Sectors of an Ultra-Tech/Bio-Tech economy

[Langy]

We're talking about kilotons per square metre over the entire surface of the planet, and much, much more over the oceans. That comes to exatons in total, plus perhaps three orders of magnitude for the oceans going off, which puts it up to zettatons.

However, the effect is spread out over the surface of the planet, so treating it as a point-like zettaton explosion would overstate the intensity.

Yeah - for the area that you're actually likely to be affected by it, it's closer to a multi-gigaton blast, I'd think.

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by Figleaf23

Extrapolating TL6 Leninism as the exhaustive and conclusive example of planned economics is pretty questionable, IMO.

There are fundamental problems with a planned economy in achieving allocative efficiency, which whswhs would be more than happy to tell you about, I think. Whether the Soviet Union's and China's problems which technical efficiency (ie. cost minimisation) are insoluble in principle is not so clear, but as you say:

(Oh, and I'm not sure it's correct to classify the Empire as a 'planned economy' anyway.)

The Imperial Government (or at least its revenue-raising arms, Imperial Spaceways and the Imperial Realty Corporation) are in effect planned firms each monopolising one industry in a generally un-planned economy.

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by Langy

So a negative marginal cost would mean producing two units of porn would cost less than producing one unit of porn, which is what I described. Diminishing marginal cost would mean that you could produce one unit of porn for, for example, ten dollars, and then produce the second unit of porn for five dollars - which would mean the total cost would be $15 for two units of porn.

Ah yes, you are quite correct. I read in an "each" that wasn't in your original statement.

Anyway, interpreting you statement correctly: I think that you are considering only material cost, and failing to impute the value of the exhibitionistic sex (to the exhibitionists in front of the cameras and the voyeurs behind them) as a negative cost. The existence of private sex tapes and Youporn indicates that making porn is something that people are willing to do even if they aren't paid, and therefor that any payment received is a rent.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Brett

Ah yes, you are quite correct. I read in an "each" that wasn't in your original statement.

Anyway, interpreting you statement correctly: I think that you are considering only material cost, and failing to impute the value of the exhibitionistic sex (to the exhibitionists in front of the cameras and the voyeurs behind them) as a negative cost. The existence of private sex tapes and Youporn indicates that making porn is something that people are willing to do even if they aren't paid, and therefor that any payment received is a rent.

I think he got it when we described it.

Most people aren't used to looking at intangible value as equivalent to tangible dollar costs. It takes a certain training or innate detachment to do that.

[Langy]

Oh, I agreed - I was just viewing it from a professional angle the first time. Ameteur porn is definitely a negative marginal cost market.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Icelander

Most people aren't used to looking at intangible value as equivalent to tangible dollar costs. It takes a certain training or innate detachment to do that.

It made total sense to me the first time I read about subjective marginal utility. I don't see how anyone makes sense of economics by thinking of it purely monetary terms. But I probably have "innate detachment."

Bill Stoddard

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by whswhs

It made total sense to me the first time I read about subjective marginal utility. I don't see how anyone makes sense of economics by thinking of it purely monetary terms. But I probably have "innate detachment."

Bill Stoddard

Maybe so.

But I recall reading something about you editing scientific papers, about, among other things, economics.

Training isn't just schooling and it makes little sense to edit something unless you understand it.

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by martinl

I thought that it was explicit in FB that pretty much everything but the very cutting edge was made using public domain IP.

Yes, that's right. Much of the current importance of IP in our economy has to do with the fact that our technology is changing rapidly driven by scientific discovery and technical innovation. In Flat Black 99% of colonies have and 90% of people live and work in colonies where IP is not the binding constraint: economic development, infrastructure, institutional infrastructure &c. are. The average "tech level" weighted by population is a little less than 8: manufacturers are working to blueprints a thousand years old, producing Glock copies and Browning GP copies and even revolvers because they can't get the materials and parts, their customers can't get the ammunition, and they can't sell enough units to justify setting up a factory for ETK firearms, let alone Gauss weapons (and similarly for products other than weapons).

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by Fish

Is this what you're thinking about?

Yeah, that's it exactly. There are related industries that it makes sense to locate together to exploit economies of scope, resulting in production clusters like, with related firms sharing suppliers, attracting specially-skilled workers etc., so that an area becomes associated with a class of products. At one time it was Manchester for woven linens, Sheffield or Solingen for knives, scissors, and razors, Birmingham for engines; at another it was Silicon Valley for computers.

In such industries as have their minimum efficient scale increase with TL, these clusters will grow so large that the output of a single minimum-efficient-scale cluster is more than the population of a planet consumes. In this case if interplanetary transport is expensive development will be choked off by the impossibility of building clusters and individual plants big enough to be cheap enough to sell their output, and if transport is cheap clusters of related industries will become associated with particular planets the way they have been (for the last 150 years) associated with particular industrial cities and conurbations.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Brett

There are fundamental problems with a planned economy in achieving allocative efficiency, which whswhs would be more than happy to tell you about, I think.

(a) Yes, but I don't think those are the most basic problems. Allocative efficiency implies that we already know what the resources are, and what people want, and what methods are available, and the problem is just how to crunch the data so that we can best line them all up all make everyone as happy as possible. That seems like something that might be done if we just had a powerful enough computer (though it might also involve dealing with chaos, as weather does, and thus be computationally intractible). But I think there are two other problems:

*We don't know all about any of those things. We don't have all the data, and the data we have are not all assembled in one place. There is a cost for getting more data and getting them to the right place. That cost is constant alertness to disequilibria that can be sources of useful work. It cannot be achieved by any routinized procedure. In other words, economics is about discovery, and central planning systems are very bad at discovery; their natural assumption is that we have already discovered everything.

*Whatever system we set up for making decisions, people will try to game it to their own advantage, either by getting into control, or by influencing those who are in control, or by misrepresenting their own resources and priorities. There is no solution to this that cannot itself be gamed in a different way. Central planning systems have such concentrated power that they are incredibly attractive to people who want to game the system; indeed, just as "if God did not exist, he would have to be invented," people who want to game the system will invent central planning to make it easier. The only remedy is to have so much disorder in the total system that there is always a base for tearing the old institutions down.

(b) Even technical efficiency cannot really be achieved if you don't assign each technical resource to its most valued use. But there is no common technical measure of value. Value is measured by prices, and prices are either determined by a market, or arbitrarily assigned by an administrator . . . and arbitrary assigned works really badly. Without capital markets, where producers' goods have prices, you have no rational basis for determining which technical resource it's most important to conserve, and therefore you can't achieve efficiency. This is part of the "economic calculation argument," which you can read about in David Ramsey Steele's "From Marx to Mises."

Bill Stoddard