Money, it’s said, makes the world go round. While that might not be literally true — Earth, much like its wealthiest inhabitants, moves forward through sheer inertia, a kinetic inheritance bestowed at its creation — money undeniably does make things go around the world. An astonishing number of things, in fact: The weight of goods moved by ship alone each year now surpasses 10 billion tons, or nearly 3,000 pounds of stuff for every human being on the planet. (Or if you prefer, imagine it as 27,000 Empire State Buildings, or 15 times the weight of all the cows on Earth.) The estimated annual value of global trade since 1979 has increased tenfold, to more than $16 trillion, a figure nearly equivalent to the entire G.D.P. of the United States.

The consequences of all this global exchange have been profound, and not merely in an economic sense. Trade may not have made the world “small” (if anything, it feels more capacious and complex than ever) or “flat” (its relative economic opportunities and its physical form both remain irreducibly three-dimensional, whatever Tom Friedman or Kyrie Irving might tell you), but our hyperglobalized economy has certainly made the world strange, as the interconnections of capital have brought about other, unforeseen types of connection. Smartphones, designed largely in California and manufactured almost entirely in Asia, proliferate only thanks to conflict minerals mined largely (and often brutally) in Africa. Recently a dispute over South Korea’s missile-defense system prompted China to retaliate against Korea’s exports of pop music and soap operas, which have become wildly popular with Chinese consumers. The propagandists of ISIS use American meme generators to lure potential fighters from Europe and elsewhere. Money pulls soccer talent from the developing world’s farms and slums and sends it across the developed world, creating unlikely national heroes in the process.