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Outsourcing, taken to extremes
If backward time travel is also somehow possible, maybe firms in the future will choose to outsource some of their operations to the past, locating their manufacturing and other services in lower-wage time periods. This opens the possibility of transtemporal gains from trade... assuming, of course, that governments don’t implement effective trade barriers.
That is Glen Whitman, here is more, interesting throughout. By the way, Stephen King was right: the movie Jumper is quite good, albeit it requires a taste for conceptual science fiction counterfactuals. It's the best treatment of teleportation I know, with of course references to Plato's Ring of Gyges. Catch it on video if you can.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on March 28, 2008 at 03:15 PM in Economics | Permalink
Comments
South Park already grappled with this issue in their episode about immigrants from the future.
Posted by: Jonas Cord at Mar 28, 2008 3:31:46 PM
What it boils down to is that along with History, Physics, and Philosophy, functional two-way time travel also destroys Finance.
A world where time travel into the past is possible is so different from ours, in such a large number of fundamental ways, that it's pretty much impossible to have any real discussion of what it would be like.
Luckily, the fact that we are not inundated with tourists from the future seems to rather strongly indicate that backwards time travel is not possible.
Posted by: Aric at Mar 28, 2008 3:56:58 PM
Aric presupposes that they would want to come here. Hmmm....
Posted by: Alan Coffey at Mar 28, 2008 3:59:30 PM
They took our jobs!
Posted by: Joey at Mar 28, 2008 4:12:50 PM
"Luckily, the fact that we are not inundated with tourists from the future seems to rather strongly indicate that backwards time travel is not possible."
Or that the human race will go extinct before it can develop the technology.
Posted by: anon. at Mar 28, 2008 4:27:21 PM
This of course shows up in Douglas Adams: "not only had the great Cathedral of Chalesm been pulled down in order to build a new ion refinery, but that the construction of the refinery had taken so long, and had had to extend so far back into the past in order to allow ion production to start on time, that the Cathedral of Chalesm had now never been built in the first place. Picture postcards of the cathedral suddenly became immensely valuable."
Posted by: celeriac at Mar 28, 2008 5:06:45 PM
Asimov also dealt with intertemporal trade in a more serious manner in The End of Eternity, the eponymous "Eternity" being the agency developed to facilitate intertemporal trade.
Posted by: Richard Green at Mar 28, 2008 5:22:38 PM
Luckily, the fact that we are not inundated with tourists from the future seems to rather strongly indicate that backwards time travel is not possible.
There is another possibility. Serious proposals of how General Relativity *might* provide a loophole that would allow backwards time travel tend to have the property that one cannot travel any further back in time than the point at which the time travel device first started functioning (there may be exceptions, but none springs immediately to mind). To the extent this is the case, the lack of time travelers from the future would have no predictive value for whether backwards time travel is possible or not. This, needless to say, would foreclose many possible opportunities for trans-temporal gains from trade
Posted by: Greg at Mar 28, 2008 6:29:48 PM
The best treatment of teleportation is "The stars my destination" by Alfred Bester.
Posted by: Tim R. Mortiss at Mar 28, 2008 6:37:03 PM
Outsourcing works in part because you can bring developed-world technology into a developing-world environment, marrying high productivity with low labor costs. With time travel, however, exporting high-tech to the past would presumably be verboten for fear of altering history. So you could not outsource much, other than the very limited categories such as antiques, handicrafts, and Stradivarius violins. Other kinds of goods such as old paintings derive nearly all of their value from their rarity rather than intrinsic qualities, which can be competently imitated by any number of modern-day forgers and imitators.
Posted by: at Mar 28, 2008 6:37:05 PM
6:37pm - Of course, in every serious treatment of time travel I've seen, you *can't* alter history, so that wouldn't really be a problem. I remember Isaac Asimov wrote a novel (called "The End of Eternity") about inter-century trade relations, but his understanding of economics was not so great. I also remember thinking the novel was bad for Asimov when I was a freshman in high school, so I shudder to think how bad it actually is...
