Really neat post about transtemporal economics at Agoraphilia. What would trade through time look like? Glen Whitman looks at migration and time travel:
If wages are expected to be higher in the future, then once the cost of time travel falls low enough, we can expect people to start migrating in large numbers into the future – just as they migrated from Europe to the North America from the 1500s onward, and just as they migrate from Mexico to the U.S. today. A simple model of transtemporal migration would therefore predict equalization of wages over time, as wages rise in the present (from reduced labor supply) and fall in the future (from increased labor supply).
This might even come into play without time travel per se should some Kurzweilian cold-storage or cryogenic technology develop in the next few decades. Will groups suspending economic participation through temporary freezing affect wages and planning? Perhaps a labour crises or recessions could be managed by sleeping through them, or an ongoing Albertan labour shortage could be solved by simply waking up some ancestors.
Back to time travel, Whitman continues:
…that’s assuming time travel is only possible in a forward direction. (I think time dilation only makes forward time travel possible, but I confess that I’ve never fully wrapped my head around relativity.) 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 discussion likely caught my interest having finished up the third season of Doctor Who last night. It was superb, but I’m now afraid a time traveling economist is going to arrive and enslave us all.
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