On Tue, Aug 25, 2009 at 7:55 PM, Onno Meyer <[email protected]> wrote:
> 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. > What gets built in poor countries on earth is mostly stuff that has a high input of labor, but low capital costs. Assembly of electronics using components built elsewhere, textile production, garment sewing, things like that. No one is building a factory to produce 20 year old computer technology, for instance. It's cheaper to import modern technology than to make obsolete junk. -- David Scheidt [email protected] _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
