Something very old

I just read the following text out of the March 1931 issue of Scientific American:

We are faced with a stagnation of industry such as we thought would never occur again. The country is full of remedies, but in trying to think our way through the difficulty we must remember that we are living in a 20th-century industrial world and not an 18th-century one. Our new world is a world of interdependence and solidarity. It is a world with thousands of criss-crossing threads. It is a world in which the relations between cause and effect have been so lengthened that on any given day the Egyptian planter cannot know what his cotton or sugar is worth until he receives the quotation from Galveston or Cuba. A heavy frost in the Mississipi valley will affect prices on the Liverpool exchange, and the disturbance will reverberate in Australia and India. French savings, through the channel of a loan to Argentina or Chile, contribute to the development of Belgian or German industry. Prosperity in Czechoslovakia by increasing the consumption of chocolate, results in the stimulation of the plantations of Venezuela. ...

That was 1931. So looking did the world changed a lot?