Chapter 18: The Venus Dream

In the swamps of central Florida, an elderly man spent decades building models of the future. Jacque Fresco, industrial designer and futurist, constructed domed buildings, circular cities, transportation systems—all prototypes for a civilization that didn't exist. He called it The Venus Project, and at its heart was a proposal so radical that most economists refused to take it seriously: abolish money entirely.

Fresco died in 2017 at age 101, having spent most of his life on the margins of mainstream discourse. His ideas reached millions through documentaries like Zeitgeist Addendum and Paradise or Oblivion, attracting passionate followers and dismissive critics in roughly equal measure. The academic establishment largely ignored him.

This chapter takes Fresco seriously—not as a prophet with all the answers, but as a systems thinker who identified real problems and proposed solutions worth examining. What did he see that others missed? Where did his vision fall short? And what might a coherentist synthesis preserve from his work?

The Resource-Based Economy

Fresco's central proposal was the Resource-Based Economy, or RBE. The core idea is deceptively simple: manage the Earth's resources as the common heritage of humanity, using scientific method and advanced technology to allocate them according to need rather than purchasing power.

In Fresco's vision:

Money would be abolished. With no buying and selling, there would be no prices, no wages, no profit motive. Resources would flow to where they were needed based on technical assessment of carrying capacity and human requirements.

Property would be replaced by access. You wouldn't own a car; you'd have access to transportation systems when you needed them. You wouldn't own a house; you'd have access to housing designed for your needs. Ownership creates artificial scarcity; access enables abundance.

Technology would provide abundance. Automation, renewable energy, and efficient design could produce enough for everyone. Scarcity, in Fresco's view, is largely artificial—a product of the monetary system's incentive structures rather than genuine physical limits.

Cities would be designed as integrated systems. Fresco spent decades designing circular cities with transportation, housing, production, and recreation organized holistically. No zoning conflicts, no traffic congestion, no urban sprawl—just elegant systems solving human needs.

Politics would be replaced by technical decision-making. Democracy, in Fresco's view, was corrupted by money. Political decisions were really economic decisions in disguise. Remove money, and you remove the corruption. Technical experts could determine optimal solutions without the distortions of power and interest.

What Fresco Got Right

Viewed through a coherentist lens, several of Fresco's insights hold up under scrutiny.

Systems thinking: Fresco understood that social problems are interconnected. Crime, poverty, environmental destruction, political corruption—these aren't separate issues but symptoms of systemic dysfunction. Treating them in isolation, without addressing the underlying system, is futile. This holistic perspective is increasingly validated by complexity science and ecological economics.

Abundance orientation: Fresco rejected the assumption of scarcity that underlies most economics. He observed that modern technology could produce far more than humanity consumes, yet billions go without. The problem isn't too little production but wrong distribution. Whether or not you accept his solution, the diagnosis has merit.

Critique of artificial scarcity: The monetary system creates incentives for planned obsolescence, artificial limitations, and the hoarding of innovation. Fresco saw that corporations benefit from scarcity—if goods were abundant and durable, there would be nothing to sell. This critique anticipates contemporary discussions of intellectual property, platform monopolies, and the misalignment between profit and social benefit.

Design as politics: Fresco insisted that how we design our built environment shapes how we live. Car-centric cities create car-dependent lives. Isolated suburbs create isolated people. The physical environment embeds social values. This insight is now mainstream in urban planning, even if Fresco's specific designs remain unrealized.

Long-term thinking: While most economic discourse focuses on quarterly returns and electoral cycles, Fresco thought in terms of generations and civilizations. His time horizon was appropriate to the scale of the problems—climate change, resource depletion, technological transformation—even if his solutions were incomplete.

What Fresco Missed

But the Venus Project vision has significant gaps, and intellectual honesty requires acknowledging them.

