Adam Tooze on Taiwan's Economic Surge (Plus: The Beach) | Ones and Tooze Ep. 243

Indexed: 2026-05-22

[00:00:06]Hi and welcome to Ones and Twos FP's economics podcast. Every week we take a couple data points, use them to try to explain the world. I'm Cameron Abati, FP's deputy editor with you in Berlin, Germany. Joining us as always is FP's economics columnist and Columbia University professor Adam Tus. This week in Berlin as well, though not in the same room, we will correct that later this week. we'll get together. But for now, we'll be recording in separate locations. Uh, hi Adam.

[00:00:33]>> Hi, Kim.

[00:00:35]>> So, two segments uh for you all this week. In the second half of the show, we're going to be talking about the beach. That's on the occasion of Memorial Day in the United States, which is the sort of informal uh beginning of the summer holiday season. So, stick around to hear about the beach. But first another data point and that is 30% that is the monthly trade surplus that Taiwan hit in October of last year.

[00:01:13]That's 30% of GDP in a single month that Taiwan's trade surplus hit. Uh it's a remarkable figure. It is uh largely due to Taiwan's chip manufacturing industry.

[00:01:28]And yet the extent of that trade surplus largely was not remarked upon as Taiwan was in the headlines this past week, namely during the summit between the United States and China between President Donald Trump and Chairman Xiinping of China. that summit happened and Taiwan was very much a part of that diplomacy namely uh Taiwan's future the security questions related to that the United States relationship to Taiwan and how that bears on its relationship with China uh but again in the background also is Taiwan's own economy and how that relates to all these questions so we thought we would dig in and discuss uh Taiwan in context and first of all Adam this trade surplus plus that I I mentioned. I mean, just how large is that? I mean, if we were to put it in in some context, we've talked about countries with big trade surpluses uh before uh often in the the the case of countries with natural resources and in that context, we've talked about the Dutch disease problem uh which leads to all sorts of downstream economic uh challenges. Is there a danger of Taiwan having a kind of Dutch disease problem caused by its tech industry essentially rather than natural resources?

[00:02:55]>> I mean first of all the the trade surplus is absolutely gigantic. Um I mean by historic standards you know well not unique one's tempted to say u it's driven by the AI boom. It isn't limited to Taiwan. South Korea is also experiencing an absolutely gigantic surge and it's basically anywhere which is producing the key micro electronic chip components basically for the AI boom. We know on the American side hyperscaler is going bigger and bigger.

[00:03:22]Investment figures now running over 700 billion dollars perom and what that goes into is hardware. And even if Nvidia is the master of chip design, it's the Taiwanese and the South Koreans that are manufacturing these chips. And so Taiwan being a much smaller economy than South Korea is it's kind of like Palo Alto as an independent nation state effectively.

[00:03:42]It's 23 million people um with this giant tech sector. By historic standards, it dwarfs anything we've probably ever looked at in terms of share of GDP. Um, Singapore sometimes hits 15% of GDP in terms of trade surplus. The Netherlands when a bunch of European other European countries are transshipping things to the Netherlands, it gets up there. Ireland as a result of various types of tax evasion strategy.

[00:04:09]But even the pro states like the United Arab Emirates uh or Norway, you know, probably top out as trade surplus is in the 15 to 15%. Like it's kind of anomalous to be running one as gigantic as Taiwan is. And yes, it does as the Palo Alto example or Norway suggests um create problems of displacement. They, you know, Dutch disease gives it a very negative connotation. Apparently there's a phrase pertaining to Taiwan which is the formosa flu. I think that's largely you know courtesy of the aliteration.

[00:04:44]Um, but of course what we're really talking about is that if you are the host of literally the most sophisticated manufacturing operation ever conceived by our species and you have a uniquely dominant position in that and an entire global supply chain traced back to the Netherlands amongst other countries is feeding you and the biggest source of demand in the Western world is eagerly snapping up your products then this will lead to lopsided growth um in Taiwan.

