Game in the Brain

TLDR: Getting the audience Used to 1000usd = 1 Cr is drawing from my developing world background – where the cost of living difference is 10x as compared to a developed country. 

This reminds me of traveling to the US and a McDonald’s meal in The US would be 15usd and in the Philippines at the time of 2017 it would be 5usd here at the most.

The puzzle of what to do with terribly high x10 cost of living but balance it with the 10x higher earning. Like people with computer literacy to operate accounting software being paid 20-50usd an hour while I’m training people who come from disadvantaged schools so that they operate erpnext accounting so they can be paid 2usd an hour .an accounting graduate, so I learned in the Philippines which takes 5+ years to produce and has a very low passing rate <25%

Of course the difference in opportunities are Huge. Opportunities that can pay for the cost of living in developed worlds are part of the landscape and impossible on the developing worlds. 

So the 1000Cr a spacer crewman earns can barely pay for the high cost of living on space infrastructure. But the 1% ownership of a 20MCr ship In a scifi setting if a person = 200M usd can allow them to live comfortably in a present day Tech level (TL7 in cepheus engine or TL 9 in Mneme and gurps). 

You want to retire with 200M usd and die at 100, or do you want to be near immortal with Anegathics with a struggling cost of living – having to pay for all the upkeep (all the stem cell treatment for rads) for a life in space and children that will be raised in space. 

As any developing country educated person with the dream of living developed country – this alien paradigm of living in space with 1000x cost of living vs living on earth is just like living in the US with x10 cost of living vs retiring in the Philippines with1/10 cost of living as the US and many corners to be cut (looking at all the retirees in olongapo – the former US naval base and retirees who married their “nurses” in a consensual arrangement) 

The problem now is how DO I write in a way that talks about the difference in quality of life? The difference between someone who became a spacer from earth for 40 years with anagathics, to retire on earth or Mars or venus or on a gravity well which a cheaper cost of living? 

Sparkling cities like any developed country – “Bunker-miniums” (bunker and condominiums) a scarred but recovering ecology of earth. Plastics being replaced by wood, paper, and various composites as plastic eating bacteria has gone haywire. 

A huge poor population on “Basic” who are happy and growing and the elite migrating to space like the mobile migrant peoples of many cultures – evey culture has a migrant population that has a high social mobility. So much so that they come to represent everyone and the default marketing of “average”. 

Gravity bound old money are like tribal leaders “big fish in their tiny pond” but mean nothing to spacers. 

The social arrangements that sacrifice power for health and happiness in gravity bound society is alien to spacers. The way a historian will look at slavery and arranged marriage – an evil of a time and circumstance. 

I think people forget that these all still exist – slavery still exists, and very archaic forms of disempowerment exist its just that it’s far from everyone.

Problem

1. COST of living. the cost of living of a SHIP and Space faring measured in Credits. Explaining why there is such advantages of being in some place that has 1000x the cost of living. 
2.  Why a Cost of Living of 1/1000th is still Viable – what are you sacrificing or what is your opportunity cost living on earth vs living in space. 
3. That the Different Lifestyles and Values CAN CO-exist. When Material Wealth is the measure – that 1 being has hundreds of thousands of USD to their name while people may have almost nothing to their name. Now take a Spacer with 200M USD or Billions of USD value to their name and comparing them to someone happy in the equivalent of being in BASIC (and basic as comfortable as being middle class in a developED world but without having to work). When you have an INTERSTELLAR economy where materially they can easily produce Goods and Services equal to the 95 TRILLION USD economy. (note the cost to provide 8B people a Quality of Life like Developed world is much smaller than 95T. probably only 90B) 
4. Zero-Sum thinking and traditional concepts of wealth and what is considered “good” – for concepts that are more nuanced. Imagining an AI telling people if something harms them or not and helping them deal with complexity.