What xkcd and Jeff Herbst Taught my about Logistics and Foreign Trade in Africa

The genius who creates xkcd made a source cited graphic representation of all the money in the world at 2011 prices. You can take a look at it here. (I thought about uploading the image here, but it is large enough that it would be unwieldy on your normal image preview software. Better use the applet xkcd provides.)

Look at that first.

Next examine this section borrowed from the "Billions" Section of the above graphic:

Notice the footnote about the US Interstate Highway system and how much it cost.

Compare that to the US Foreign Aid budget.

Now look at this picture depicting Africa in terms of relative size (rather than fidelity to axis as in some projections).

Now compare the size of the United States to the size of Africa, and we can now start to imagine what a comparable logistical network for the continent would cost.

Again the highway system in the United States was only constitutional because it was deemed a national security project. It was modeled off the Audubon, but made into straight lines as opposed to curving race ways. That way we could land Trans-Atlantic bombers on it in emergencies — helping our Cold War ambitions to dually save ourselves and possibly wage nuclear war with the USSR.

So the factors that contributed to the single largest public logistical system were:
-2 Super Powers
-A Cold War
-Nuclear Security Policy
-Possession of atomic weapons (precursor to having Nuclear Security Policy)
-A national legislature with the power of the purse to authorize the project

-A captured, rationalized, institutionalized and (more than nominally) taxable population.
-Skilled laborers and engineers to build and design the roads respectively
-being built in a time when planes were the main delivery mechanism for atomic weapons, hence the country needed excess road that could be used as runways. They needed an amount of road so large that any primary or secondary attack on the united states could not possibly destroy all of it.
-the largest single price tag for a physical asset in human history?

And that road network wouldn't cover even one third of Sub Saharan Africa if it tried.

I think the comprising members of the African Union, nay the entire world, are going to have a problem replicating that success.

We talk endlessly about connecting markets, and economic linkages. A lot of growth theories for the past 60 years (from both new-Keynesians and monetarists) even assumed zero lag times. How is it that that can be conceived of as possible on the least sparsely populated continent on the planet, where transaction costs over long distances are among the highest in the world, and where the barriers to the fixed capital to world-class logistical investment are the elephant in the room? They are a massive elephant! Massive.

I knew infrastructure investment in Sub Saharan Africa was complex and expensive, and I am not done working on this. The figures for the US Interstate Highway System provided me with a context, a watermark, that I never had before yesterday. I think it's important to know. If we're to keep thinking outside the box, and not spend the next 60 years like we did the last, then we should know how big the box is. How else would we transcend it's boundaries?