[00:05:13]whether this is really a disease. You know, I think the disease connotation is you have something like a natural resource which is inherently thought of as relatively primitive and it swamps out the rest of the economy. In the Taiwanese case, it's just that the whole standard of living is being jerked up with by this, you know, remarkable concentration of very very high-tech manufacturing. And so, it's a unique configuration in the world economy, you know, hither too. I think it's it's not like anything we've ever seen before in this intensity. Yeah, it does. It does sound like what one reads about in Silicon Valley specifically. Yeah. The kind just in terms of the the displacement and the kinds of distortions uh that are introduced when you have one sector that is thriving so uh kind of prolifically. Um, but I did want to ask about the relationship between this economic success and uh the security challenges that Taiwan is sort of inevitably involved with. Obviously, China claims Taiwan is part of its own territory and that always includes the risk of a war uh breaking out. And um when we're talking about this really successful semiconductor industry, an industry that the entire world depends on, I'm curious whether that serves as a kind of vulnerability for Taiwan or or is it itself a kind of deterrent? I mean like you know does does the indispensibility of Taiwan's tech industry again these these chips that are manufactured there and and and can be manufactured nowhere else. Um does that guarantee it some protection? I mean because presumably Taiwanese companies could kind of disable their their factories in the event of an invasion. uh you know I I don't know if there's that kind of doomsday plan that Taiwanese companies have but um does that deter effect offer it some kind of protection? I mean there's no doubt at all I think that both the key players TSMC and the that is the the you know the world's leading fab and ASML the supplier of the lithography machines that from the Netherlands that TSMC operates with they both have kill switches they both have remote kill switches so they can switch those facilities off at long distance and then wobbit anyone trying to restart them there are for obvious reasons very complex diplomacy and politics around this in Taiwan Um, you know, Taiwan doesn't want to envision the end, you know, it doesn't want to envision the the nightmare scenario of a Chinese invasion and having to activate these kind of these kind of technologies. It wants even less for other people to be constantly envisioning that scenario and imagining how they would independently of Taiwanese sovereignty, which is after all the central dilemma between Taiwan and and the PRC. um it wants even less for outsiders to be making that decision for it. Um so there's a very complex politics around this. Um it's a little bit like kind of nuclear deterrent debates like how you know how unthinkable should the unthinkable actually be is part of and who gets to decide you know what what the line will be. The fundamental fact though that you're pointing to it can't be underlined heavily enough. You know, the straits of Hammuz are a order, not an order of magnitude, but much less severe a problem for the world economy. Let me underline that. Than um a war over Taiwan that would jeopardize the Taiwan straits would be for the world economy. 50% of container traffic go through that um straight of container traffic. That's everything in the world, right? So that isn't just one share of global oil. That's 50% of all merchandise traffic. The estimates are that global GDP would take a 10% hit. Um that's worse than 2008. That's worse than the COVID shock. Certainly over the course of the entire COVID year 2020.

[00:09:25]The immediate impact of the COVID shock and the shutdowns and lockdowns in the spring of 2020 took us to a 25% hit to the global economy. So a war over Taiwan would be like the impact of the the COVID shutdown. It would be that kind of an impact on the world economy. So that does that give you know Taiwan a measure of leverage? Would anyone in their right mind be thinking very second, third, fourth, fifth thoughts about doing this?

[00:09:56]Sure. But you know we thought that about the straits of Hormuz and that people used to get at least a second or third thoughts about that and that didn't stop the Americans and the Israelis doing this. So one can't be certain and 2027 was for a long time taken as the key date for potential action by the PRC and the PLA. So you got to figure that you know those plans are being looked at quite seriously. But you're right. I mean this is you know this is really a disaster scenario for the world economy and work to come to it. we would not have seen anything like it.

[00:10:28]>> Yeah, I do wonder, you know, how this works just from a, you know, capitalist perspective. These are private companies, uh, that have to, I guess, include this this kind of kill switch in their calculations, but I mean, does this come up in shareholder meetings? I mean like presumably uh from from the perspective of investors they would want the company to continue doing business even in the event of a kind of foreseeable political risk like occupation or invasion. Um I don't know how historically companies have tended to act in practice when push comes to shove in that situation. uh whether they kind of cooperate with the occupiers or end up you know seeing through that kind of doomsday plan >> very very delicately is the answer like very carefully indeed if you look at you know the equivalent technologies which might be something like air fuel in the 1930s and the cartel diplomacy between the German IG Farbin and Standard Oil on the American side around this the games that were played around the transfer of IP the latter stages of World War II when it's quite clear that German companies were moving ownership of IP to affiliates in Switzerland or Sweden in the hope that you know these might over winter the end of the war. It's it's extremely delicate stuff and it's clear that TSMC has found itself uncomfortably caught in this because both TSMC and is ASML in an ideal world would presumably love to be doing business like Nvidia with China as well. them. Um, and to be in a situation where everything is politicized to the extent that it is, I mean, the response we've seen is, okay, let's just double down on our strength.

