Getting paid in space

Darren,

OK, using the amount of energy production as an overall indicator of
economic strength, and using that to set exchange rates and such.
Like any system, of course, it will be subject to manipulation and
abuse. Of course since EVERY system is subject to abuse, that is no
reason to discount a system.

The ancient Romans used a system where they assigned each province an
economic value based on several factors, such as the amount of arable
land, the number of head of cattle, the presence of certain minerals,
etc. They used this system primarily to determine how much taxes each
province owed. Provinces were therefore encouraged to underreport
their value. To prevent underreporting, the leaders of the province
could be rewarded higher amounts of money, prestige, and opportunity
for having more valuable provinces. This created a sort of check and
balance system to keep the economic value of each province reasonably
accurate (in theory.) One would think that with modern technology, we
would be able to assign more consistent and accurate values to each
settlement. But inevitably politics would come into play and
settlements would begin demanding exceptions to the formula used to
determine their value. "Green" colonies, for example, might say that
they purposely produce less energy for ethical reasons, and therefore
an energy-only formula punishes them unfairly. Other settlements
might deliberately overproduce in order to attain some perceived
benefit. Borrowing from another thread, colonies that use only
artificial light would produce more energy than colonies that use
natural reflected light.

Whatever formula used would need to have a check and balance system
that encourages accurate reporting of energy production, while
discouraging manipulation by colonies seeking to gain some kind of
economic advantage. That would probably be an easy task among a group
of closely related settlements, but more difficult with far-flung
settlements with weak ties and vastly different economic/political
systems. I'm assuming there would be no superpower dictating law to
all the settlements.

I'm not arguing against your ideal. I'm just pointing out that people
are still people, and having humans involved always introduces
complexities (and politics).

doug

On Aug 19, 2006, at 12:00 PM, Darren wrote: