Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller
Oil and the End of Globalization
REDEFINING RECOVERY
BEING AN ECONOMIST CAN RUIN YOUR APPETITE
It is probably not the only job that has that effect. I’ve never worked as a taxidermist, but I can see that it might turn me off fish. My job, though, gets me worried about fish in a whole different way.
I like salmon–who doesn’t? Salmon consumption has risen about 23 percent each year for the last decade or so. There are a number of good reasons to eat more fish: we all want food high in omega-3s, we want to eat less saturated fat, we want healthy protein for our low- carb diets. But here’s the key reason for the amount of salmon on your dinner table: cheap oil has been subsidizing the cost of fish. Just like Wal- Mart and Tesco and big- box retailers around the world have been able to cut prices on almost everything by taking advantage of cheap shipping and cheap Asian labor, salmon went from being delicious local seafood to being another global commodity. Cheap oil gives us access to a pretty big world.
In the global economy, no one thinks about distance in miles ...
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