تغییرات زیربنایی و توسعه اقتصادی سکولار

Long-term economic development is determined by changes to the infrastructure, especially material and non-material infrastructural networks that link agents in different locations. The infrastructure consists of the slowly changing, collective arena that supports production, exchange, and consumption, such as the built environment, transport networks, and institutions. In the short run the infrastructure can be regarded as fixed. Changes to the infrastructure are under normal conditions small enough to be disregarded by producers and consumers. With the creation of a critical link of a network, there will however be a revolutionary restructuring of the arena. Critical links are here defined as additions to infrastructural networks that create opportunities for new information and transport flows between previously unconnected regions. Such a revolutionary restructuring of infrastructural networks has been called a logistical revolution. Certain institutional pre-conditions are necessary for a logistical revolution, while the creation of a critical link is both a necessary and a sufficient condition. This paper discusses the three logistical revolutions that occurred in the 13th century, around 1600, and in the 19th century, which each had crucial similarities with the current “information revolution.”

The games of both markets and politics take place on an arena. The arena facilitates certain types of actions and decisions, while making others more difficult. The possibility to predict what will occur in markets and political decision-making depends on our ability to identify long-term changes to the arena. What matters in the long run are the slowly changing factors that have collective impacts on individuals and firms. We refer to these slowly changing, collective, factors as the infrastructure of a society. The infrastructure does not only comprise roads, railways, and other durable physical assets, but also the soft (non-material) infrastructure of legal systems, common values, and shared knowledge.

The purpose of the brief survey of the logistical revolutions is to draw attention to a number of common features of logistical revolutions. Each restructuring has had similar causes and consequences: • They were caused by a slow but persistent expansion of the infrastructure. Usually it involved improved opportunities for transport, knowledge and information search, contracting, and other economic transactions. The restructuring was triggered by a phase transition of the transport and communications networks which resulted in much lower unit transport and transaction costs for inter-regionally traded goods and services.