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Charlie Stross, Paul Krugman Discuss the Future
Peripatetic Entrepreneur writes "At the Science Fiction World Convention in Montreal, Hugo Award winning author Charlie Stross and Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman opened the show with a 75-minute, wide-ranging conversation on stage. From flying cars to decoding the genome of the Pacific Ocean to vat-grown Long Pig, it's all there. Audio is also available — video soon."
but the big thing was the freight container.
He's right. There's a great book called "The Box", which is a history of modern shipping containers. Containerization reduced the cost of ocean shipping of manufactured goods by about 90%. Breakage and theft went way down, too.
A few decades ago, if you went down to the docks in New York or San Francisco, there were thousands of big guys lifting and carrying stuff. Not only did containers end that, they ended the ports of New York and San Francisco - both were replaced with new ports in New Jersey and Oakland. If you go to a container port today, you see very few people around.
The other big development that made international trade work was fax machines. With fax machines, you could send ordinary business paperwork to people far away. Even if they didn't speak your language, they could probably figure out a purchase order. So you could do the basics of commerce at a distance. This cut out many of the expensive middlemen in international trade. It used to be that to import something, you had to deal with an importer, who dealt with an exporter at the sending end, who dealt with the manufacturer, possibly with a wholesaler and a warehouse company somewhere in the chain. With fax machines and containers, you cut the deal with the manufacturer by fax, they filled a container, and the container came to you without any intermediaries who cared what was in the box.
That's a very fair point. I'll say this though: most libertarian economists warn about the dangers of governments using policy to direct economic matters. This criticism is very well founded; generally things start out well, but inevitably things go wrong and the perpetrators end up blaming the free market for all the problems. There are of course examples and counter examples on both sides, so things are completely black/white, but as a general trend it rings true. While libertarian economists (to use a stereotype) are political in the sense that they look at the economic problems resulting from political issues, they tend to think that economic policy should be apolitical...that is, get politicians of all striped out of the money business. Krugman is the nemesis of that line of thinking.