Fascinating article, I think the only bit I was a little in disagreement with was the suggestion that “railroads are only a marginal improvement over roads and canals”. I get what they’re saying, but it’s also silly, it’s like saying air conditioning is marginally better than a hand fan.
You simply can’t carry the weight of goods on roads that you can on rail, and while canals can do that, you need the waterways to exist in the first place. I don’t see any canals crossing the continental USA for example. Then there’s speed, many types of goods spoil if they take too long in transit.
Railroads combined with the steam engine were definitely a monumental improvement on anything that came before.
Note: I know this was a quote from a paper, from 1962 in fact, but still, while maybe it didn’t single-handedly drive GDP, it was clearly a game changer.
I think that humans are coevolving as we speak to read into these patterns and reinforce the algorithms with their intelligence. I think there's a certain amount of intelligent data capture that is needed to effectively get transformative results
Fascinating article, I think the only bit I was a little in disagreement with was the suggestion that “railroads are only a marginal improvement over roads and canals”. I get what they’re saying, but it’s also silly, it’s like saying air conditioning is marginally better than a hand fan.
You simply can’t carry the weight of goods on roads that you can on rail, and while canals can do that, you need the waterways to exist in the first place. I don’t see any canals crossing the continental USA for example. Then there’s speed, many types of goods spoil if they take too long in transit.
Railroads combined with the steam engine were definitely a monumental improvement on anything that came before.
Note: I know this was a quote from a paper, from 1962 in fact, but still, while maybe it didn’t single-handedly drive GDP, it was clearly a game changer.
Can you post it on Substack? It’s more convenient if I can listen to it.
I think that humans are coevolving as we speak to read into these patterns and reinforce the algorithms with their intelligence. I think there's a certain amount of intelligent data capture that is needed to effectively get transformative results