The Scale of Things (Personal and Trivial)
On Friday I drove from Vermont to New York, but as usual avoided driving into Manhattan — I parked at Secaucus Junction, a quick train ride in and a good jumping-off point for the drive to Princeton today.
And as I headed south from Secaucus, I had one of those moments when the sheer scale of the world economy hit me.
The vista: in front of me the NJ Turnpike, 12 lanes wide at this point and already full of trucks early in the morning. On the right, Newark Airport, with many planes taking off and landing. On the left, the massive cranes of the Elizabeth container port marching off into the distance.
And Newark is only one of three New York airports; New York is, these days, only one of many huge global metropolitan centers. The scale of the whole thing is more or less literally inconceivable, in the sense that nobody can picture the reality of our getting and spending.
Maybe the reason this kind of thing hits me now and then is that in my normal line of work I analyze this gigantic system using stylized little models that reduce all this vastness to a couple of intersecting lines. And that’s OK — people who reject stylized models invariably end up relying, whether they know it or not, on implicit models that are even less realistic because their assumptions go unexamined. Furthermore, those stylized little models have been hugely successful in recent years, predicting the quiescence of inflation and interest rates, the adverse effects of austerity, and more.
But every once in a while it does seem worthwhile to contemplate the enormity of the system we’re talking about.