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🏗️ Nearly flat, which is also great for agriculture, but also for building anything for cheap, really ⛴️ The Mississippi and its tributaries have more navigable length than all other navigable rivers in the world COMBINED 🕴️ They're all connected to each other, so easy trade
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And ON TOP OF THAT the East Coast, from Mexico to Boston, has intracoastal waterways, which make trade easier to protect, hence is cheaper
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When trade is cheap, your goods can go anywhere. Compare this with Russia, which doesn't have any cheap way to transport the goods from the middle of the country, which means these goods are either more expensive or simply can't be traded (eg, if perishable)
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Follow me for more of these. I'm covering next: - If Geography determines History, what determines Geography? (hint: Space!) - What's the role of Technology? (hint: it changes over History).
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So summary: - Impregnable - Best fertile land in the world - Very cheap to build other stuff too - Super easy and cheap to trade All of this creates lots of wealth Worth keeping in mind when we talk about American exceptionalism.
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Feels like a Guns, Germs, and Steel type argument but for modernity. Environmental determinism. I think there’s some of that, but also a strong element of tech path dependence (“flywheel”) at country scale a la Joel Mokyr, which also unfolded in other places at other times.
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Good article. Broadly agree. Thx for sharing! You mean counterpoint to what? It's very much aligned with what I mean: the exceptionalism is not as much cultural as we like to think.
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💯 I am highlighting the Geo part here, which was vastly predominant over History. Now Tech takes over, my big hypothesis is that faster and faster. On tech flywheel, though, tech diffusion is so much faster now that it might not account for much difference
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That graph shows GDP per capita vs. the US. Most country, as they develop, they catch up, and then remain at a stable gap with the US. In Europe, for example, that gap correlates very highly with geo quality TBH (except for tax havens obv)