Right, the problem is that Star Trek isn't even a useful jumping-off point.

This article is "link-bait gone wild". Calling the article "The Economics of Star Trek" is valid in that the Star Trek setting is supposed to be post-scarcity. But that's about where Star Trek's usefulness disappears.

They don't even take their ground assumptions into account in either their background setting or their stories. (Most of the intrigue in the episodes is conflict over resources (unless it's the "Prime Directive" which is even sillier). Why do the Klingons want this planet?)

I don't see any link-bait with the article.

What I see is someone trying to speculate out loud about how such a society could work using Star-Trek as reference point.

Keep in mind that Star-Trek has always been fairly scientific in its approach to story telling and so I think it's absolutely fair to use it as a jump of point since it provides an already existing narrative to talk about an otherwise abstract idea for many.

To me it's speculation and it's concise enough to take serious. What he basically claims might be a possibility even if you took away Star-Trek but it would be harder to communicate the ideas.

After all isn't that what creativity is al about exploring?

Sorry, I didn't mean to deride the title. I think the article was based on a good idea (Star Trek is post-scarcity and people will read articles on Star Trek), but went down the rabbit hole trying to justify its title (by dwelling on analysis of Star Trek, which is a hopeless task).

I think a better approach would be to look at markets that are already post-scarcity or approaching post-scarcity. E.g. entertainment, many kinds of information, and software. What happens when the price of things gets so low that the cost becomes finding the thing you want rather than getting access to it?

In the world of open source (which isn't post-scarcity, but is similar in that people do stuff for "free" and so they aren't incented by money) we see what I refer to as the "economy of interestingness" where things programmers are interested in get lots of attention (3d game engines, web browsers, programming languages, editors) while things programmers don't care about are horribly neglected (e.g. accounting software, email clients)

I hear you.

Sometimes though you need a bit of a fictional narrative to help push thinking past the constraints if nothing else as inspiration and motivation.

But I am sure there are more rational ways to approach this.