"The economics of interstellar flight"

[Platonian]

This is a GREAT article: "The economics of interstellar flight: Starship enterprises" (Economist)

If Paul Krugman were alive in the ST 24th century, he would make an excellent Federation ambassador to the Ferengi!

Here's another interesting article, also from the Economist: "Interstellar travel: Starship troupers"

[Coalition]

The first article covers the basics, no much more. Interest on ship payments will be handled on planets to avoid time dilation, and banking rates on planets will balance due to competition. The second article points out distance and time/energy needed to cover it, and the fact we may travel only to see what is there, rather than for trading.

I was hoping for a much larger article with more data.

Something that would have been useful would have been a comparison of shipping costs vs cargo value, using comparisons to modern air, truck, rail, and sea shipping, along with relative prices for various goods (ordinary iron and grain, vs rare earth materials and non-perishable critical organics). Large quantities of a single item would be better off manufactured at the target planet, from plans transmitted via radio (or FTL comms). Small quantities might be worth trading, as it would cost more to set up the industry than buying the items (like advanced computer chips on Pandora in exchange for room temperature conductor material).


Here are other sites with articles about Interstellar trade:
Atomic Rockets - excerpts from a lot of stories about trade between planets
Rocketpunk - Observatory - Trade numbers for shipping costs
Costik - The $11B bottle of wine
Paul Krugman's pdf on Interstellar trade - The original pdf that the article is based on

[Platonian]

Thanks for the references, Coalition.

I'll be especially interested to read Krugman's original article.