Roger replied to David: > >Ignoring, for the moment, the woeful lack of understanding of economics > that > >the Traveller setting demonstrates, > > I think one has to consider as a guiding principle the idea that > imported goods are hugely expensive, but that local manufacture isn't > done because... well, the Empire tells people not to, or something. > That's the core impossibility.
By that reasoning, state of the art factories should be going up in Haiti, and in South Africa, and in Iceland. They are not. You can explain some of that with political instability. Haiti is a lot worse than Iceland, so people have fewer chances to set up local manufacture, and Haiti is much poorer than Iceland, which actually has SOME modern industry. South Africa falls in between. In the Imperium, the interstellar trade which would allow the import of machine tools and plans also allows people with the money to build factories to build them on high-tech worlds, where conditions are much easier. Those left behind on poor worlds are either too stubborn to leave, or too poor to afford the ticket. Both happens, and the 7 million on Rangent are probably in the former category. _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
