Indonesia, for one, is already cornered on the agriculture front, because they fucked that one up themselves, so a reform is not going to change anything here. EAF is poor enough that we can help them transition into extraction economy from the agricultural one without much trouble.
Wrecking the profitability of local agriculture and then helicoptering money in as aid is worse that letting our allies protect their farmers, even if we sent more aid than the value of the local economy that we out-competed with our cheap exports. The reason is because local production means value is spread evenly throughout these mainly peasant economies and can be circulated efficiently, with peasants being able to support themselves and buy local goods and services, while even an infrastructure as extensive as the modern Soviet system would struggle to distribute the benefits of aid as widely (and these agrarian and young systems are NOT as extensive as ours is). Further, much of the industry that will be worth building in these countries will be food processing, as sexy as steel mills and such are, food processing industry has played a vital and usually unsung role in every successful industrialization.
We would get a more equal society, good boost to economic growth and living standards, but it would also mean we get smtg like a +10 RpD per project across the board (except rocketry which I think isn't affected by labor prices).
I am not sure how the game works, but in the real world, the cost of engineers is the dominant factor that influences the cost of rocketry. The biggest reason why Russian rockets were cheaper than American rockets in the 90s and 00s is because Russian engineers were paid less, especially taking into account the difference in exchange rates between the dollar and the rouble. Even with SpaceX today, a major factor behind their cost advantage is that they pay their engineers less than companies like ULA or Arianespace.
Isn't that just basically the middle income trap?
Extractive industries become uncompetitive due to high wage costs, while advanced industries failed to thrive and start losing folks die to brain drain.
Last I checked no-one has managed to prove why the middle income trap exists, and there are alot more issues than just the ones you mention that tend to crop up when an economy is in the middle income stage.
For example, it could be much more specialized educations are needed to push productivity higher, whereas before an economy could grow by, for example, training lots of engineers. It could be a political issue where it takes time for countries to re-orient their political systems to support high productivity economies. It could be that middle income countries just can't grow through copying what worked for others so much, and the shift to groping out their own path means they have to slow down.
There may not even be one explanation for the middle income trap - each country might have a middle income trap unique to it. There are even still arguments about whether there IS a middle income trap.
Jovian Programs (1*-4)+45=41
Outer System Probes (1*-4)+17=13
Well, if we were going to roll low one one of these, I am glad it was the outer system probes. And we did start this early, so we have time at least to work on whatever issue cropped up here.
Since this is a combined program, I am guessing our people agreed on a design that was adequate for Jupiter and its moons, but underpowered for Saturn and beyond.
Regards,
fasquardon
