{"id":54435,"date":"2020-07-29T07:28:48","date_gmt":"2020-07-29T12:28:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=54435"},"modified":"2020-07-29T07:28:49","modified_gmt":"2020-07-29T12:28:49","slug":"twenty-questions-that-will-make-you-rethink-trade","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=54435","title":{"rendered":"Twenty Questions that Will Make you Rethink Trade"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/stories\/2020-07-29\/twenty-questions-that-will-make-you-rethink-trade\/\">Twenty Questions that Will Make you Rethink Trade<\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/07\/container.jpg\" alt=\"\"\/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We live in the age of trade. Trade, supported by an infrastructure of criss-crossing cargo ships, mega-ports, and an endless armada of trains and trucks plying the railways and highways, has become the foundation of the modern global economy. (And let\u2019s not even talk about the virtual infrastructure of banking and finance that undergirds all this real-world activity.) In fact, we\u2019ve&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.postcarbon.org\/crazytown\/episode-16\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">taken trade so far<\/a>&nbsp;that the actual transactions are routinely irrational from an ecological or an energetic perspective, let alone a common-sense perspective. For example, consider the&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.heraldscotland.com\/news\/12765981.scotland-to-china-and-back-again-cods-10000-mile-trip-to-your-table\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">10,000-mile cod<\/a>. Scottish fishermen catch cod in the North Atlantic. Now, the fish could be consumed fresh in Scotland, but no\u2026 First, the poor piscine provisions are deep-frozen into codsicles, which are then shipped to China, thawed, filleted, packaged, re-frozen, and shipped back to Scotland for eventual consumption. The energy balance for codsicle processing is indefensible, as the calories spent to run the fish through this globalized&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.digitaltrends.com\/cool-tech\/best-rube-goldberg-machines\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Rube Goldberg machine<\/a>&nbsp;immeasurably outstrip the calories gained from eating them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">OK, let\u2019s pull back from the criticism for a moment. Trade isn\u2019t all bad. Any college economics student can regurgitate a neoliberal rehashing of David Ricardo\u2019s early-19<sup>th<\/sup>-century treatise of&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.econlib.org\/library\/Topics\/Details\/comparativeadvantage.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">comparative advantage<\/a>\u2014trade can create benefits for a person or nation willing to engage in it. Researchers even&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.sciencedirect.com\/science\/article\/abs\/pii\/S0167268105000284\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">hypothesize that trade was an advancement unique to&nbsp;<em>Homo sapiens<\/em><\/a>&nbsp;that allowed us to outcompete the Neanderthals. The thinking is that, through trade, we developed both specialization of labor and new technologies, while Neanderthals (who apparently were reluctant to trade) failed to develop either. But something\u2019s gone awry with the idea of exchanging goods and services.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Twenty Questions that Will Make you Rethink Trade We live in the age of trade. Trade, supported by an infrastructure of criss-crossing cargo ships, mega-ports, and an endless armada of trains and trucks plying the railways and highways, has become the foundation of the modern global economy. (And let\u2019s not even talk about the virtual [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[6665,22837,805],"class_list":["post-54435","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-resilience-org","tag-rob-dietz","tag-trade"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54435","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=54435"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54435\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54436,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54435\/revisions\/54436"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=54435"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=54435"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=54435"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}