One frustrating aspect of being a Star Trek fan is that despite us being told that “we don’t use money anymore”, very little detail is given on how the Federation actually works, economically. Of course, ST hand-waves over a lot of things, like warp drives, transporters, and so on. The writers are smart enough to know what they don’t know, and to avoid violating the suspension of disbelief by spouting obvious nonsense.
There are any number of SF works that declare themselves utopian / post-capitalist by authorial fiat (The Culture Series, The Disposessed, Accelerando, etc.), but I’m curious to know whether there are any works that really get into the economic nuts and bolts.
In particular, I’m interested in fictional depictions of societies that continue to use money and property in some form, but which do so in a way that mitigates the excesses of our current capitalist framework - just as our economic system today mitigates the worst aspects of 18th-century capitalism. This also may include different flavors of capitalism, varieties democratic socialism, and so on.
I’m also very interested in stories that depict the path of “how you got there”.
The challenge of writing about alternative economic systems is hard - the space of unintended consequences is vast, and many of those consequences aren’t discovered until decades later. (As I’m fond of saying, “The more mature the ecosystem, the more sophisticated the parasites”). I’d be most impressed with authors who can foresee some of these consequences.
I’d prefer if this not get into political arguments, I am primarily interested in literary references (which can include both fictional works and academic papers). We can discuss whether a given idea would work (or not), but I’d like to keep this academic, and steer away from advocating that we actually adopt (or not) any given idea.
Bonus credits if the idea is presented in sufficient detail that it’s possible to model the system mathematically.