[Main Blog Post] How the Cost of Freight Has Shaped the World

[jprussell]

Short post this week where I barely scratch the surface of what I suspect will be a big, deep topic - how cheap transportation has been the less obvious, but maybe just as important, side of the industrial revolution next to mass production.

Comments

[thinking_turtle]

As a factoid, Europe now has fairly stiff import taxes for individuals. When I order anything from outside the EU, it gets a 10 euro administrative charge, and a 20% surcharge. These are considerable expenses.

One of the goals of technocracy is to create a standardized worker. I'm just reading Dmitry Orlov's "Shrinking the Technosphere", and he writes:

The technosphere defined It demands homogeneity THAT THIS IS so is clearly visible in spite of all the talk about “diversity” and “multiculturalism” in the overdeveloped Western nations. When people say “diversity,” what they really mean is homogeneity: a common, simplified, commercialized mass culture organized around nationalist/globalist concepts and symbols. In the pursuit of total homogeneity, “diversity” turns out to be quite useful. This is not a paradox but mere misdirection. Over time tight-knit communities tend to develop their own unique local cultures, traditions, languages and dialects, and these allow them to withstand the onslaught of outside influence. People who share a common local culture recognize and automatically trust one another. This is true diversity: the diversity of distinct, separate cultures with unique traditions of mutual aid, cooperation and solidarity. And it is this that makes them hard for the technosphere to dominate and to control.

The goal of equalizing every worker provides an alternative explanation for the dwindling of our sundry clubs, lodges, and groups. The powers that be are destroying mutual trust, transactions outside the system, and small enterprise. It affects the family, clubs, but also unions and parties, which have degraded to one-size-fits-all blandness.

[k_a_nitz]

Distribution was a lot more important historically than people realise. During the Napoleonic wars France blockaded English access to Scandinavia for trees to make the masts on its ships. As a result England switched to sourcing the wood from North America. But the ships bringing the wood back needed something to take on the journey there to allay the costs. Given the size of the North American market at the time bulk goods weren't really a very profitable option, so they took people - cheap fares for immigrants (see James Belich's Replenishing the Earth).

At the end of WWII New Zealand had one of the highest per capita incomes in the world (#1 or #2 from memory). This was built on the global distribution of agricultural goods - primarily meat, wool, and butter. Similarly for Argentina in its heyday, supplying animal products to Europe. For New Zealand in particular the lack of a large population has always meant that the costs of distribution have been much higher (effectively paying much more or piggy-backing partly off shipping to Australia), thus providing an additional driver for becoming a lower cost producer of animal products, if not the lowest. Take away the global distribution though and the landscape of New Zealand would be transformed back to that of the mid 19th century - marginal land, and some not so marginal, would almost certainly be left to revert to forest (NZ exports about 95% of its dairy production - who would drink all that milk if we couldn't export it?). The alternative would be mass migration at an unheard-of level (over 20% of the population of the largest city, Auckland, are already foreign-born and the housing market hasn't coped with that) - and the ability to build housing for those numbers is doubtful.

Whilst large populations can provide their own demand (the % of exports in the economy of the USA is fairly small, and China and India have the populations to act as a flywheel for their economy), for some of the major goods exporting countries the loss of global distribution would be world shattering in its effects.

Rolf Peter Sieferle wrote in one of his books (can't recall which off the top of my head) about the costs of transport in the absence of oil (which he called the subterranean forest), starting with the costs of a horse or oxen driven wagon, which needs to carry twice the feed required for the horses/oxen(and driver!) so they can return, and thus that needs to be deducted from what it can transport. He showed that this limited the effective circle of distribution significantly and also explains why navigable rivers (and later canals) were so important to trade.

[scotlyn]

Sorry, this is not a comment on your post, which I have not (yet) read. It is a comment on your question re Girard's mimetic theory. This theory seems to exert a strange attraction on some people I care about, and they will commend it to me as the work of an "anthropologist" (my BA, in the long long ago, was in the subject of anthropology). When I looked into the theory, it seemed to include a great deal of "backwards projection" onto so-called "primitive" societies, a trait that I have never found impressive. And, so, I decided to send a tweet to the then living David Graeber as to whether Girard could be considered to have carried out significant anthropological work. And Graeber graciously replied to me, (paraphrase) "no, Girard has not done any ethnographic work. Girard is, however, known for "forcing" the work of other ethnographers (not to speak of mythology at large) into the procrustean beds of his theory."

Ralph Borsodi

[(Anonymous)]

Hi Jeff,

I apologize for resurrecting a very old thread. I only just recently discovered your blog from your comments on J.M. Greer's dreamwidth blog.

The title of this post caught my attention. Are you familiar with Ralph Borsodi and his book, The Distribution Age (https://soilandhealth.org/book/the-distribution-age/)? Ralph Borsodi was an economist turned philosopher and a back-to-the-lander during the Great Depression. He, quite unpopularly for the time, identified this freight issue as a problem and described its long-term impact on the economy in detail in The Distribution Age. It is a very fascinating read, especially for those that have an understanding of retail and/or wholesale business.

Your post touches very much on the basics of Borsodi's thesis. I thought it might interest you.

In a side note, Borsodi left all of his works to the public domain when he died. This Ugly Civilization and Flight From The City are also worthwhile reads.