Consider today's global civilization. You see it every single day from your morning cup of coffee to your iPhone. Yet, it is largely invisible.
According to Edward Humes, author of Door to Door, the components necessary to make the average cup of coffee travel more than 500,000 miles before they get to your coffee maker.
The more complex the item, the longer its journey from hundreds of thousands of miles over sea and air to millions of miles. The components of an iPhone circumnavigate the globe eight times.
So with all this travel, your cup of coffee is now virtually unaffordable. It costs $10,000 a cup. Oh, wait, no, it costs pennies. How can this be?
Humes says it is as if global trade defies gravity.
"We live like no other civilization in history, embedding ever greater amounts of miles within our good and lives as a means of making everyday products and services seemingly more efficient and affordable. In the past, distance meant the opposite: added cost, added risk, added uncertainty," Humes writes.
But what seems inefficient, is actually very efficient.
Take the smartphone. It has all those miles embedded into its creation. Yet, the smartphone, Humes writes, is a transportation reducer. Instead of a paper copy of your newspaper, you read the news on the smartphone. Instead of mail delivered to your door, you may get all your bills and missives delivered to your phone inbox. Same with banking. You carry fewer things because of the smartphone: You don't need a calculator, watch, alarm clock, or even a flashlight.
This global transportation network is stunningly new. Even as recently as the 1970s and 1980s, shipping and transportation were expensive, unreliable, and unpredictable, Humes writes. Shipping took a lot of time, up to10 days to load and unload and it had to be done by swarms of longshoremen. Tracking shipments was difficult, communications sketchy, and arrival times fluid. In short, shipping was a lot of trouble and it was expensive.
Computerization, advances in shipping, low tariffs, free trade — all these factors now make it possible for ordinary things to defy gravity, Humes writes.
