> On Feb 24, 2015, at 1:13 PM, Richard Aiken <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Tue, Feb 24, 2015 at 11:15 AM, Jeffrey Schwartz <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:
> Which would make it even smaller, more efficient, but best of all
> change the price from x4 to x4/2 ?
>
>
> It's always been hard for me to wrap my mind around game rules for lowering prices for *better* items at higher tech levels.

Dramatically lower costs of production. Higher TL economies also have higher TL infrastructure and supply chains.

Compare the cost of a top end TV in 1976 (which would be a ~32” Color set with a rudimentary remote control) with a what you could get towards the end of the CRT teevee age;our last CRT was a GE 32” model that cost us less than $250 in about 2002-ish.

In 1984 when the Mac first came out, it cost $2500 US. That’s $5810 in 2013 dollars. The first Mac had an 8 MHz 68000 chip, 256K of RAM and a 400Kb floppy drive.

$5800 will buy you a 2015 Mac Pro with 1TB of SSD, 64Gb RAM and a 27” monitor. No floppy drive though…

On the other hand if we wanted to present the capabilities of that original mac in a modern device we could probably sell it for $25.

After all we DO sell devices of higher capabilities for about that cost: The Raspberry Pi. And it’s still several orders of magnitude higher performance than that original Mac. http://www.makershed.com/products/raspberry-pi-model-b-8gb

>
> All other things (advertising, reputation, tarrifs, taxes, etc) being equal, the demand for a premium item in any given market would be higher than the demand for an average item. Since price reflects demand, the premium item should always cost more.

The absurdity is not that high-TL items are cheaper, it’s that there’s a market for those inferior low-TL items at those prices.

Again and again we’re clubbed over the head with the fact the the writers of Traveller have only a fleeting and illusory grasp of economics.

For lower TL items to maintain market share in the face of cheaper, better items made at a higher TL to those lower TL points there would either have to be substantial savings in buying them (which there isn’t) or some substantial barrier to getting the ‘low tl things made at high tl’s.

This is *kind* of a indicator of a ‘low trade’ model for the OTU, but that explodes in a poof of magic smoke when it hits reality: a ‘low trade’ OTU cannot possibly support a mercantilist, heavily militarized, trillions of starships OTU. If you have very little trade, there’s no point to the IN, let alone the kinds of infrastructure that produces 200dT Far Traders. Starships would be exptremely rare and astonishingly expensive.

Your motel rooms are constrained by the fact that THEY CANNOT MOVE. Your motel rooms aren’t a trade good for sale.

--
Bruce Johnson
University of Arizona
College of Pharmacy
Information Technology Group

Institutions do not have opinions, merely customs