[00:12:08]If the Americans insist on having a TSMC plant in Arizona, well, then, you know, let's jump through that hoop and build one there. It's good to be wanted. Um, but it clearly can't be, you know, anything other than a nightmare scenario. This goes to the general Taiwanese I think if you look certainly majority opinion in Taiwan is you know desperately kinging to the status quo to be honest.

[00:12:31]>> Yeah I I suppose you know when push comes to shove if if if someone has to burn down the factory it's going to be you know government forces I guess rather than maybe the company itself.

[00:12:41]But uh you mentioned the United States and clearly the United States has actively been involved in diplomacy with Taiwan uh itself and the Trump administration. You know I I had come across reading about um how the Trump administration negotiated a trade framework with Taiwan. This was in in January of this year that included language saying that neither country would expand partnerships with China without uh involving the other without getting approval. And then yet at the same time there was just this summit that Trump engaged in with Xiinping in which you know the United States government also flew over a bunch of US CEOs uh to Beijing uh presumably to strike business deals of some kind. So you know how how how did these arrangements square with one another um you know if at all? They don't I mean they just demonstrate once more that than an agreement with the Trump administration even just setting aside the extraordinary asymmetry here. Um an agreement with the Trump administration is not worth it's not worth the paper it's written on to invoke the cliche. I mean the Europeans are discovering this like with constant threats of further tariffs despite the agreements struck in 2025. They're just a bunch of thugs um you know opportunistically looking for a deal here, a deal there. But well, structurally speaking, however, we just can't, you know, want we, you know, obviously a certain sort of Taiwanese nationalist, including the current president, insists that Taiwan is the legitimate heir to the Republican revolution of 1911 1912 and was founded before the people's republic and therefore is fully sovereign. And that's not actually the understanding of the Americans and the Chinese. Um, though everyone agrees to kind of carry on as though we were all on the same level.

[00:14:33]And even setting that aside, um the Chinese mainland economy is more than 20 times larger than the Taiwanese economy and sophisticated as the Taiwanese economy is and important as is and as much leverage as that technology gives them, they're utterly dependent on the United States for security. So frankly, you know, this is as lopsided as it gets basically in terms of America's trade relationships.

[00:14:59]Um it's it's not surprisingly in that extent that there's just no there's no real coherence. The thing that in a sense subends all of this and does give again Taiwan a good degree of leverage is that several of the CEOs several of the American businesses that were on that trip of course are all deeply interested in technological industrial partnership with Taiwan. So, you know, they're not, yes, they go there with the American president, uh, but I gather the Nvidia boss only went, you know, rather last minute notice and it wasn't clear what came out of it for Nvidia. So, there is a degree of leverage there, but we just shouldn't, you know, we shouldn't make false uh false equations here. Um, Taiwan and China in their relations with the US are just not at the same level for, you know, that's that's a core element of American doctrine on this issue. So, how does this play out when it comes to arms deals? Because clearly Taiwan itself requires military assistance and uh it facing a potential security threat that is constant from China. So, you know, you have US officials that are eager to approve these kinds of arms deals or arrange arms deals with Taiwan, insisting that they go through. And yet at the same time, Taiwan's own parliament seems reluctant uh to approve these arms deals with the US. So what what explains that reluctance in the face of that need by Taiwan?

[00:16:36]>> Well, I mean in the case of the Taiwanese democratic politics, the profound complexity of the issue and just an entanglement which goes all the way back to the 1940s and which has driven American politics as well. So there appears to be the possibility of a quite fundamental division between American China hawks um the likes of Matt Pawinger of former administrations who's been very influential here but somebody like Kurt Campbell also comes to mind and on the other hand um Trump himself who seems first and foremost interested in a deal with she and perhaps quite a lot of corporate America which might follow down the same line and that results in an incredibly complex situation where you do indeed have the situation where the the duly elected president of of uh of um of Taiwan Lingu um and his defense minister Wellington coup named um after presumably the descendant of one of China's great representatives at treaty Versailles and in the aftermath are pushing for a substantial package of uh defense spending $40 billion is on the table which is designed to make you know Taiwan on a a hard uh object for China to swallow, kind of a Singaporean strategy. And they of course have backers in the US, both inside the administration, in Congress and in the general think tank world. And on the other hand, you have what is at this moment the Taiwanese opposition led by the KMT, but also the more progressive left-wing party who periodically will ally in the Taiwanese Parliament to block what they see as alarmist and dangerous moves on the part of their government. Noteworthy in this case is that the thing that they're not blocking is spending on American equipment. what they're actually the big object of contention is the development of an autonomous drone capacity on the part of Taiwan's highly sophisticated electronics and manufacturing sector which is precisely what the opposition doesn't want um the money to be allocated for. So read that as you will.