The calculation problem returns: How would a moneyless economy determine what to produce? Prices, for all their flaws, aggregate information about preferences and scarcities. Without them, how does the planning system know whether to produce more wheat or more rice, more housing in New York or more in Montana? Fresco invoked technology and surveys, but never fully addressed how distributed knowledge would be gathered and processed.

Incentive compatibility: Why would people work in an RBE? Fresco believed that removing the profit motive would liberate intrinsic motivation—people would work because they found it meaningful. This may be true for some activities, but what about tedious, dangerous, or unpleasant work that still needs doing? The assumption that automation will handle everything unpleasant is optimistic, perhaps unrealistically so.

The transition problem: How do you get from here to there? Fresco's writings largely skip over this question. You can't simply declare money abolished; the entire social structure would collapse. The RBE requires new infrastructure, new institutions, new ways of organizing—none of which can be built without resources coordinated through the existing system. Transition paths were never adequately developed.

The legitimacy gap: Who decides what needs are legitimate? Who determines "carrying capacity"? Who designs the cities? Fresco's answer—technical experts applying scientific method—ignores everything we know about the politics of expertise. Experts disagree. Values conflict. Power shapes what counts as "scientific." Removing money doesn't remove politics; it just obscures it.

Behavioral assumptions: Fresco's vision assumes that human behavior is almost entirely shaped by environment. Change the system, and people will change. This is partly true but overstated. Human nature includes capacities for both cooperation and competition, altruism and selfishness. A system design that ignores the full range of human tendencies is fragile.

The Coherentist Assessment

From a coherentist perspective, Fresco's vision is a mixed inheritance—containing genuine insights wrapped in problematic assumptions.

What resonates: Fresco understood that coordination technologies are not fixed. Money is a human invention; humans can invent alternatives. The assumption that current economic arrangements are natural or inevitable is a failure of imagination. Fresco's willingness to imagine radically different systems is valuable, even if his specific proposals are flawed.

What creates dissonance: Fresco's vision is imposed, not emergent. His circular cities are designed from the top down by technical experts implementing a blueprint. This is force-based coordination dressed in utopian clothing. Genuine resonance requires participation, consent, evolution—not revelation from a designer, however brilliant.

What's missing: The transition. You cannot leap from here to utopia. Change happens through iteration, experimentation, learning. A coherentist approach would ask: what small experiments might test RBE-like principles? What existing practices embody elements of the vision? How might we evolve toward something better rather than imposing it?

A Coherentist Resource Economy?

What would a coherentist take from Fresco—and leave behind?

Take: The abundance orientation. The recognition that scarcity is often artificial. The systems thinking that connects economics to ecology to society. The long time horizon appropriate to civilizational challenges. The willingness to imagine alternatives.

Leave: The blueprinting. The technocratic confidence. The dismissal of politics. The assumption that the right design, implemented correctly, solves human coordination. These reflect the errors of twentieth-century planning rather than twenty-first-century wisdom.

Add: Participation. Consent. Iteration. Multiple experiments rather than single solutions. Respect for local knowledge and diverse preferences. Accountability mechanisms that prevent capture. Humility about what we don't know.

A coherentist resource economy might look something like this: commons-based management of key resources, with governance emerging from affected communities. Market mechanisms where they work well; planning where markets fail. Automation serving abundance for all rather than profit for few. Experimentation and learning rather than blueprinting and implementation. And always the question: does this system resonate with human needs, or does it require force to maintain?

This is not a blueprint—that would contradict the principle. It's a direction, a set of questions, a framework for evaluation. The answers must emerge through practice.

The Thread Forward

Fresco's Venus Dream represents one pole of economic imagination: the comprehensive redesign, the clean break, the utopia rendered in architectural models. Its appeal is understandable—who wouldn't want to leap past the failures of existing systems?

But the coherentist insight is that paradises cannot be designed and imposed. They must be grown, evolved, emergent from the participation of those who will inhabit them. The question is not what the ideal system looks like but what the next steps look like—the experiments, the transitions, the learning.

The dream is not over. But the dreaming must become more sophisticated.