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Economic studies can have huge effects. At least two examples are
familiar to everyone:
1. Before Phil Knight founded Nike, he wrote a paper investigating
offshore labor costs, onshore sales prices; he put it into practice
and is now among the world's wealthiest;
2. the founder of Flying Tiger Airfreight got a bad grade on a
business school paper which proposed the (now universal) hub system
for overnight delivery, but put it into practice and made economic
history.
As a classics professor and life-long student of the ancient
Mediterranean I am aware that the oldest and classic means of
advancing wealth (after piracy!) is to get a cargo from where it is
dirt common and ship it to a destination where it is rare and
valuable.
What do I mean? Under the sails that inspired the poets of Rome and
the wall painters of Thera and Pompeii, wine and olive oil were going
from Greece to Thrace; wheat from the Black Sea shores to barren Greek
islands; even literally the very dirt and rock gained value from
transport: Parian marble from (otherwise desolate) Paros; pottery
from places of good clay soil (and abundant fuel to fire it) to places
so freshly volcanic you couldn't make a pot!
Few ever get a chance to do this, but everyone could. What cargo?
Dollars. What mode of transport? Retirement.
Every retiree owes it to himself to know where the nest egg would
bring the greatest effective value. E.g. in the United States, a
dollar is only a dollar, and the only advance on reserves is the
accrued interest.
No transport, no change of value.
Now suppose a retiree moved to a country where dollars were rare and
valuable, where the cost of living, in dollars, was say, a fraction of
the at-home cost. The fraction becomes a factor. (An apartment for
$80/month instead of $800, for instance would -- for that part of the
c.o.l.a.-- be a factor of 10.)
Of course, an American can do this in part by retiring from Boston to
Biloxi. But one can do far better than such a differential as that.
The study in economics I am suggesting should be clear by now: a
country-by-country index of quality-of-life and cost of living.
The envisioned study would answer questions like these:
"Where will my dividends go the farthest?"
"With these resources, where would I have it best?"
"Where might these resources do the most good?"
Perhaps such a study has already been done; certainly it should be.
Some results of such a study are plain beforehand: obviously, it would
dissuade retirement to Switzerland, or to Austria.
I predict such a study would show one would do very well to retire to
Armenia.
Perhaps an Armenian business college student could take the lead and
just focus on the economics of retiring to Armenia and make the case
for it. Prima facie, such a study could show real economic good sense
and economic motivation. Such a study could have a huge impact.
Some consequences would follow: Each retiree who acted on this would
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