The Weird Economics of Teleportation

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:00]Let's set some assumptions for this video. Teleportation one is possible, two is cheap, Star Trek cheap, and three the tech resolves the ethical concerns like destroying the original person and replacing them with a weird clone. I'll also be conflating true teleportation along with Star Trek's replication where a similar sort of teleportation machine can assemble fungible goods from raw materials.

[00:00:23]>> [music] >> Regardless of how the tech shakes out, these questions are beyond the scope of what I'm interested in here. What's interesting is how transportation technologies fundamentally transform not just the economy but everyday life.

[00:00:35]>> [music] >> We've been through many transportation revolutions already and we tend to think of them solely as moving more things faster. And that is what happens but there's a secondary effect that's also important. Transportation changes the way we think and behave about space. Not space space although that may happen soon but the topology of the earth itself. If we go all the way back to lugging things around by hand, economic activity was constrained by how far someone can walk in a day. A day's round trip to market was maybe 3 to 7 miles max. For the average person, all food, goods, and services had to exist within that range. Time jump 700 years to the railroad. Factories could now be built far from resources creating the modern industrial city. Once you only had to be the best shoemaker in that 3 to 7 mile range, now you have to compete with every shoemaker along the railroad. The range of competition exploded from local to regional to even national. All but geographically, everything became closer together. Then you have the steamship.

[00:01:40]Being able to power your boat without the fickle wind made trade regular and predictable which caused price convergence. This made goods globally competitive and forced national specialization for competitive advantage. This is how you get the Midwest Red Bull, Egyptian cotton, and Scandinavian timber. As transportation improves, the range of competition grows and the world shrinks. There used to be barriers between levels like local, regional, national, and global simply the expense and risk of transporting goods. Each logistical wall gave advantage to local businesses, artisans, and workers but no more.

[00:02:16]What if the last barrier dissolved? What if the logistics cost of transportation not only dropped massively once again but the transportation was also instant?

[00:02:29]>> [music] >> You can't move goods any faster than light speed making teleportation the conclusion of the logistics revolution.

[00:02:38]And we already have a taste of what that might look like. The internet has made the transfer of information effectively instant. This has created location arbitrage with online work. Why pay an American to work in a call center when an Indian will do it for pennies on the dollar with minimal logistics cost.

[00:02:54]Teleportation would do this to the physical economy. You're not just competing with the world to be a software engineer, you're competing to be a cashier or a forklift operator.

[00:03:03]Every cook on earth competes with every other cook on earth. Niche perishables can become accessible globally. There's no spoilage if transportation is instant. This brings economic diversification to near zero. Why forge steel where bananas grow plentifully when you can just trade your excess of bananas? There's no transportation cost.

[00:03:22]Then wages converge to the global mean.

[00:03:25]It's not American minimum wage, it's global. The average person makes $825 per month and at 40 hours a week, that's 515 an hour. Since there's no logistical friction, every person in the world is competing against every other person in the world. The bottom flattens, wages converge downward, goods homogenize.

[00:03:44]Local culture is entirely replaced by a global culture. Not just because there is no limit on exchange of goods and services but when transportation becomes so fast, there really is no local to begin with. As much as there is a unit remaining called a community, wealth is totally drained from it.

[00:04:01]On the other end, the top spikes. The best version of everything conquers the global market. Nothing is protected by geography. There's total topological specialization controlled by less and less people. There are pockets of insane wealth among a global favela. There's no middle class, no middle income. If you're not nearly the best in the world, you're not even in competition. When all friction, all logistical barriers leave the system, whoever can do the thing the best is the only one who can do the thing.

[00:04:30]All of this, of course, would lower global inequality.

[00:04:34]But here's the thing. We don't need a teleporter to get this world. We already nearly have it.

[00:04:42]>> [music] >> Alaskan salmon caught in Bristol Bay is shipped 4,000 miles to China where they debone it for 20 cents on the dollar before it heads 4,000 miles back to be sold in Seattle. Valentine's Day roses are cut in Kenya, flown overnight to Holland, auctioned in 4 seconds, then distributed across Europe in a breakneck 36-hour frenzy. You walk into a restaurant to pick up some food and the cashier is 8,000 miles away in the Philippines. A Californian remote operator takes a forklift job in France.

[00:05:14]The internet has teleported them from their home to their job, no [music] commute. A t-shirt's cotton is grown in the US, spun into yarn in Indonesia, sewn into a shirt in Bangladesh, shipped overseas in a container, then sold for $4 at Walmart. None of these are teleportation but it's pretty close. Our global supply chain operates in the exact same way just a bit slower than the speed of light. Innovations with cargo containers dropped the cost of ocean shipping by 97%.

[00:05:42]This is what allowed for the deindustrialization of the West. This is how manufacturing can employ 35% of Americans in 1947 down to just 8% today.

[00:05:52]This enabled the just-in-time economy where inventory stays close to zero as pipelines of product flow from all over the world with consistent throughput.

[00:06:01]This fragile system caused supply shocks and pricing scrambles during COVID. So is this it? Permanent globalism until we can spread the human median to the stars?

[00:06:12]>> [music] >> Globalism is actually slowing down. This is theoretically because the container ships, internet, and the rest of modern logistics are so effective [music] with the mechanism being global price convergence.

[00:06:25]There's no reason to offshore when it costs about as much as remaining stateside. On top of that, you have very negative public sentiment [music] towards globalism. This has spawned politics like Trump's tariffs, Brexit, and nationalist populist movements all over Europe all fighting to create friction on global trade. People are finally tasking their leaders to rebuild the walls between global, national, regional, and local. It seems like we've hit the critical mass on globalization at least until we master a new form of technology. But next time it happens, we won't be caught by surprise.