The kind of specialized investment required to maintain and develop technology at our current level requires market sizes not much smaller than the current ones (e.g. check out what a modern microchip factory costs.)
I’ve read this claim many times, but I’ve never seen a convincing argument for what exactly would count as “much smaller.” My impression is that three orders of magnitude smaller would almost certainly be too small, two orders of magnitude possibly also, but I’m not at all sure about one order of magnitude.
rwallace:
I’ve read this claim many times, but I’ve never seen a convincing argument for what exactly would count as “much smaller.” My impression is that three orders of magnitude smaller would almost certainly be too small, two orders of magnitude possibly also, but I’m not at all sure about one order of magnitude.