How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We're Going

by Vaclav Smil

Reinforced concrete is now inside every large modern building and every transportation infrastructure, from port piers to segmental rings installed by modern tunnel-boring machines (under the Channel and the Alps). The standard configuration of the US Interstate Highway System is a layer of about 28 centimeters of non-reinforced concrete on top of a twice-as-thick layer of natural aggregates (stones, gravel, sand)—and the entire Interstate system contains about 50 million tons of cement, 1.5 billion metric tons of aggregates, and only about 6 million tons of steel (for structural support and culvert pipes).[94]

Airport runways (up to 3.5 kilometers long) have reinforced concrete foundations, deepest (up to 1.5 meters) in the touchdown zone to handle the repeated pounding of hundreds of thousands of landings every year by airplanes weighing up to about 380 tons (the Airbus 380). For example, Canada’s longest runway (4.27 kilometers, in Calgary) required more than 85,000 cubic meters of concrete and 16,000 tons of reinforcing steel.[95]

The era of these megastructures began during the 1930s with the construction of the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River and the Grand Coulee Dam on the Columbia River. The vertiginous Hoover Dam, located in a gorge southeast of Las Vegas, required about 3.4 million cubic meters of concrete and 20,000 tons of reinforcing steel, twice as much plate and pipe steel, and 8,000 tons of structural steel.[96]

Hundreds of these massive structures were built during the second half of the 20th century, and the world’s largest dam—China’s Sanxia (Three Gorges) on the Yangzi, generating electricity since 2011—has its almost 28 million cubic meters of concrete reinforced with 256,500 tons of steel.[97]

Annual American cement consumption rose tenfold between 1900 and 1928, when it reached 30 million tons, and the postwar construction boom—including the construction of the Interstate Highway System and the expansion of the country’s airports—tripled by the century’s end. The peak was reached at about 12...

In 1985, it surpassed the US to become the world’s largest producer, and in 2019 its output of about 2.2 billion tons was just over half of the global total.[99]

Perhaps the most stunning outcome of this rise is that in just two years—2018 and 2019—China produced nearly as much cement (about 4.4 billion tons) as did the United States during the entire 20th century (4.56 billion tons).

Yet another astounding statistic is that the world now consumes in one year more cement than it did during the entire first half of the 20th century. And (both fortunately and unfortunately) these enormous masses of modern concrete will not last as long as the Pantheon’s coffered dome.

In affluent countries with low population growth, the main need is to fix decaying infrastructures. The latest report card for the US awards nothing but poor to very poor grades to all sectors where concrete dominates, with dams, roads, and aviation getting Ds and the overall average grade just D+.[102]

Other common and prominent concrete relics are thick-walled defensive bunkers such as those of Normandy and the Maginot Line, and massive concrete silos that formerly housed nuclear missiles and now sit empty on America’s Great Plains.

No structures are more obvious symbols of “green” electricity generation than large wind turbines—but these enormous accumulations of steel, cement, and plastics are also embodiments of fossil fuels.[107]

Their foundations are reinforced concrete, their towers, nacelles, and rotors are steel (altogether nearly 200 tons of it for every megawatt of installed generating capacity), and their massive blades are energy-intensive—and difficult to recycle—plastic resins (about 15 tons of them for a midsize turbine). All of these giant parts must be brought to the installation sites by outsized trucks and erected by large steel cranes, and turbine gearboxes must be repeatedly lubricated with oil. Multiplying these requirements by the millions of turbines that would be needed to eliminate electricity generated from fossil fuels shows how misleading any talks are about the coming dematerialization of green economies.

Globalization manifests itself in countless quotidian ways. Ships loaded with many thousands of interlocking steel containers are bringing electronic and kitchen gadgets, socks and pants, garden tools and sports equipment from Asia to the shopping centers of Europe and North America, as well as to hawkers of cheap clothes and kitchenware in Africa and Latin America. Giant tankers move crude oil from Saudi Arabia to refineries in India and Japan, and liquefied natural gas from Texas to storage tanks in France and South Korea. Large bulk carriers full of iron ore leave Brazil for China and return empty (as do the oil tankers) to their home ports. Apple’s American-designed iPhones are assembled in a Taiwanese-owned factory (Hon Hai Precision, trading as Foxconn) in Shenzhen, in China’s Guangdong province, from parts coming from more than a dozen countries, and the phones are then distributed globally in a highly choreographed feat of integrated engineering and marketing.[1]

Travel for leisure has reached such levels that in many cases the pre-pandemic label of “overtourism” was but a mild description of what was taking place in Rome’s San Pietro, where the basilica was jammed with selfie stick–wielding tourists on quick package European tours, or on Asian beaches that became so degraded they had to be closed to visitors.[3]