[00:18:44]It seems to me a kind of interesting play where what the opposition is doing is say right if you're going to do this defense expenditure let's get the maximum from it in the sense of the idea is to pull the Americans in let's do this by way of America but it's also of course incredibly sensitive in Beijing and it's not clear that the Trump administration will actually sign off on this at the time of of recording this which is Wednesday the what are we Wednesday the 20th the the green night has not been issued um so it's a very it's a very complex issue and it reflects the underlying uncertainties of the of the Taiwanese polity where a vast majority of people want to postpone confrontation over this issue and want the status quo to persist. There is a substantial minority now which is pushing for some kind of independence.

[00:19:33]There is a tiny minority which wants rapid merger with China. Um but the majority are clearly um are clearly uh committed to somehow maintaining the status quo and that requires a very delicate delicate dance and the hawkish sound from the US and its allies in Taipei are not necessarily you know working in working in that direction.

[00:19:57]>> Yeah. the complexities you're uh describing in the triangulation that's you know perhaps endemic to Taiwanese politics you know raises another more general point that I've been thinking about and and maybe this is you know the most natural place to end and it has to do with Taiwan's you know general political identity and I I noticed that the the government of Taiwan has been branding itself as uh you know quote the island of resilience foregrounding some of the posturing that we've been discussing here but at the same time as we've also been discussing Taiwan seems inevitably beset by all sorts of vulnerabilities you know it is this kind of monoculture uh you know economically dependent on the tech sector its dependence on others for energy its dependence militarily on on outside assistance and it being diplomatically isolated in a sort of global sense Uh so you know is there just a kind of inevitable or inherent you know irony in Taiwan's politics that is unavoidable here both simultaneously claiming to be resilient while you know inherently being vulnerable. I mean I think this idea of you know vulnerability and resilience is you know point to a country which doesn't face that kind of combination right anyone that's honest about their situation in the world will note that on the one hand there are ways of asserting your autonomy and the other hand one has to recognize interdependence right and there's something almost pathological about taking the resilience and the autonomy line too far I mean it leads you to really nightmarish places you could say it was one of the things underlying for instance ance Israel's expansive sense of its defensive strategy which if you take it at face value is about hunting down chasing down and destroying all conceivable enemies at whatever price and you know it's a it's it leads to a kind of annihilatory logic Taiwan is the utter utterly other end of that spectrum right it's an improbably independent entity the result of an incomplete victory by the communists in the Chinese civil war with the Americans withdrawing, you know, along with their KMT allies to to the island, formerly a Japanese uh colony, and establishing power there. And what the president was alluding to when he made this speech is the dramatic anniversary that we should also note on the podcast that this is the 30th anniversary, 2026 of the first free democratic presidential election in Taiwan.

[00:22:39]arguably some would claim the only such effort so far in the Chinese speaking world in a in an in a in an independent political entity and that was done against the saber rattling of Beijing and the famous you know escalation of tension and the massive demonstration of PLA firepower was designed explicitly to intimidate the Taiwanese electorate who nevertheless with a resounding majority elected what was then in fact a KMT candidate who was that is a womanang candidate now the party that is closer to Beijing but at the time was seen by Beijing as an utterly unacceptable assertion of autonomy by by Taiwan. So when the president lie of the other party, you know, proudly declares that we are the island of resilience, it's a little bit like Churchill in 1940 or something like that. Like do we have some problems? Yes, we do. Are the Germans bombing us? Yes, they are. But like we are proudly resilient. We are we we are the a nation of resilience. So that's a slightly grandiloquent comparison, but he'd probably appreciate it. Like that I think is the spirit in which in which this kind of claim is made. And it is after all remarkable and that is the tragic dilemma. That is the agony of this of this problem right which is that it is both on the one hand clearly certainly from the PRC's point of view a intolerable partition of these the coherence of Chinese sovereignty contentious claim but that's their strongly held claim and to a far greater extent than was the case in Hong Kong where thanks to British rule over a long period of time democratic development had been really slow and belated in the Taiwanese case now there's no ifs and buffs about it. This is a functioning democratic polity of 23 million 23 million people used to it very contentious complex democratic political style and they are in the crosshairs of this of this clash. So I think that's what the the resilient the resilient nation or the island of resilience is pointing to is is this this you know in its own terms of course heroic and dramatic history.

