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40 sats \ 2 replies \ @Voldemort OP 15 Apr \ parent \ on: Free markets, governments, and space econ
That is a good point.
I think my view is a little different than this. I think it is more so that nothing will be subject to market or democratic feedback until there is some threshold of level of production.
Just to make it easier to discuss, assume there are 10 goods that are required for survival. If we can only produce 9/10, the population will die off.
If there are two colonies, both colonies should produce their own supply of each in case the other has a catastrophic failure. Likewise for 3 and etc.
However, at some point, maybe when there are 100 colonies, each one produces some subset of the goods such that if any 50 colonies are destroyed the other 50 still have enough of each good. Maybe 10 of them will always produce all 10 goods as well.
I acknowledge this seems like an arbitrary thought experiment, but but consider how governments were formed throughout history.
People weren't worried about dying in space; rather they wanted protection from chaotic crime. Over a decade, a government might tax your supply of wheat more than criminals would steal from you, but criminals might steal too much in a single year and cause your family to starve.
Now, I ask myself, does this somehow apply to what happened in Israel over the weekend? Does this have any implications for political philosophy?
What this has me thinking about is all the supply chain disruptions of the past few years. We're sort of living out a much lower stakes version of your thought experiment. I haven't seen a compelling treatment of how a market could maintain optimal redundancy in the overall system of trade.
Still, the gains from specialization are so great that I don't think colonies would generally operate in autarky. What makes more sense is that critical resources would be stored in enough quantity that if something disrupted the supply there would be plenty of time to ramp up domestic production.
That would probably have to be a non-market policy, though, since markets don't seem to operate that way on Earth. Although, perhaps it would be an insurance requirement.
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What makes more sense is that critical resources would be stored in enough quantity that if something disrupted the supply there would be plenty of time to ramp up domestic production.
Yes! Excellent observation. Sadly, I had not thought of this. Specialization -> efficiency gains -> surplus.
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