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Old 08-13-2009, 09:17 AM   #11
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Default Re: Sectors of an Ultra-Tech/Bio-Tech economy

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Originally Posted by Mailanka View Post
You might have a problem. If you're playing a conservative hard ST game, which I assume means difficult FTL, Ricardo's law won't help anyone.
Easy FTL is no more superscience than difficult FTL.
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Old 08-13-2009, 09:17 AM   #12
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Default Re: Sectors of an Ultra-Tech/Bio-Tech economy

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(I note that you mention you have "superscience where necessary," and I assume that means you do have FTL, but the considerations of that FTL matters)
From here:
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Originally Posted by Flat Black
Interstellar spaceships travel at approximately three light-years per day, and there is no FTL signalling other than sending a courier. It takes almost five days on average to travel from any planet to its nearest inhabited neighbour, and four months to travel from the periphery to the core and back (or to send a message and receive a reply). Interstellar travel is not particularly expensive, but long travel times deter people from making frequent trips. Long signal delays force the Empire to devolve a great deal of authority on its local representatives.
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Old 08-13-2009, 09:18 AM   #13
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Default Re: Sectors of an Ultra-Tech/Bio-Tech economy

Oh, is this Flat Black?

That explains Icelander's comments.
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Old 08-13-2009, 09:52 AM   #14
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Default Re: Sectors of an Ultra-Tech/Bio-Tech economy

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Judging by conditions in the United States, if you view health care as an industrial sector rather than a public service, it could easily become quite large. I'm going to suggest one-third of the economy, assuming that things have advanced to the point of massive life extension . . . not immortality or fundamental genetic fixes, but just ensuring that the normal person lives to a hundred or so.
On the Suite worlds and those with a similar level of medical technology; I think that the average person manages to live to a 130 or more. We've met a 195-year-old NPC in one game and the retirement age in the Empire is a 110 years old, at which point a person is still about equivalent to a well-preserved 65-year-old in our world.

One Suite world enforces (by cultural pressure, not law) suicide after the first century of life, ensuring that there are no old and unproductive people. Other colonies have their own ways of dealing with the problem, which can include just not dealing with it and accepting these demographics.

Note, though, that the marginal value of unskilled human labour is not high at TL10 (and not all that high at TL7-9). Even semi-skilled human labour is not very valuable at TL10. This means that most TL9 worlds (except those with low populations but a burgeoning economy) will have had to come to terms with the fact that most people may not be able to sustain an acceptable (to them, at least) standard of living with their own labour.

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Intangible industries are also going to be important. How big an entertainment, recreation, and tourism sector will there be? What about the "finance, insurance, and real estate" sector?
Entertainment and recreation is huge in the Suite. Interstellar tourism is not a large industry, largely due to the long travel times which confine it to those independently wealthy enough to forgo whatever dole or salary they receive to take months or years off. Such tourism mostly benefits the Empire, in light of its monopoly on space travel.

Finance and insurance, on an interstellar scale, I get the impression is pretty robust. There are many opportunities for fast growth for the canny investor who takes it upon himself to help a colony just shedding a repressive form of government modernise a bit (by contrast, those who bet that a change of government will mean more security for investors often turn out wrong, broke or even dead).

Real estate in the smallest sense varies by colony. Often enough the ownership of individuals will be restricted or not present at all, given that capital will usually be much more important than labour in the economy and the governments will be have been responsible for the welfare of the majority of people for centuries. Some colonies have a large class of people without possessions that are functionally recipients of state doles and nothing else (even called 'Recipients' on at least one colony). In order to finance this, some colonies own all the land and receive rent (also a consequence of some colonies that began as commercial enterprises and are governed by the remains of the corporation which bought the rights to development of the planet).

On a macroscale, the Imperial monopoly on space travel and exploration means that new habitable colonies or planets ready for terraforming are a resource that only the Empire can find, sell and utilise. They are prevented by law (at least in later periods) from colonising them on their own, but they can and do sell them to raise the operational funds needed to keep the Empire running.

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Going by the "rise of the creative class" thesis, the creation of new content seems likely to be economically important. So would there perhaps be a basic research sector absorbing maybe 5-10% of economic activity?
From what Brett has said in the past, the Suite is primarily distinguished from other TL10 colonies by the fact that Suite worlds are advanced enough to make new technological advances. Selling the licences for those is one of their major revenue streams.

Creative jobs are likely to be a major factor in any TL9+ economy and the largest factor in TL10 ones. Any economy where the basic needs are met will be hungry for new entertainment, arts or other things to keep the masses happy. But any creative people on lower TL colonies have massive competition in that there is a constant stream of information for anyone asking for it. Not only do licensing costs for Suite tech and Suite entertainment finance the massive economies of those colonies, but the Empire makes sure that anything that is no longer restricted by IP laws remains useful.