Statistics concerning money movements greatly underestimate the real (including massive illegal) flows. The global merchandise trade is now close to $20 trillion a year, and the annual value of world trade in commercial services is close to $6 trillion.[4]

And numbers describing global information flows are many orders of magnitude higher than these money transfers—not just in terabytes or petabytes but in exa (1018) and yotta (1024) bytes of data.[6]

Perhaps the greatest misconception about globalization is that it is a historical inevitability preordained by economic and social evolution. Not so—globalization is not, as a former US president claimed, “the economic equivalent of a force of nature, like wind or water”; it is just another human construct, and there is now a growing consensus that, in some ways, it has already gone too far and needs to be readjusted.[8]

China provided a combination of other attractors—above all, centralized one-party government that could guarantee political stability and acceptable investment conditions; a large, highly homogeneous and literate population; and an enormous domestic market—that made it the preferred choice over Nigeria, Bangladesh, and even India, resulting in a remarkable collusion between the world’s largest communist state and a nearly complete lineup of the world’s leading capitalist enterprises.[10]

Globalization has been linked, approvingly, with the advantages, benefits, creative destruction, modernity, and progress it has brought to entire nations. China has been by far its greatest beneficiary, as the country’s reintegration into the global economy helped to reduce the number of people living in extreme poverty by 94 percent between 1980 and 2015.[11]

My goal is to explain how technical factors—above all, new prime movers (engines, turbines, motors) and new means of communication and information (storage, transmission, and retrieval)—made successive waves of globalization possible, and then to point out how these technical advances have been contingent on the prevailing political and social conditions. As a result, there is nothing inevitable about the continuation and further intensification of the process, and the significant, decades-long, post-1913 retreat from globalization, as well as recent reversals and concerns about the security of existing supply chains, serve as obvious reminders of this reality.

But the scattered linking of parts of Europe, Asia, and Africa is a far cry from a truly global reach. Only the inclusion of the New World (starting in 1492) and the first circumnavigation of the Earth (1519) began to satisfy this definition, and a mere century later commercial exchanges tied European states with the interior of Asia, India, and the Far East, as well as with coastal regions of Africa and with both Americas—and only Australia was still left aside. Some of these early links were as enduring as they were transformative. The East India Company, headquartered in London and operating between 1600 and 1874, traded a wide range of items—largely to and from the Indian subcontinent—ranging from textiles and metals to spices and opium. The Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (Dutch East India Company) imported spices, textiles, gems, and coffee mostly from Southeast Asia; it kept its uninterrupted monopoly on trade with Japan for two centuries (between 1641 and 1858), and the Dutch domination of the East Indies ended only in 1945.[16]

Incipient globalization eventually connected the world with far-flung but not very intensive exchanges enabled by sail ships. Steam engines made these linkages more common, more intensive, and much more predictable, while telegraph provided the first truly global means of (near-instant) communication. The combination of the first diesel engines, flight, and radio elevated and accelerated these enablers of globalization. And large diesels (in shipping), turbines (in flight), containers (enabling intermodal transport), and microchips (allowing unprecedented controls thanks to the volume and speed of information-handling) brought globalization to its highest stage.

Works by Dirck Hals, Gerard ter Borch, Frans van Mieris, Jan Vermeer van Delft, and many lesser masters show these new profits turned into tiled floors, glass windows, well-made furniture, thick tablecloths, and musical instruments.[21] Some have argued that this can all be dismissed because this genre of painting depicted a fantasy world that never existed in reality.[22] Exaggeration and stylization were certainly present, but, as historian Jan de Vries makes clear, what he calls the “New Luxury” (generated by urban society) was real: not striving for grandeur and excess, but evinced in products of good craftsmanship—from furniture to tapestries, from Delft tiles to silver utensils—including about 3 million paintings owned by families in Holland in the 1660s.[23]

Leisure travel, a form of temporary migration formerly reserved for the privileged classes, took off in its many manifestations with steam-powered trains and ships. With Thomas Cook leading the way in 1841, travel agencies offered package tours, and spa and seaside vacations became fashionable as people visited Baden-Baden, Karlsbad, and Vichy, and traveled to Trouville on the French Atlantic coast or to Capri.

