I'm just trying to figure out what it will look like. Thus, there is by definition some sort of micro-economy. The ship has people, and people need things (like food), ergo the things must be distributed to the people. Command economy, barter system, gift-giving, these are all economic systems. So the question is: how are they compensated? By who? And how, in general, does this economy work?ĮDIT for clarification: I do not mean 'economy' in the sense of 'capitalism', or even 'money', but in the sense of 'creation and distribution of goods and services'. Contact with Earth and the rest of the Sol system is severely limited. There is a limited military-style hierarchy, the ship's operations crew and command structure, but the vast majority of people on the ship would be civilians. Everything is a closed loop, by necessity. Traditional farming is likewise off the table. It's a space ship though, so there are no raw materials to extract without new raw materials, industrial production is limited.
Since they're traveling for sixty-some-odd years, people will need to have jobs. Suppose we have an interstellar generation ship, with an initial population of about 10,000 and a final population (on arrival) of about 20,000.
