What woul the implications be?
Jan. 26th, 2011 09:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pktechgirlbackupAmerica is running a trade deficit right now. When I hear that, I think "yay, other countries are giving us stuff for free" rather than "boo we're losing our industrial superiority," but many people don't take it that way.
Matthew Yglesias has an interesting theory: long long ago, back in the 50's America was running a trade surplus. In fact, it was running such a trade surplus that other countries were running out of stuff we wanted that they could trade for our stuff (i.e. the American dollar was very, very strong). This hurt America's companies that wanted to sell overseas. But certain other countries had oil. We didn't necessarily need that much oil, but we could certainly find a use for it- by, say, switching from public transit to cars. It wasn't necessarily a huge incentive, but every time we were weighing something like density restrictions, there was a little gnome saying that it didn't matter if lower density required more oil, any money spent on it would come back to us in purchases of American goods. This made policies that favor oil usage small subsidies to export-oriented businesses.
Now, there are a lot of reasons America uses more oil than Europe that are never going to change- drastically lower population density, larger temperature variations, and the food supply chain stretches over a larger geographical area. But oil use is really sensitive to snowball effects, especially in things like designing communities for single rider transportation. So the making oil, in essence, a few cents cheaper, could have ultimately had a huge effect on how much oil we used, especially since once people get used to low density and cars, it's hard to transition to high density and transit.
I have no idea if this theory is true and I'm not sure how you'd test it, but it is interesting.
Matthew Yglesias has an interesting theory: long long ago, back in the 50's America was running a trade surplus. In fact, it was running such a trade surplus that other countries were running out of stuff we wanted that they could trade for our stuff (i.e. the American dollar was very, very strong). This hurt America's companies that wanted to sell overseas. But certain other countries had oil. We didn't necessarily need that much oil, but we could certainly find a use for it- by, say, switching from public transit to cars. It wasn't necessarily a huge incentive, but every time we were weighing something like density restrictions, there was a little gnome saying that it didn't matter if lower density required more oil, any money spent on it would come back to us in purchases of American goods. This made policies that favor oil usage small subsidies to export-oriented businesses.
Now, there are a lot of reasons America uses more oil than Europe that are never going to change- drastically lower population density, larger temperature variations, and the food supply chain stretches over a larger geographical area. But oil use is really sensitive to snowball effects, especially in things like designing communities for single rider transportation. So the making oil, in essence, a few cents cheaper, could have ultimately had a huge effect on how much oil we used, especially since once people get used to low density and cars, it's hard to transition to high density and transit.
I have no idea if this theory is true and I'm not sure how you'd test it, but it is interesting.
