On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 12:50 PM, Onno Meyer <[email protected]> wrote:
> > It's cheaper to import modern technology than to make obsolete junk. > > David Scheidt > > GURPS Traveller subscribes to the theory of comparative advantage. It > is explained in a sidebar in Far Trader, or found in the wikipedia at > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage I'm well aware of compartive advantage. traveller pretends to subscribe to theories, but it doesn't. The people invented the game had no clue about anything. (Except how to make a game people still play thirty years later, which isn't nothing.) The science is a joke, the economics are non-existent. (Comparative advantage, at least at the level that far trader manages to assume it exists, is a joke, of course, because it assumes that there's no mobility of capital nor any incentive to change what factors of production you have available. Mobility of capital may, or may not exist, as might mobility of labor. But the assumption that there's no incentive to change factors is nonsense, for many reasons.) > > Where it comes to electronics, most are best built at TL10, some are > best built at TL11-12 (mostly sensors and EW) and TL6 has a niche if > weight is not an issue -- vacuum tube radios are cheaper in absolute > costs than those with microchips, by a sufficient margin to become > competitive even in comparative costs. this is another thing that doesn't make sense. Vacuum tubes are a) heavy b) unreliable c) consume *huge* amounts of power d) shed lots of heat (see c.). And you can't do digital radio with a vacuum tube. (and anybody who thinks analogue radio is going to survive once people get off the planet is, well, wrong) Somewhere that was truly building from zero might use them; but no one that had any sort technical base. (you can *build* transistors with the same tech that was available in 1900. You just can't design them.) This is one of the huge failings of traveller's lack of knowledge of scientific development. Much of the advances in the 20th century weren't really physical process improvements, they're improvements in understanding. In the first two-thirds of the century, it's mostly theoretical understanding; in the last third, there's a whole lot of computational understanding that comes from having computers that can do the math fast. Lots of technological advancement consists of not wandering down the wrong road, and merely knowing what the right one is speeds up the ability to redevelop it. > > But the simple model of comparative advantage makes assumptions like > full employment and full job mobility, and it might lock poor worlds > into agricultural or raw material production. Compare > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage#Economic_dependence > > In the real world, jobs are not that easy to change, and no world can > stop farming wheat and start building starships overnight. > > In another mail, you wrote: > > It's not just that, though that's a big part. It's also the complete > > failure to understand that much of technological progress isn't really > > technology. It's understanding. Give me a couple engineers, a time > > machine, and I'll advance any field of technology you care to name from > its > > state in 1800 or 1850 to what it was a hundred years later in a year. > > For widespread impact, there has to be widespread understanding in > the general population, not just among the time-traveling engineers > and their immediate disciples. That can't be done overnight, and it > can't be done in giant leaps. You're ignoring Japan in the 19th century. Or China in the present one. Technological progress can happen very fast, if there's a reason for it, and there's little reason to go from A to Z by passing through B,C,D... if you can jump straight to Z. -- David Scheidt [email protected] _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