[00:24:48]Yeah, that's a useful reminder that you know psychologically speaking uh I guess in politics as in life or you know whether in the schoolyard or in the office that claims of resilience are probably expressions of uh a sense of vulnerability. Uh those are probably inseparable uh ultimately but uh we should take a break here for now and we will be back in a second though to talk about the beach.

[00:25:21]Hi, welcome back. So 50% that is the data point I have here which is a survey that was taken about 20 years ago found that about 50% of respondents in the United States said that returning from vacation with a tan was more important than the trip itself.

[00:25:43]that is to say the food or the recreation. Otherwise, the tan was important. And of course, uh when you're talking about the tan, you're talking about being outside at the beach oftent times. And uh you know, going to the beach, at least in the United States, tends to happen uh beginning around this coming Monday, which is the annual Memorial Day holiday. Ostensibly, Memorial Day is uh to commemorate uh fallen soldiers in war. In point of fact, it is the beginning of summer and summer vacations. It happens to be a three-day weekend where many people go to the beach. It seems like there's a holiday of some kind uh like that elsewhere in the world. Here in Germany, there is the Christian holiday of Finston. I guess that's the Pentecost.

[00:26:32]uh which is usually when things start warming up and people start thinking about swimming outdoors. In any case, as Adam was just reminding me, there is a chance we've already done a segment on the beach. I'm not sure. We've been doing this podcast so long it's likely that we've talked about the beach before, maybe in the context of another holiday. I'm not sure, but there's plenty more to say about the beach, I believe. And to start off with, Adam, I thought we could discuss the fact that the beach obviously in an obvious sense is a natural phenomenon, but it seems like as a place of recreation, it must have been invented, so to speak, at some point. And then that for me raises the question of who exactly invented it, if that's the case. And yeah, was this a kind of class issue in the sense it was originally maybe something that you know was pursued by the upper classes before it was extended to the masses in some sense.

[00:27:25]>> Yeah. So on the one hand this is an anthropological constant like people live by water um and fresh water flows into the sea generally and um the sea is both a means of transport and a source of nutrition.

[00:27:41]And so people have always congregated by the water. Um right now we think to an astonishing extent this is true. Um perhaps somewhere between 40 and 50% of the world's population live within 150 kilometers of the sea. Um so it's really a kind of profound basic aspect of reality. You just look at the map and look at the big interior spaces of the continents of Africa of of Asia, of both North and South America, and they're sparssely populated. The population is densest around the coastline. Um, in the US, it's estimated that half the population live in counties which are adjacent to the ocean. So, this is a really profound reality. How that strikes you is of course dependent on culture, politics, and really mundane things like your ability to swim. If you don't know how to swim, um the ocean is nothing but a threat. Um it's dangerous to go in. You lose your footing. You go under, you you drown. And until the early 20th century, even in rich and sophisticated societies, it wasn't common for people to be able to swim because there were few opportunities to learn. It was dangerous to try. There wasn't any kind of culture of learning to swim. If you look at some of the most notorious uh sea disasters of the early 20th century in the US, it's the general slogan which uh which has a fire on board in 1904. And of the passengers who were mainly women and children, virtually none could swim. So over a thousand people died. It's one of the worst maritime disasters before uh the Lucy the Lucitania.

[00:29:15]Um so it and the Titanic. So, it's um it's a it's a it's a fundamental kind of acquisition, our ability to enjoy the seaside. And you ask who did it and where did it start? I don't think there's really much dispute that it started in Europe, specifically ironically in some ways in north northern Europe uh in in Britain in particular from the middle of the 18th century because Britain at that point is the pioneer of a kind of bourgeoa aristocratic fusion and a new leisure culture. And it starts with a mixture of a kind of romantic appropriation of the ocean as a site of desolation which isn't just threatening a sublime sight.

[00:29:53]You know this culture that so many of us are now quite unselfconsciously part of which is you you go to the water and what do you do when you get there? It's often quite difficult to explain to small children like mommy daddy what are we doing? And the answer is we're looking out to sea and like why are we doing that? Well, because and this is where romantic culture and answers which is this is where we see a certain sort of awesome gigantic nature which expands beyond us. The sound the expanse is very dramatic. And of course if you look at say the art of Turner or somebody like that in the early 19th century he's preoccupied with seascapes um and with also with images of maritime disaster.

