Russ Roberts, in a recent blog on the wonders of saran wrap refers us to his cheers for the virtues of cardboard boxes and their tremendous lowering of transportation costs. In the same vein, Thomas Sowell points out in his book Race and Culture:
“...in mid nineteenth century America, before the transcontinental railroad was built, San Francisco could be reached both faster and cheaper from a port in China than it could be reached over land from the banks of the Missouri. In the city of Tiflis in the Caucasus, it was cheaper to import kerosene from Texas, across 8000 miles of water, than to get it over land from Baku, less than 400 miles away. In Africa, even in the twentieth century, the cost of shipping an automobile from Djibouti to Addis Ababa (342 miles) has been estimated as being the same as the cost of shipping it from Detroit to Djibouti (7386 miles). [...] Huge transportation costs shrink the economic universe...[and they] shrink the cultural universe as well.”
I just finished Race and Culture, and I highly recommend it. It’s a gold mine of facts with good theory: history done well. It’s like reading Acton with footnotes!
