Читать книгу Global Political Cities - Kent E. Calder - Страница 35

To understand this quiet yet subversive erosion of nation-state influence in international relations, it is important to recall the classic work of the Nobel laureate Oliver Williamson. He noted in 1981, at the dawn of the globalization age, that “governance structures that have better transaction-cost economizing properties will eventually displace those that have worse.”¹¹ As we shall see, technological change over the past several decades has radically cut communications and transportation costs worldwide, with reduction in transaction costs being a central dimension. This cost reduction has allowed human network structures at the subnational level—particularly within large cities where a notable power of proximity prevails—to displace the vertical relationships prevailing at the national level, such as bureaucratic regulations. Such regulations cannot easily capitalize on the lowered transaction costs that the digital era makes possible and that market forces incentivize.

The radical declines over the past century in marginal costs for all manner of communications and transport technologies, ushering in a sea change in global connectivity, are evident in figure 3-2. First to decline, from the 1920s through the 1950s, were sea-freight rates. By 1960, maritime transport charges were only a third of their 1920 level.¹² Next came telephone calls, whose prices fell sharply across the 1940s but continued to decline well into the twenty-first century; a three-minute phone call commanding a $293 price tag in 1931 cost only a nickel in 2015.¹³ During the 1950s and the 1970s, air fares also began declining sharply, as larger, faster aircraft came into service.

Figure 3-2. Declining Transport and Communications Costs, 1920–2015

Source: Jean-Paul Rodrigue, Claude Comtois, and Brian Slack, “What Is Transport Geography?” in The Geography of Transport Systems, 4th ed. (London: Routledge, 2016), https://transportgeography.org/?page_id=271.

Across the 1970s, computing storage costs also fell sharply, following an initial decline in the 1950s. The merger of computer and communications technology during the 1980s and beyond, facilitating the internet, then gave birth to a digital age of unprecedented low-cost connectivity worldwide.