[00:30:31]So it starts out as a leisure culture of the European upper classes. It's also tied to health. So taking the waters could be sulfurous, salt water inland, but it could also be by the seaside. It always involved various types of awkward navigation with nakedness, which by the 18th and 19th century had become a huge taboo for Western Europe. But nevertheless, with the advent of the railway in the 1830s and 1840s, one of the first things people use railways for, other than moving coal, is moving people to the seaside to enjoy the seaside. So the big chant you know the big movements of people begin over weekends initially and then with the advent of something like summer holidays which begins in Europe in the early 20th century. You get people going for longer periods of time and staying for longer periods of time and enjoying this. And with that then also comes the transition in body culture to much greater degrees of exposure, to high degrees of nakedness, to very revealing bathing costumes, to a very different understanding of still different between the West and Asia for instance, of how much suntan is a good thing and how much how much of that tan that you started with is actually attractive or off-putting and certainly much of East Asia is still very preoccupied with a whiteness of skin, right? That that refuses any exposure to the sun. But in places like California, in the south of France, in Australia, from the early 20th century onwards, the bronze neocclassical body that resembled that of Greece became ever more to the four.

[00:32:01]Even though it's not obvious that the Greeks really had be the classical Greeks had be c beach culture and if you were on one of those Greek galleys and it sank, very few of them had much chance of surviving because they couldn't swim. So, so that's a kind of composite portrait. And then it's of course become an utterly mass phenomenon worldwide.

[00:32:21]>> So I I wonder if we could take a step back in some sense because I I wonder in the most literal sense who exactly owns the beach, right? I mean, we're talking about the beach is is basically where the ocean meets land, the form of sand of some kind that's being spit up by the ocean. It strikes me that the water and the sand are are kind of owned by the public in some ways in a natural sense. So like h how how does the beach become privatized exactly? Well, it's in so far as it has been it's generally hotly contested. So in the vast majority of western derived jurisdictions anyway um those private claims are bounded in some way and they're commonly bounded by high tide low tide um type lines granting to the public some kind of access to the seashore which is then however complicated by the fact that the land in land from the beach can be completely privately owned and so people may actually have no way of accessing the beach. So often it's not just a matter of asserting a public claim to the shoreline but also asserting public access to that shoreline and that varies by in the US people may have the preconception that everywhere in the US you know the tidal line is publicly owned. That's true up to a point, but in some states there are also quite farreaching access provisions so that you must be able to get to it. Whereas in other states it's virtually impossible to access it. And you anyone who's walked along a American beach will know certainly in the crowded Northeast will know that that can be quite tricky.

[00:34:05]And it really depends on whether the tide is in or the tide is out whether it's really possible to walk along a beach or how many private docks you have to duck under so as to be able to continue that prominade. It results in, you know, really hotly contested fights in European beaches which apart from everything else on the one hand in many cases were segmented off for hotels who will then plant, you know, their sun lounges and their and their um their sun shades all the way down to the limit, making it almost impossible to walk along. But you'll always see people just walking along the surf line. Um, and then in some cases there were also of course the question of what is appropriate behavior. And there have been notable struggles between municipal authorities in Spain and various types of nudist culture that want to take all their clothes off on the beach and find themselves at odds with the public authority which then ends up denying Spanish citizens who want to wear no clothes access to this was a case in Kadis apparently where this happened. Um so it's a zone of it's a zone of unresolved unresolved uh property rights in some sense or at least not a fully and comprehensive claim. Um which makes it you know a kind of continuously fascinating um and there's been an ongoing I'm always struck in big cities by the where we're not talking about the beach but we're talking about the shoreline about the way in which that has been reetabolized in many cities. So I remember London in the 70s and 80s where there was virtually no access to the length of the tempames and now bit by bit you're actually at the point where you can almost walk the length of the temps on both sides of the north and the south though there are major private property restrictions on both sides at various points. Ditto in New York you know the reappropriation of the old of the old uh the old docks the old peers all the all the way around Manhattan.

[00:35:57]There will be an interesting episode to be done about those kind of reclamation projects because that was highly privatized. That was entirely commercial industrial even uh land which is now being kind of reabolized into the city.

[00:36:10]And then you have these fake beaches popping up all over the place including in Berlin where we're both at where you kind of simulate a beach on a riverbank um to create that kind of vibe. Um, sand is a, you know, hugely fascinated topic in this respect. And, you know, to just go back to this point of how this the the, uh, the beach was formerly seen.