The Empire freely dissemnates blueprints and supporting documentation of any* technology where the patent has expired, which owing to the long time TL10 has been maintained, will include nearly any item up to mature TL10. This means that TL10 factories are relatively easy to build anywhere that can afford them and can mass produce almost anything relatively cheaply.

But since raw materials are plentiful and low-tech manufactured goods only have any value at all beacuse of Ricardo's law, most low-tech colonies will not be able to afford much in the way of higher tech goods, services or even technological assistance to bootstrap themselves up to a higher standard. Of course, the Empire has people who help with that, but given the size of the known space and the shortage of people motivated and trustworthy enough to be in Imperial Service, most colonies that don't have at least moderately sensible and moral government (rarer than you'd think) still languish at a standard far below TL10.

*Except weapons of mass destruction, which in this setting includes FTL drives.

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What about secondary scientific activity? Already there are important abstracting journals and research services. Imagine an economic situation where (a) science has grown even larger and more difficult to keep track of, (b) productive research often comes about because some enterpreneurial scientist sees a payoff in taking a result from field A and examining it in light of theoretical models from field B, and (c) such entrepreneurs of science make up a substantial economic sector in their own right.
This will indeed be huge in the Suite. In less advanced colonies, trawling through the immense databanks made available by the Empire for blueprints of tech that could be useful at the colony's level of development is likely to be a profitable task.

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Then there is Vernor Vinge's bit where a starship travels from one solar system to another carrying a precious cargo of—long random numbers usable for encryption! It's about as high a value-to-weight ratio as you're likely to get.
Trade in information, blueprints and all sorts of new ideas is robust, of course. The Suite mostly comes up with them and the Empire transports them.
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Old 08-13-2009, 10:14 AM   #15
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Default Re: Sectors of an Ultra-Tech/Bio-Tech economy

May be another question is how many people in the future of this Ultra Tech society will work? What would constitute as work, doing 16 hours a week?

Judge Dredd's world was a parody that 94% of the population were unemployed and 97.7% of society were potential 'perps'.

From my reading the economy was split into 3 parts and this could be expanded up to about 6. But here is the 3 to keep it simple.

Making stuff to consume: food, clothes, white goods etc...
Making stuff to make stuff: New tools, machines, roads, lighting etc...
Making stuff (which in this example is wastage) that does not 'enhance society'... guns, bombs etc.

The 3rd example is like the 1st but guns and bombs can only be successful in the destruction of themselves and of parts 1 and 2. Then the can of worms opens up for all sorts of a debate.

The 3rd example also allows profits from 1 and 2 to be absorbed and may off set crisis.

Now in a future society of great tech, we hope great wisdom too and the option of blowing stuff up is relegated to a historical past time. But the question is how many people will be employed and what will they be employed to do?
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Old 08-13-2009, 10:28 AM   #16
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Default Re: Sectors of an Ultra-Tech/Bio-Tech economy

If you are UT enough to be post scarcity - or close enough to post scarcity then more and more of the enconomy is going to be in non-esssentials.

Even in a late TL8 developed world nation at the moment, an awfully big chunk of the economy revolves around stuff people don't actually need, and as you reduce the cost of production further you shrink the 'productive' sector. You also reduce the requirement to work - we already, on average, do less physical work than our parents or grandparents, let alone earlier ancestors. Extrapolate that and you will be faced with a largely idle population whose efforts will mostly be centred around amusing themselves.
Potentially this could lead to a very low volume economy...
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Old 08-13-2009, 10:29 AM   #17
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Default Re: Sectors of an Ultra-Tech/Bio-Tech economy

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May be another question is how many people in the future of this Ultra Tech society will work? What would constitute as work, doing 16 hours a week?
This question is further complicated by the fact that there is not one homogenous society, but somewhere between 850-1070 different ones. Each colony is an independent society which gives up some of its sovereignity when it signs the Treaty of Luna, which gives the Empire monopoly of FTL travel and authority to enforce the Imperial Crimes Act. In general, such enforcement stops well short of toppling local governments and Imperial officials are powerless to stop most colonial governmental acts of malfeasance and stupidity.

This means that any question about 'how many work?' can only be answered on a per colony basis, or perhaps, if we feel really comfortable about broad generalisations, for each group of colonies which share common economic features.

Imperials mostly all work. But they are an exception and in any case such a small percentage of the total population that they may be ignored in a demographical sense (though their political, economic and military influence is superlative, of course).