And this new mobility also had a distinctly political dimension, with exiles—traveling by trains and ships—seeking refuge in foreign countries: most famously, nearly all future prominent Bolshevik leaders (Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Nikolai Bukharin, Grigory Zinoviev) spent many years abroad in Europe and the US.[36]

But the first marine engine was installed only in 1912 on Christian X, a Danish freighter. Diesel-powered ships carried much less fuel than coal-fired steamers, but could travel further without refueling because the new engines were nearly twice as efficient—and because, per unit of mass, diesel oil contains nearly twice as much energy. An American engineer who saw the first diesel-powered vessel after her maiden voyage to New York in 1912 concluded that: “marine history is being written by the advent of the Diesel engine.”[41]

Wireless broadcasts required no expensive undersea cables, and they could achieve wide area coverage and universal access (anybody with a simple receiver could listen). Not surprisingly, the adoption of radio receivers was rapid: within a decade after their introduction, 60 percent of American families had them—nearly as fast a rate of acquisition as that of black-and-white TVs (which also originated in the 1920s) after the Second World War, and a faster rate than the subsequent diffusion of color TV which in the US took off rapidly during the early 1960s.[46]

By the conflict’s end, the US had built nearly 296,000 airplanes compared to about 112,000 in Germany and 68,000 in Japan.[47]

In 1945, the United States emerged as the world’s dominant power, and the economic recovery of Western Europe was fast. Aided by the US investment (1948’s Marshall Plan), all of the region’s countries surpassed their prewar (1934–1938) level of industrial production by 1949, while Japan’s recovery was accelerated by the contribution of that country’s industries to the Korean War.[48]

The stage was thus set for a period of unprecedented growth and integration, as well as for extensive social and cultural interactions. Communist economies, led by the USSR and China, were the notable exceptions: although they reported impressive economic growth rates, they were highly autarkic and operated with very li...

Primary energy output nearly tripled, and crude oil consumption rose almost sixfold as the world became increasingly dependent on Middle Eastern oil. As a result, there is no contest as to which technique has made the greatest difference in enabling mass-scale transport in the global economy: without diesel engines, intercontinental trade in bulk cargoes—from grain to crude oil—would have been just a small fraction of recent shipments.

Total deliveries of the 747 have added up to 1,548 planes in half a century of production, and Boeing estimates that during those five decades the planes carried 5.9 billion people, the equivalent of about 75 percent of the world’s population.[61]

The plane’s revolutionary design changed intercontinental travel, as wide-body jets have transported hundreds of millions of people to a growing number of destinations with steadily declining costs and increasing safety.

ENIAC, the first electronic general-purpose digital computer, had 17,648 vacuum tubes, a volume of about 80 cubic meters (the footprint of roughly two badminton courts), with its power supply and cooling system it weighed about 30 tons, and its frequent operating interruptions were caused by recurrent failures of tubes that required near-constant maintenance and replacement.[62]

The first practical transistors—solid-state devices performing the same functions as glass-enclosed devices—became commercially available during the early 1950s, and before the decade’s end the ideas of several American inventors (Robert Noyce, Jack Kilby, Jean Hoerni, Kurt Lehovec, and Mohamed Atalla) resulted in the production of the first integrated circuits, with active (transistors) and passive (capacitors, resistors) components built and interconnected on a thin layer of silicon (a semiconducting material). These circuits can perform any specified computing functions, and their first practical uses were in rockets and space exploration.[63]

As for maximum ship sizes, in 1972 and 1973 Malcolm McLean launched his largest container vessels, each with a capacity of 1,968 standard steel containers (nearly five times larger than his first converted vessels in 1957). In 1996, Regina Maersk could load 6,000 standard units; by 2008 the maximum was 13,800; and in 2019 the Mediterranean Shipping Company put into service six giant vessels each able to carry 23,756 standard containers, hence a 12-fold increase of maximum vessel capacity between 1973 and 2019.[77] Inevitably, this mass-scale conversion to container shipping required the commensurate conversion of freight trains and truck transportation, and these intermodal chains now bring the goods from a city in China’s interior to the loading dock of a Walmart in Missouri.

The belly hold of every passenger airplane carries goods, as does the growing fleet of air freighters: as a result, between 1973 and 2018 global airfreight (expressed in ton-kilometers) rose about 12-fold, while scheduled passenger traffic rose from about 0.5 trillion to more than 8.3 trillion passenger-kilometers, nearly a 17-fold gain.[78]

For generations the US led overall tourist expenditures, but it was surpassed by China in 2012 and five years later Chinese tourists were spending twice as much as Americans. The rather sudden multiplication of arrivals and their disproportionate concentration in several major cities (Paris, Venice, Barcelona) has led to complaints by their permanent residents and to the first moves to limit the numbers of daily or annual visitors.[80]

