When it comes to transporting goods, isn't efficiency really a tradeoff between time and money?

Definitely the first part of efficiency is time. Obviously air travel has a great advantage there. Air travel has a great disadvantage too--gravity. It takes a lot of work to lift things up against gravity. That costs money, so you have the tradeoff again. But gravity's a law of physics that can't be messed with! The only cheat is lighter-than-air craft like blimps and zeppelins. So far nobody has figured out how to make them really fast, AFAIK, but they should be much cheaper than conventional planes.

As for ships, they are intrinsically the cheapest mode of transportation. Sail ships are absolutely the cheapest, but also the slowest. There was talk some years ago of using sail ships to transport oil from producers to user countries. I don't think anything came of it, probably because merchants objected to the slowness.