Fragile, yes, but also beautiful. The Chinese "single product city" is something of a free-market wonder. I visited Dehua (a ceramics city) and spent the time fascinated at how anything related to ceramics production is cheap in that city. It is no one individual factory that achieves economy of scale, but rather the full city, and everyone in it benefits. Small producers can achieve globally competitive pricing on their goods without having to take delivery of truckloads of input materials.

This works really really well until it really really doesn't. There's a reason why these towns don't exist in the West anymore, Detroit being the biggest example (though they got out of their predicament by trying to diversify).

There's still a pretty huge concentration of automakers and suppliers in the greater Detroit area.

Hence the keyword "trying".

When I started composing my reply, your comment read "This works really really well until it really really doesn't. There's a reason why these towns don't exist in the West anymore, Detroit being the biggest example."

Perhaps our edits overlapped.

Reminds me of Tula, the Russian city where a huge number of accordions were made. I'm not sure if it was dictated by the Soviet government or whether it happened organically, but I'm not sure it was due to a free market.

If anything, Tula is famous for metalworking, weapons, and gingerbread before anything else.

weapons and gingerbread, now there's a combination that tickles the mind :)

I'll take the accordions thanks.

Beautiful samovars.

There is nothing beautiful about this I see.

Yeah there's a part of AntiFragile that I'm reading right now about the average calories burned to transport consumable calories on average.

The soviet union focus on agricultural production efficiency achieved the opposite effect right after the breakup.

Crops were produced inefficiently compared to centralisation, but after the breakup the calories to transport vs consumable calories ratio was close to 1:1, compared to a 12:1 in the USA at the time, because the crops were grown super close to where they were consumed.

Same with toilet roll availability in lockdown... lots of control built in over the years to give the appearance of reduced volatility.

So when relatively minor real volatility came in the form of an uptick in demand over a shorter period of time, it had a drastic effect.

We should be thankful these lessons are being doled out in the form of toiler paper, Christmas decorations and hard disks instead of food and meds.

> compared to a 12:1 in the USA at the time

That doesn't sound quite right.

After a quick google, here's some typical numbers for shipping meat: a big rig with refrigeration can transport more than 40000 pounds of meat; at about 1000 (kilo)calories per pound, that's abotu 40 million kcal. Such a rig travels about 500 miles per day, has a fuel economy of about 6 mpg and burns an extra 15 gallons for the refrigeration, all in all, about 100 gallons per day. At about 35000 kcal/gallon, that's about 3.5 million kcal to travel for one day. So you need to move around for more than 11 days to get just to a 1:1 ratio.

>at the time

Your numbers need adjusted for 30 years of fuel efficiency improvement (but to be honest I think your calculations would still illustrate the same point).

The passage I'm reading doesn't cite an exact study/paper except to cite that it's from the works of Dmitri Orlov.

I think the point was more likely centred upon 1:1 calorie transport/consumption of the variety of staples needed rather than taking one of the most calorie dense categories of food like meat for the purpose of back of the envelope math. I also took a quick glance at a passage from Google from Orlov's book which takes all the calories involved in the growth of the food as well, so there's probably a little more to it.

Most people don't realize how huge chemical energy is compared to mechanical energy.

Here's a different way to look at the same thing: one gram of carbs has an energy content of 4.2 kcal. That's about 18000 Joules. One Joule is the same as 1 kg*m2/s2; it takes one Joule to lift a mass of 1kg to a height of about 10cm (because the gravitational acceleration is about 10m/s2). So, with 1 Joule you can lift one gram to a height of about 100 meters. With the energy content of 1 gram of carbs, you can lift 1 gram of matter to a height of 1800 kilometers, i.e. more than 4 times higher than the orbit of the International Space Station. When shipping things around, we don't change the elevation too much, for the simple reason that the highest elevation on Earth is less than 10km. Moving 1g of matter 1km in the horizontal direction requires much, much less energy that 1km on the vertical.

Now food has some water content, the energy does not get converted with 100% efficiency, etc. But the idea that the energy used in transportation is anything close to the energy content of food is quite far fetched.

Let's put it differently: it's hard to lose weight. It's damn hard. Precisely because the energy content stored as chemical energy in our fat cells is so large compared to how much we burn by performing mechanical actions. For example, an average runner burns about 100 (kilo)calories per mile. Since one pound of fat has about 3500 kcal, you need to run about 35 miles to burn that. If you want to burn all the energy stored in all your body, you need to run more thousands of miles. And we humans, are very inefficient. We don't have wheels in particular.

Or, let's put it yet another way. One of the most inefficient ways to transport things around is by rocket. The planned Starship will have a launch mass of about 5000 tons and a payload of 100 tons in orbit. That's a ratio of 50:1. So, to take one gram of stuff from being stationary on Earth to moving at orbital speed (8km/s) perpetually in the sky it takes about 50g of propellant (fuel plus oxidizer). When we move things on Earth, we obviously can use the Oxygen that's all around us. Of the 50g of propellant, only about 11g are actual fuel, so you end up with a ratio of about 11:1 of fuel vs payload, using the most inefficient way of moving things around.

On top of that we can't eat hydrocarbons, but we can use them to move food around.

I think in their metric, the wheat that the US occasionally shipped to the USSR counts as a downside to US agriculture.

I suspect warehousing and other distribution logistics factor in as well. 'Transport' is from farm to plate.

Makes you wonder, though, to what extent there are market opportunities in identifying weak product chains like that, preparing to look like a viable alternative, and then staging a marketing campaign based on drawing public attention to the risk and pushing demand for second source contracts.