Living Nomadically: My 80/20 Guide

update: I've had more trouble than I've expected finding descriptions of examples I'm pretty sure exist. I'm going to call this query timed out for now, and you can update on this conversation however you like from that result.

Here's a description of a related thing instead from memory, which isn't actually in one of the tourism-heavy areas of the carribean, but has examples of the same kind of ownership network structures.

It's a general model of how complex incentive systems in economics work in the form of a claim about a pattern that would be expected to arise any time there are certain structures of contracts in use which are very common, of which I have seen a great many examples in life, but which is a general model and you're asking for specific instances; very fair request, so I'll go find the things my general model predicts in this instance after I'm done with a few other things in my queue. (Commenting on lesswrong is a guilty pleasure, it doesn't count.)

Well, hang on. This seems a bit different from what you said before [LW(p) · GW(p)], which was about the locals not benefiting at all (and you even implied [LW(p) · GW(p)] that the locals might be made worse-off—or at least that seemed to be the connotation of “funding crushing the locals with the weight of the economic activity your visits’ trades create”).

In general, it is common for networks of investors to end up participating in partial cartel monopsony over employment, resulting in ability to do some amount of price fixing. When distant investors own contracts that the implementors of law interpret to give the investors command ability over large portions of the businesses in an area, and those investors are optimizing for their own returns, the investor subnet has an incentive to use strategies that depress wages using this cartel. This typically results in the majority of money spent on goods and services from those stores going to the owners of the stores, not the employees; this is alleged to be good for the purchaser, but in reality typically indirectly makes the product much worse. in a region with many poor folks and distant investors, and where the poor locals don't have synchronized bargaining with the investors, the investors can and often do take advantage of their synchronized bargaining against employee's desynchronized bargaining to ensure that local market wages do not increase as fast as trade, resulting in most gains from trade being shared between purchaser and investor, with employees ending up treated as a nuisance cost by the network pattern.

You may recognize this description from somewhere; I've rephrased it somewhat out of the typical words because they've become fnords, but it's a pretty standard criticism of stock-investment-based ownership patterns.

To participate in local markets where such things are happening, look for ways to spend money that result in more gains from trade going directly to locals, and especially in ways that result in balancing the amount of group synchronized bargaining between employees and owners.

And of course, as you imply, many people who bring up this network pattern and critique employment structures take it too far and assume this means no gains from trade go to the employees. Some definitely often do. But quite often the system becomes efficient only at some subgoals, while the biggest investors end up with a significant majority of control and thus can induce market inefficiencies selectively that limit growth of locally owned, small-owner small businesses. It's especially frustrating because it's not always obvious where this is happening.