From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@www.aeiveos.com)
Date: Wed Aug 25 1999 - 17:47:25 MDT
On Wed, 25 Aug 1999, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote:
> Can I just briefly point out that chimpanzees, much less rocks, are not
> famous for migrating to janitorial jobs?
Comparative advantage *requires* that you both can do the job.
If one of you can't then the other's comparative advantage
becomes infinite.
>
> Besides, this doesn't hold true if the worst producers are using
> resources inefficiently that the best producers could otherwise use.
>
The worst producers could be doing an extrodinarily poor job
of producing widgets, and you would continue to allow them to
do it if it cost you 100 years of star output to go & bring
back 10% of their widget raw materials over a 1000 year time
period.
Yes, you could simply go there, axe the widget for brains
manufacturers and produce widgets locally (there) with the
formerly (their) resources. But in the time you are doing
that, you have to be able to guarantee that that every
other SI in the galaxy hasn't discovered how to locally
produce widgets in less time than you would take to
(a) go there + (b) setup your own widget manufacturing
system + (c) ship it to the SIs that now constitute
a very "iffy" market.
I'm sure that there is someone in the world who has a significant
comparative advantage with regard to manufacturing flint spear heads.
If that is true, then why haven't I noticed them doing a IPO
right next to Amazon, Red Hat, Affymetrix, etc., etc.
Time delays and market shrinkage turns comparative advantage
into a no-op.
Since presumably there SIs all have nanotech, there are
no more matter based widgets (shipping mass around in
space is too expensive). The only widgets are light-speed
transmitted "designs". The problem is that there are
few barriers to a remote individual coming up with the design
themselves and little recourse to prevent them from using
such a design (i.e. no galactic patent law). This to me
seems to imply little galactic "trade". On the other hand
there might be a market for galactic gossip or news.
The routers always get their cut because it is cheaper
for them to amplify and retransmit to local destinations
than it is for a remote source to transmit very high
power beams to all of those destinations.
Robert
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