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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What are these intracoastal waterways? The islands that protect all the East Coast.
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Why do all these rivers and intarcoastal waterways matter so much? Because it makes it dirt cheap to trade
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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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I go into much more details in today's article, and also cover some dynamics from the rest of the world
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This is inspired by sources like the amazing Stratfor Monographic worldview.stratfor.com/article/geopol
Or Prisoners of Geography
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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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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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Mokyr’s argument is not quite flywheel in the modern Amazon sense. More like over 1000 years Europe built up an advantage because it went down a path of runaway innovation via positive feedback loops. Geography helped trigger it but isn’t determinative.
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Yes, agreed. That's what I meant.
Same thing happened in China and India, with obvious synergies across them. GGS etc.
If you haven't read it my favorite book about all these topics from the last 5y is Nonzero from Robert Wright, Highly recommended
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