I just got back from a visit with family in Cumberland. It's the epitome of rust belt. What used to be a thriving manufacturing area has become an abandoned service-sector economy with low-wage jobs. Property values are dirt cheap, even for nice houses. There isn't much nearby, you have to travel hours from Pittsburgh to even get there by plane. Tales of theft of items like power tools from relatively remote farms ar…
When the railroad was the internet, it was really the Silicon Valley of its day. Really makes you think.
China is an interesting example, in that it was so well ahead of the curve until around 1700s. In the 1800s, when telegraphs were connecting the Western world together, the Qing dynasty China would not have been able to participate unless pictographs could be encoded as easily as letters (let alone the century of uprisings, rebellions, and civil war).
But look at Tang Dynasty China. The Silk Road was a part of a global trade network reaching through the Middle East, and into Africa, along with maritime routes from India.
It wasn’t just trade goods that travelled. Ideas — religious, cultural, technological, flowed along the network. But they travelled only as fast as trade goods.
I think it is when information is able to flow faster than the physical items that, we might find some insights about what is going on now.