Posted by: Lucas at Mar 28, 2008 7:22:37 PM
Jumper quite good?! After various good posts about music and food, I thought TC had taste. What a dismal waste of time that film was.
Posted by: Andrew at Mar 28, 2008 7:44:49 PM
Seeing no current outsourcing from the future, that fact alone seems to indicate that, if this idea of time-sourcing is possible, labor costs are not time-source optimal at the present. That could mean that there are previous times that are more affordable, or that labor costs in the future will be cheaper. (Lotta ins, lotta outs, lotta what-have-yous in this hypothetical, but bear with me...)
With our current expectation that labor costs will always increase, perhaps that means that sometime in the future there is a catalcysmic event that fundamentally changes labor cost structure.
Posted by: JH at Mar 28, 2008 7:47:05 PM
Maybe robots render obsolete anything a 21st century human can actually _do_.
However, there is the "can't go back before the machine is first turned on" problem. Even Dr. Mallett has given up on ever seeing his father again.
-dk
Posted by: dick King at Mar 28, 2008 8:01:52 PM
Scotty, beam me out of this post.
Posted by: karl at Mar 28, 2008 11:09:28 PM
How do we know there's no outsourcing from the future? Have you audited the books of any inland Chinese manufacturing companies?
The sheer corruption of the developing world would make it a perfect place for time travelers to hide their operations. Maybe what we observe as waste and losses to corruption are simply the laundering of massive shipments of goods into the future.
Posted by: jb at Mar 29, 2008 12:16:13 AM
I echo Andrew's sentiment. However I did not see Jumper. I could not bear the thought of sitting through an "Anakin" movie. However, one of the benefits of science fiction is that a good story and concept can overcome crappy acting.
Posted by: Sameer Parekh at Mar 29, 2008 9:38:02 AM
Replying to my own post, after thinking about it last night:
The Bible describes Jesus as being followed by large crowds of people, at things like the loaves-and-fishes or the sermon on the mount, yet there are no contemporary accounts of His existence.
Maybe all of his contemporary followers were actually future Christians?
Posted by: Aric at Mar 29, 2008 11:49:45 AM
"Maybe all of his contemporary followers were actually future Christians?"
Posted by: Jacob at Mar 29, 2008 1:27:11 PM
Labor costs, nothing--- the beauty of time travel is all the money and effort you'd save on R&D (once you've paid for the time machine of course). Imagine going forward and bringing back scientific journals from 20 or 50 years in the future, all of that new knowledge... good times.
Or to look at intellectual property in general, say George Lucas intends to do 3 more Star Wars movies in 2011, 2013, 2015. Ifyou could jump ahead to 2016, you'd buy the trilogy DVD set then return and sell it back to George Lucas today. And its worth it to Lucas to write you a fat check. He'd get the finished product without actually having to pay any actors or even roll out of bed.
To get all this (e.g. future R&D and movies today), you wouldn't have to send a human time traveler. Since all of this information would be online, you'd just need to get a present day computer forward (and back) or a way to bring future internet access to the present.
Posted by: beowulf at Mar 29, 2008 4:22:45 PM
I thought the book version of Jumper was overwhelmingly better than the movie.
"The Stars My Destination" by Bester and "Born to Exile" by Phyllis Eisenstein are the classic novels of teleportation, and credited as such in the book version of "Jumper"; also the novella "Flash Crowd" by Niven.
Posted by: Eliezer Yudkowsky at Mar 30, 2008 12:10:11 AM
Aah... the proverbial 'if'
Well if there really was a time travelling machine out there, who needs to trade even. Go back to time and get hold of some treasure,come back.... :)
Posted by: Soham Das at Mar 30, 2008 2:33:43 AM
Soham Das: Indeed, I can't believe no one's brought up Back To The Future 2 yet (where Biff gets a hold of a sports almanac from the future and uses it to get rich from betting on sporting events).
On the other hand, if backward time travel became possible and commonplace, it might signal the death knell for gambling altogether, for obvious reasons.
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