Yes, I was tempted to ask for a working example of a society that had effectively unhitched value from effort--successfully.
And no. The Federation does not qualify.
We have no replicators, sadly.
I think most people think "monetary value" when one says value these days, and seem to believe that value can be created without effort. See Wall Street for a whole population that thinks that way.
Indeed, given our monetary system today, one can create
monetary value without effort and without creating any material value whatsoever. That's the biggest problem with our monetary system today. Monetary value and material value have been effectively decoupled.
I think the most egregious failure of the public school system is the widely-held belief that economics encompasses only monetary transactions, and that monetary value and value are therefore synonymous. As the American Economic Society's own definition points out, it encompasses far, far more than that.
Economics is the study of how people choose to use resources.
Resources include the time and talent people have available, the land, buildings, equipment, and other tools on hand, and the knowledge of how to combine them to create useful products and services.
Important choices involve how much time to devote to work, to school, and to leisure, how many dollars to spend and how many to save, how to combine resources to produce goods and services, and how to vote and shape the level of taxes and the role of government.
Economics at heart is about material or subjective personal value, not monetary value.
Frex, economics encompasses how one chooses to use one's time, the rarest of resources under one's command. But pointing out that choosing who to date or who to marry, or indeed whether to marry, is an economic decision often seems to cause people's heads to explode. As the definition above shows, even the choice of how to use one's leisure time is an economic decision. An hour spent vegging out in front of the TV, for example, is an hour that can never be spent in learning a foreign language, or in any other way. Spending dollars is economic activity, but so is spending time or effort.