Wormhole Economics

[jack]

A standard trope in space opera is that a planet is rich because it has a lot of wormhole junctions in its system (Bujold, Weber, etc).

Presumably the historical analogy would be of a port city: assuming it's possible to make non-zero-sum trades, being in a position to conveniently make lots of trades will increase your success a lot more.

However, it seems the trope is normally that they _start_ by taxing other people's trade that passes through, and only then start trading. There's obviously lots of precedent for that in history: I think there's a natural progression from "pirate" to "oligarch/noble"? But is this economically accurate, or just an author's somewhat distorted idea of how it would work?

Comments

[ptc24]

The computer game I keep designing in my head has a model whereby you have a graph with nodes and edges; each node is a star system or city or whatever. The nodes post buying and selling prices for goods, like in Elite. Trade works by goods being bought at one node, taken on a single-edge journey, and sold at the next node.

So a trading hub would work by buying low and selling high. In effect, it's picking up money for being a stop-off on the movement of goods, providing docking facilities, refuelling, warehousing, brokerage, market making (ie making sure that people who want to buy can always buy straight away, and people that want to sell can always sell straight away), all of the good stuff like that.

[jack]

Yeah, I think this works well. I also forgot to mention that "squelching unofficial pirates" is also a service that might very well be worth X% tax on everything that comes through.

I guess the thing is, the situation seems plausible, but the authors don't seem to have that in mind, but be imagining something rather different...