I was recently reading a post over at Construction Physics that did a similar analysis with regards to construction productivity. The stuff that buildings are made of is generally large and heavy, so transportation costs can be substantial. Unlike most industries, there are benefits to local production even if this limits the scale of production. Sometimes the gradient is so extreme that it makes sense to do manufacturing on site as opposed to at some efficient central or regional facility. (for example, concrete skyscraper floors)
>>This failure of trade to grow between the 1910s and the 1980s is, you might say, the dog that didn’t bark. <<
What I see from the chart is that WWII was a huge, huge event, and following it global trade has been on a meteoric rise, and has done so continuously for almost 80 years now.
So better to say that trade dropped catastrophically in the 1940s and despite very rapid growth, there are limits to how fast that growth can be under even the best of circumstances (e.g., oceanic containers are awesome, but you can only redesign ports, create a container shipping fleet and build a manufacturing base in China so fast).
So deglobalization requires the most destructive war in history, but other than that it's been a pretty steady upward process for approaching two centuries now? Do I have that right?
I was recently reading a post over at Construction Physics that did a similar analysis with regards to construction productivity. The stuff that buildings are made of is generally large and heavy, so transportation costs can be substantial. Unlike most industries, there are benefits to local production even if this limits the scale of production. Sometimes the gradient is so extreme that it makes sense to do manufacturing on site as opposed to at some efficient central or regional facility. (for example, concrete skyscraper floors)
>>This failure of trade to grow between the 1910s and the 1980s is, you might say, the dog that didn’t bark. <<
What I see from the chart is that WWII was a huge, huge event, and following it global trade has been on a meteoric rise, and has done so continuously for almost 80 years now.
So better to say that trade dropped catastrophically in the 1940s and despite very rapid growth, there are limits to how fast that growth can be under even the best of circumstances (e.g., oceanic containers are awesome, but you can only redesign ports, create a container shipping fleet and build a manufacturing base in China so fast).
So deglobalization requires the most destructive war in history, but other than that it's been a pretty steady upward process for approaching two centuries now? Do I have that right?