3 ms·

Is there any goods-producing industry that is more efficient by being decentralized? This isn't a rhetorical question, I'm really not sure. And I don't mean so

• ddulaney 4y ago
  Ginseng is an interesting one [0]. It can be farmed without too much trouble, but farmed ginseng has a more uniform, smoother appearance than wild ginseng. One of the major uses is in Chinese traditional medicine, where it's believed that wild ginseng has better properties (exactly what properties and how you measure them is hard to pin down). This leads to a tension: You can set up an efficient, high yield, centralized farm, but your main buyers will value your crop less. Or you can use "simulated wild" conditions that create a wild-like appearance and charge more, but now you need a very different operation that looks more like forestry than farming and is much more likely to be decentralized. And of course you can still forage, but that has its own limitations (lots of details in [0]). [0]: https://www.uky.edu/ccd/sites/www.uky.edu.ccd/files/ginseng.pdf https://www.uky.edu/ccd/sites/www.uky.edu.ccd/files/ginseng....
• pjc50 4y ago
  Certain rapid prototyping can be faster by being decentralised, but this results in higher per-unit costs. It's cheaper to 3D print than do injection moulding if you just want one item, but not if you want 10,000.