In the Suite, I believe that it is considered rather commonplace that the majority of people are engaged in some combination of hobbies, make-work and volunteer work for non-profit organisations. Only the creative or the narrowly technically trained may be assured of work and work is more often than not less than onerous. Working what we would consider 25% or 50% work weeks in rather easy bot-bossing jobs is not uncommon, but even more common is devoting most of one's time to a pursuit that is more a vocation than a career and has, strictly speaking, no economic incentive.

How each colony in the Suite deals with this is different, but laws enforcing mandatory retirement ages, maximum hours per work weeks and such are nearly universal in all TL10 societies in Flat Black. So is some form of welfare, social security, dole or a the encouragement of a non-governmental support system. A common economic system is one where capital gains are appropriated by the state and (after paying for governmental services and costs) divided equally between all citizens.
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Old 08-13-2009, 10:42 AM   #18
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Default Re: Sectors of an Ultra-Tech/Bio-Tech economy

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The basic idea that you need a minimal scale to make certain industries economically viable makes sense to me. It's not so obvious to most of us for high-tech industries, but if you look at older ones, then, for example, the cost of printing a book from carved blocks is much lower than that of hand copying it . . . but only if you can spread the cost of carving the blocks over at least hundreds of copies...
There was recently an article about a doctor who sequenced his entire genome in a week, using three people and 1 computer station, for the cost of $50,000. Compare that to a few years prior, where sequencing a genome took years, dozens of people, and millions.

Of course, buried in the article, they admit that the cost was closer to $1,000,000 — and the doctor's "cost" of $50,000 was his estimated share of the 20 or so sequences the machine could be expected to perform over its lifetime.

Similar principle. What is the cost of creating a 1-meter long carbon nanofilament, versus the cost of creating ten million of same? First you gotta invent the technology to understand how to make the tool ... then you gotta make the tool.

Anyway:

I would personally begin with the chart I provided earlier, and start tweaking the balance of percentages. Remembering that the stat chart I provided was based on labor statistics and not economic volume, you could start to revise the balance. Is the growth rate high? Put more into construction and education. Has the field of education been automated? Transfer some of education into manufacturing (for robots, teaching software, etc). Is the empire far-flung? Put more into travel (eg, shipping, distribution, supply lines, and starship manufacturing). Are the markets regulated? Reduce finance. And so on.

Since what you want to create is a way for worlds to specialize in certain sectors of the economy, I think you do want to begin with labor statistics — in order to specialize in a sector, it's got to have a certain critical mass of labor/manhours.
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Old 08-13-2009, 05:46 PM   #19
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Default Re: Sectors of an Ultra-Tech/Bio-Tech economy

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I would personally begin with the chart I provided earlier, and start tweaking the balance of percentages. Remembering that the stat chart I provided was based on labor statistics and not economic volume, you could start to revise the balance.

<snip>

Since what you want to create is a way for worlds to specialize in certain sectors of the economy, I think you do want to begin with labor statistics — in order to specialize in a sector, it's got to have a certain critical mass of labor/manhours.
Yep. And thanks for the figures, too. Unfortunately the breakdown in official sectoral statistics are more or less at right angles to what I have in mind. Construction, education, and retail, for instance, are all things that have to be carried on in every colony. What I am really thinking of is "what parts of manufacturing etc. can and ought to be clustered together and separated from others on particular worlds, for economies of scale and transport?"
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Old 08-13-2009, 07:19 PM   #20
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Default Re: Sectors of an Ultra-Tech/Bio-Tech economy

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"what parts of manufacturing etc. can and ought to be clustered together and separated from others on particular worlds, for economies of scale and transport?"
Realistically?

None. High-tech devices require way too many things for splitting up manufacturing into completely different worlds to be viable unless transportation is essentially zero-cost. Electronics in particular require a hell of a lot of different devices and technology, and are used in a hell of a lot of applications. The more complicated a device is, the more likely it is that it requires things from multiple disciplines to build it. A starship, for example, pretty much requires every possible thing in an economy except bioresearch to construct.

Spreading all the different bits onto seperate worlds that are weeks or months apart is incredibly inefficient, especially if the companies in question want to be able to adapt to changes in costumer demand. On-demand inventory control is becoming a big thing nowadays because it lets you cut a whole bunch of costs, and it's not something you can do if you can't phone up the company you buy stuff from and say 'hey, I need twice my normal order please' or 'my next order is only half of my usual'.

Worlds that have everything needed for their industries all on-hand are going to outperform worlds that depend upon week or month long supply chains.
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