't impressed with the rest of the movie myself, though. The names were familiar, but that's about it. Too much over-the-top special effects to the point of utter absurdity, and the entire Star Trek history was rewritten.
Posted by: Brian at May 8, 2009 4:46:56 PM
I caught that line when young Spock was in the "teaching chamber." He was giving the standard textbook definition of public goods.
Posted by: alex at May 8, 2009 5:13:11 PM
And ethics!
Posted by: Paul Gowder at May 8, 2009 5:30:47 PM
What corresponds most closely to "money" in the Federation is referred to as "credits". These are earned by working, the more and harder one works, the more "credits" an individual earns. One can then use these to purchase food, transportation, living space, etc. Once one spends a credit, it disappears, it is not transferable to the store or anyone else (except parents to children). It is simply deducted from one's total.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
In other words, the real interest rate is zero. Not a very realistic model of our future, or really any galaxy future.
Posted by: foobar at May 8, 2009 5:49:06 PM
These are earned by working, the more and harder one works, the more "credits" an individual earns.
And, may I ask, how do they define "more" and "harder"? Is it in any way related to how productive someone is.
Aye, there's the rub.
Posted by: jmo at May 8, 2009 5:59:52 PM
I have to say, I'm a pretty big star trek fan, but I have mixed thoughts about even going to the new movie. It looks like an ok action movie, but it does not look like a star trek movie. I'm not sure I understand why they had to call it star trek, rather than come up with some new names and start a new franchise, especially when they are going to depart so dramatically from the spirit of the old franchise.
The real kicker is when Alex says "I wish they had put more effort into the plot." While characters are important, and should not be neglected, I am not a fan of sci-fi that focuses on "character development" to the exclusion of plot development, ala the last season of BSG. I'm just afraid this is going to be one big BSG finale that spoils the whole franchise for me.
Posted by: Doug at May 8, 2009 8:21:17 PM
@Doug: Don't be so worried, it was pretty good. The first hour will have you thinking, "WTF?", since it starts out like a teen coming-of-age romance flick. But then all of the sudden it's pure Star Trek. More true to the spirit of the original TV series than the other movies, IMO.
I was the only guy in the theater who laughed out loud at the "non-rival", "non-excludable" bit. Then I turned to the guy next to me and said, "that line never would have been scripted in the first 'Trek' episodes!" He didn't comprehend... It was a nice touch to add to the cognitive dissonance of people dressed in 1960s clothes in the distant future.
Posted by: Joshua Allen at May 8, 2009 9:16:41 PM
RE: Poor Plot
Notice that the writers were the same team who wrote Transformers, which had a bad plot even for a movie about space robots that can turn into cars. If you are going to animate the whole plot with a McGuffin, at least try to come up with something creative (i.e. do not use an all-powerful space cube of mysterious origins) and try to disguise the fact that that is what you are doing. Even most video games these days have much more cleaver plot devices than than.
Posted by: Aguirre at May 8, 2009 9:31:17 PM
I never considered Star Trek to be overly socialist. Fascistic definitely, given the Federation's emphasis on Star Fleet. Also I think that Nylund's quotation claiming people could not own the means of production is wrong. Wasn't Jean Luc Picard a farmer?
Posted by: Dan in Euroland at May 8, 2009 11:43:43 PM
"I never considered Star Trek to be overly socialist. Fascistic definitely, given the Federation's emphasis on Star Fleet. Also I think that Nylund's quotation claiming people could not own the means of production is wrong. Wasn't Jean Luc Picard a farmer?"
Nylunds quote has nothing to do with the Star Trek canon. His quote comes from Michael Albert's parecon cult which has become one favored alternative to capitalism among the insane left after Noam Chomsky endorsed it. The quote describe a reimagining of Star Trek's economy along parecon lines.
Posted by: assman at May 9, 2009 1:02:41 AM
As for Star Trek's socialism...I don't think Star Trek is socialist. Rather it is noneconomic. In our age this difficult to talk about or consider this because all our considerations are dominated by economics. So perhaps a world in which money does not motivate would seem odd to us in the same way as a society in which the afterlife does not motivate would seem odd to people living 500 years ago.
So I don't think its right to say its socialist or capitalist. It would be better to say that the ownership of the means of production and the economic organization itself may cease to be relevant in a society which is capable of nearly unlimited affluence. I think this is what Roddenberry was getting at.
The real odd thing is that we live in an economic age were economic considerations have come to dominate all other considerations. Money is now the ultimate symbol of power, prestige and status. This is very very odd because you would think that as people became more affluent, money would become less important because it would have diminishing utility. Instead the opposite has happened. Is this because money is more useful because there is so many more product being produced. Is there a good sociological reason? Why hasn't Roddenberry's vision become a reality?
Posted by: assman at May 9, 2009 1:59:59 AM
"I never considered Star Trek to be overly socialist. Fascistic definitely"
It's not the genus but it's the species? Hm...
Posted by: Vernunft at May 9, 2009 2:29:22 AM
If they can use the replicator to create anything isn't the cost of production of virtually everything essentially zero, both on average and at the margin.
If everything is free, why would it make any difference it the economy is socialist, capitalist or Marxist and why would you have trade? But trade is about the only economic activity I've seen any member of the Federation do.
Posted by: spencer at May 9, 2009 3:05:41 PM
Given the way traders -- particularly Mudd and the Ferengi -- are portrayed, it didn't seem particularly unsocialist. And since we don't see Lockheed-Boeing engineers wandering the decks during shake-down tests of Enterprise D, I suppose they're not capitalists, either. That pretty much leaves Stalinist social-fascism. No wonder Mal and Zoe joined the Independents.
Posted by: Eric H at May 9, 2009 3:21:20 PM
in ST canon, there are lockheed-boeing analogues, namely yoyodyne proposal systems, that firm even had an office on the promenade deck of DS9
Posted by: scott clark at May 9, 2009 7:58:59 PM
STAR TREK rocks! The movie was great. Everyone in the theatre was loving it and it was packed with true trekkies on opening day. I got a background for my twitter profile at http://tweetcustom.com They have Star Trek Movie images and some other tweet stuff. I hope yall like the movie and I know i will be buying the dvd to own a copy.
Posted by: trekkie09 at May 10, 2009 2:01:47 AM
I am mostly turned off by the imagery of the new Star Trek, Seems like there going for a "Fast and Furious in Space" but, I'm looking forward to the book (Alan Dean Foster wrote the novel based on the movie) to get all the plot details and update my self on the direction of the series.
Seems the goal of movie is an attempt to make Star Trek mainstream, I don't find that impressive, there is a reason why the longest lived and most loved series aren't mainstream... and look at how low-brow and ephemeral the average mainstream blockbuster movie is... or for that matter the average movie.
There are potential continuity issues some people will have, large numbers of loud people imagined lots of canon contradiction with Star Trek Enterprise mostly issues they made up themselves as opposed to true continuity contradictions... This movie does use time travel and change almost everything, so those people will probably have real reasons to have a problems there... But, still It's still easy to preserve Star Trek Time Line 1 and have the new Star Trek Time Line. ( such as in this Unimultiverse Star Trek idea http://www3.ns.sympatico.ca/jcfancy1/StarTrek-Pocket.html )
But, still this new one doesn't look much like Star Trek to me.
Posted by: Joey at May 10, 2009 4:32:00 PM
