From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@www.aeiveos.com)
Date: Wed Aug 25 1999 - 17:28:39 MDT
On Wed, 25 Aug 1999 hibbert@netcom.com wrote:
>
> Sorry Robert, but you've misrepresented the economist's idea of of
> comparative advantage.
>
> The part that *is* surprising (and particularly relevant to the SI
> discussion) is that even if some firm or country has a competitive
> advantage in *all* interesting markets, it will still benefit everyone
> if those at a disadvantage produce in the markets in which they have
> the least disadvantage. All traders would be strictly worse off if
> the worst producers refrain from producing. The implications for the
> SI debate should be obvious.
I don't disagree with this, and may have short-changed it in my
discussion. Obviously if you are using resources in something that you
are really *poor* at producting, then you are giving up using them
for something you are *good* at producing. So you are better off
producing those things you are the the very best at producing
even if you have to buy some things need from others who are poorer
at producing them than you are.
>
> Now that I've written this, I begin to suspect that it's an analysis based
> on old-fashioned static economics. If you take evolution and changing
> populations into account, it may be that the worst producers (if it's an
> inherited trait, like being biological :-) ) get competed out of the
> population over the long term. It still remains the case that in every
> market at every point in time, all potential producers should find their
> area of greatest comparative advantage (which may not be an area of
> absolute advantage) and compete there.
Yes. But the thing which is critical with regard to SIs, that
doesn't occur much in normal everyday economics discussions is
the time-delay factor in the value of goods, services, information,
etc. This is important to some degree in our society today as
we can witness with the use of FedEx, UPS overnight, "fresh"
vegetables or fish, etc. But in an SI environment, the delays
are going to be *huge* and the information (or material)
delivery small, compared with what you already can compute
(or have). In our society we may value this at something like
$10.00/day (cost of overnight vs. 2-day delivery). In the
cost of an SI society, it will be the equivalent of
multi-years of 10^42 instructions per second. That
is a *huge* overhead. Would the Spanish have funded
the expiditions of Columbus if he had told them that
the cost of returning the spices would be the time
equivalent of 142 "trips around the world"? [Or some
equally ridiculous number.] The remote SI has to be coming
up with some *extremely* rare piece of information to
justify it being purchased remotely (taking advantage of their
comparative advantage). They could have a significant
comparative advantage in producing the information but
still be in a poor marketing position due to the costs
(time delays) in getting the information to you.
I'll admit that if a SI can dedicate itself to computing
such a piece of information and sell it at low cost (with
the delays) to 10^11+ SIs, that this might still be
a feasible strategy. The only way to know is to become
a SI and see what the galactic offer/bid board says.
Robert
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