[00:36:33]Apparently, in Dante's third circle of hell, it's a beach. It's a sandy. It's a sandy zone. So, for for that phase of European culture, there wasn't anything, you know, uh, warm and attractive about this. But but now those fake beaches in cities strike me as really remarkable instances of just creating a a public space for common enjoyment.

[00:36:54]>> Yeah, this reminds me this past weekend we were uh my family was at the Oay the Baltic Sea here in the in uh uh the north of of Germany and my my son who likes the beach but is constantly bothered by the sand remaining on his feet after we leave. And that that is a kind of torture, a kind of version of hell is sort of have sand on you uh continuously uh even after you leave the beach. But um but yeah, this idea of this kind of paradox that you're almost describing where there is in theory the beach itself is accessible to everyone or owned by everyone but access to it is not accessible to everyone. is sort of you end up in this kind of strange strange uh situation sometimes. It seems like that's the case. But um you mentioned sand and that reminds me how I was reading about how there is an enormous uh global illegal sand trade and this sand trade first of all this extent kind of blew my mind. It's in apparently in the range of 200 to$ 350 billion dollar annually. uh it's estimated as being and from what I can tell it involves essentially stealing sand from beaches and selling it on uh elsewhere and I'm curious how exactly this this illegal sand trade works and and to what extent are beaches being undermined by this.

[00:38:23]>> So I mean it is a truly staggering number. I mean those figures appear to originate in one particular academic study. I don't know how well supported they are, but if you take that at face value, it's the third largest illegal trade. So after the smuggling of goods at $1 trillion and drug smuggling at 500 to 600 billion, the smuggling of sand will come in in third place. So ahead of people smuggling and everything else, all the other crimes you've ever thought of. So it's it's staggering. I mean, setting aside the criminal element, it's just worth contemplating the scale of sand as a business because it's apparently, again, these numbers are so bizarre that one kind of wonders. People claim that it's overwhelmingly the largest most min thing in the world.

[00:39:06]Like there's more sand mind than anything else. And you kind of think why would that how could that conceivably be? Well, the answer is that in the basic construction middle uh materials of modernity, sand is the major component, right? Cement concrete are well concrete is largely made up of sand uh with glue tying it together. And so when you think about the amount of concrete that has been laid and the amount of landfill that has been put down with you've got rocks and then you've got sand backing those up, you begin to get a sense of just the awesome scale of this. The figures say 32 to 50 billion tons of sand and gravel excavated every year. So you know then you begin to think, okay, well around the edges of that, you could easily see how this would take on absolutely gigantic proportions. Where does it go?

[00:39:58]Well, it it goes to some truly kind of improbable places. It goes to Dubai.

[00:40:05]You think they would have sand, but no.

[00:40:06]So, Dubai's buildout apparently has become one of the the meccas for global sand shipments. And the other place is, you know, super rich Singapore, which has expanded the size of the citystate very considerably, basically by building um on landfill, filling in with sand, then pouring cement on top, building concrete structures.

[00:40:27]So, so then you begin to get a feel when you look around how much concrete there is and you think about the scale of the sand castle that we've built. It's literally the case that modern civilization is built on sand and smuggling that then becomes a quite attractive kind of operation. You can well imagine and my sense is that most of the illegal I couldn't find any numbers on this that most of the illegal sand grabbing is not so much on coastlines as in river systems. Um and that's presuming not only because the condition of operating sand mining in rivers is easier than on you know rough potentially rough coastlines but it also has learning all the time on this show like it it also has to do with the type of the sand. Um and sea sand is u because it's being churned endlessly by the ocean is rounder when you look at the individual kernels whereas um river sand is prized because its structure is more angular and that apparently makes better building material. um it it it's it hangs together better and indeed you know in some cases the collapse of buildings built on the cheap has been blamed on the fact that they used um sea sand as opposed to river sand which would have actually had more cohesive properties. So this is a huge deal, but whether or not it's eating up beaches, it is in some cases definitely doing that and you can see it and there's plenties of photos showing it. But it might be that say, and I've seen this on the Ganges for instance, but you can also see this on the Mikong on a really large scale, these centers of Asian urban growth, um those are being fed by very largecale um illegal sand mining on on the big river systems of the world. I mean in the end of course it's all interconnected right the the grit is washed down from mountains by way of water which then flows into the sea where it's then churned it evaporates and you know so this is a this is a huge cycle of being but there are two types of sand deposited respectively in land and on the beach and the one that people are really after is the riverine. So, we should be imagining basically on rivers around the the world. There are illegal dredging operations basically happening that we don't know about.