Increases in moving materials, products, and people, as well as the necessity of delivering materials or components just in time for new industries working without extensive inventories, were enabled (and made more reliable) by gains in navigation, tracking, computing, and communication, and much-expanded capabilities were also needed to accommodate the new deluge of international data flows. All of these advances have one fundamental technical foundation: our ability to emplace more components on an integrated circuit whose progress—doubling roughly every two years—has been, so far, conforming to the prediction made by Gordon Moore, at that time Fairchild Semiconductor’s director of research, in 1965.[81]

University of Pennsylvania recreated ENIAC by putting 174,569 transistors on a 7.4 mm × 5.3 mm silicon microchip: the original machine was more than 5 million times heavier, it required about 40,000 times more electricity, and the recreated chip was 500 times faster.[83]

That last capability has benefited from advances in radar detection and by the setting up and subsequent expansion and improvement of global positioning systems (GPS): the first (American) system was fully operational in 1993, and three other systems (Russia’s GLONASS, EU’s Galileo, China’s BeiDou) followed.[85]

As a result, everybody with a computer or a mobile phone can now see worldwide shipping and aviation activities in real time, just by clicking on the MarineTraffic website and watching cargo vessels (green icons) converging on Shanghai and Hong Kong, lining up to pass between Bali and Lombok, or going up the English Channel; to see tankers (red) debouching from the Persian Gulf, tugs and special craft (turquoise) serving the oil and gas production rigs in the North Sea, and fishing vessels (light brown) roaming the central Pacific (and there are many more ships there and elsewhere that do not show on the screen, because, while fishing illegally, they turn off their transponders).[86]

The history of globalization reveals an undeniable long-term trend toward greater international economic integration that is manifested by intensified flows of energies, materials, people, ideas, and information, and that is enabled by improving technical capabilities.

But history reminds us that the recent state of things is unlikely to last for generations. British and American industries were the global leaders as recently as the early 1970s. But where are Birmingham’s metal-working factories or Baltimore’s steel furnaces now? Where are the great cotton mills of Manchester or of South Carolina? By 1965, Detroit’s big three still had 90 percent of the US car market; now they do not have even 45 percent. Until 1980, Shenzhen was a small fishing village, when it became China’s first special economic zone, and now it is a megacity with more than 12 million people: what role will it play in 2050? A mass-scale, rapid retreat from the current state is impossible, but the pro-globalization sentiment has been weakening for some time.

But the switch has also contributed to tragedies, such as the rising midlife mortality among America’s white non-university-educated men. There can be no doubt that America’s post-2000 loss of some 7 million (formerly well-paying) manufacturing jobs—with most of that loss attributable to globalization, as most of that production moved to China—has been the principal reason of these deaths of despair, largely attributable to suicide, drug overdose, and alcohol-induced liver disease.[95]

What I see to be the study’s second-most important finding is that, contrary to common perception, only about 18 percent of the global goods trade is now driven by lower labor costs (labor arbitrage), that in many chains this share has been declining throughout the 2010s, and that global value chains are becoming more knowledge-intensive and rely increasingly on highly skilled labor. Similarly, an OECD study shows that the expansion of global value chains stopped in 2011 and since then has slightly declined: there has been less trade in intermediate goods and services.[97]

Even a restrained appraisal of these real and perceived negatives confirms enough downsides to question any future intensification of the process, and in 2020 COVID-19 reinforced such sentiments.

Will this sentiment persist? As I never fail to stress, I do not forecast, and hence I am not offering any specific numbers concerning the retreat or continuation of the pre-COVID levels of globalization in general, or of the reshoring of manufacturing capacities in particular. I just try to appraise the range of the most likely outcomes, and while in recent years it has looked increasingly as if most aspects of globalization will not soar to new highs, in 2020 this notion became entirely unexceptional: we may have seen the peak of globalization, and its ebb may last not just for years but for decades to come.

The latest published surveys show Japan and the US to be surprisingly close in total food energy consumed per day. In 2015–2016, US males consumed only 11 percent more, and US women not even 4 percent more food energy per day than their Japanese counterparts did in 2017. The two countries diverged moderately in total carbohydrate (Japan was ahead by less than 10 percent) and protein (with Americans less than 14 percent ahead) consumption, and both nations were well above the needed protein minima. But there is a major gap in terms of average fat intake, with American males consuming about 45 percent more and women 30 percent more than the Japanese. And the greatest disparity is in sugar intake: among US adults it is about 70 percent higher. When recalculated in terms of average annual differences, Americans have recently consumed about 8 kilograms more fat and 16 kilograms more sugar every year than the average adult in Japan.[15]

But before you start breakfasting on miso soup (miso shiru), lunching on plain cold onigiri (rice balls wrapped in nori, dried seaweed), and dining on sukiyaki (meat and vegetable stew) a second opinion might be in order: what would the best European model of diet and longevity do?