[00:42:45]>> If you've been on them, yeah, that's not even a fantasy. I've seen it. Like if you if you're on either of the of the Ganges or the Mikong, >> absolutely all around you. And then more or less licensed brick pl brick factories.

[00:42:58]>> Yeah, that is what's going on. It's very It's a little Star Wars kind of feeling because they're these big dredging apparatuses. They look like those weird tanks with the little scavenger people.

[00:43:08]Sorry, I don't mean this. I don't mean to say that the people operating these are little scavenger people. I mean, they're tough. These are the sand mafia.

[00:43:16]You don't want It's a mafia. It's a cross. It's a It's a It's tough.

[00:43:20]>> This is not a mom and pop operation with a shovel and uh sandbags.

[00:43:25]>> Um >> No. And you can look online dredging technology. Look out for the newsletter.

[00:43:28]of the stuff on judging technology coming soon because it's a it's a fascinating industry.

[00:43:34]Well, to to to end with, I wanted to bring up a topic that often comes up on the podcast in different contexts, and that's climate change because it strikes me that that relates to the beach in some interesting ways because on one hand, it seems like uh climate change is good for the beach or at least beach tourism in the sense that, you know, warmer temperatures means more, you know, longer tourism seasons. It it means, you know, even maybe more destinations that are kind of viable as beaches as it gets warmer. But then at the same time, beach tourism, you know, maybe contributing to sea level rise, erosion, obviously people take the plane to the beach that has very high carbon emissions, etc. And yeah, that does lead to uh damage to coastlines and and beaches. So, how ultimately does the beach relate to climate change? I mean, does beach tourism in some sense produce the conditions for its own demise?

[00:44:36]>> Yeah. So, this is a really fascinating area. Um, and it's kind of like it's a real challenge to compute the interreationship between different dimensions of change because I in the Bahamas experience the impact of really dramatic extreme weather on beach formation on a coral island formation and it's unbelievable. You know, it takes beaches away on one part of the island and puts them back on another. So it's it's very haphazard. Um so the extreme weather is one dimension. Um because it'll sweep in a huge amount of sound and sweep out a huge amount. Um the other dimension is is just sea level rise. Um when you combine sea level rise with extreme weather, then you have like the maximum possible disaster. Um and there are studies of uh what people expect this to do to island destinations. So I was able to find a study that looked at uh Santorini in in Greece and uh St. Lucia in the Caribbean and they are saying I'll just quote by 2050 under the moderate RCP 4.5 scenario. So that's one of the more moderate climate change scenarios up to 50% of the Santorini beaches will be permanently retreated by 50% of their current recorded maximum width um due to sea level rise. Whereas under a 100red-y year extreme storm conditions, the sort of thing that we experience in the Bahamas, at least 67% of all the beaches will be completely inundated, exposing backshore assets to flooding.

[00:46:01]And that's the total disaster scenario that happened with with Hurricane Dorian. So it's real by 2050 those kind of phenomena expected. They saw the same in St. Lucia. Um, one has to wonder, however, and this isn't in any way to dismiss the reality and the force of that dimension of change, whether by that point over touristing isn't going to have done the damage anyway in the sense of just the giant moblike movements of people, uh, anyone who's seen pictures of the big Chinese beaches at the high point of the season or the big Italian beaches, no one in North America has any conception of what crowding except maybe some of the New York beaches at absolutely peak season, But the sheer scale of of you know semi- naked humanity lined up on the on the densest beach systems of Eurasia is is like nothing I've ever seen in the US.

[00:46:52]It's really it's really astonishing and it's very hard to imagine that persisting that you know the famous the famous Thai beach that that featured as the sort of eerie backdrop to the DiCaprio be a vehicle you know the beach has been overrun ever since by tourists 5,000 plus a day coming into this extremely loca utterly picturesque location and their sun cream alone has gone a long way to destroying about 80% of the coral formations in that in that in that destination.

[00:47:23]So yes, sea level rise is coming, typhoons, hurricanes are coming. Um but um it may just be us that is the disaster well before um well before you know us caused uh climate change gets there. It may just be naked human bodies covered with sun cream that are the ultimate you know apocalypse here.

[00:47:49]Well, happy holidays to everybody heading out to the beach this Memorial Day and uh you know, we'll just leave it at that. You are the apocalypse. Enjoy.

[00:48:02]And um and yeah, we will of course be back next week with new topics.