Posted on 05/17/2013 10:45:44 AM PDT by 1rudeboy
The shipping container – a market-based innovation – has been more important for globalization and world trade than all free-trade agreements negotiated by governments combined
From The Economist:
The humble shipping container is a powerful antidote to economic pessimism and fears of slowing innovation. Although only a simple metal box, it has transformed global trade. In fact, new research suggests that the container has been more of a driver of globalisation than all trade agreements in the past 50 years taken together.
Containerisation is a testament to the power of process innovation. In the 1950s the world’s ports still did business much as they had for centuries. When ships moored, hordes of longshoremen unloaded “break bulk” cargo crammed into the hold. They then squeezed outbound cargo in as efficiently as possible in a game of maritime Tetris. The process was expensive and slow; most ships spent much more time tied up than plying the seas. And theft was rampant: a dock worker was said to earn “$20 a day and all the Scotch you could carry home.”
Containerisation changed everything. It was the brainchild of Malcom McLean, an American trucking magnate. He reckoned that big savings could be had by packing goods in uniform containers that could easily be moved between lorry and ship. When he tallied the costs from the inaugural journey of his first prototype container ship in 1956, he found that they came in at just $0.16 per tonne to load—compared with $5.83 per tonne for loose cargo on a standard ship. Containerisation quickly conquered the world: between 1966 and 1983 the share of countries with container ports rose from about 1% to nearly 90%, coinciding with a take-off in global trade (see chart above).
All three links are interesting.
sorry, Boudreaux
Chicken/egg conundrum. Did globalization create the demand for the shipping container or did the shipping container boost globalization?
(not sure I should give my preemptive speech on the difference between globalization and globalism but it always seems to lead down that path for these articles)
The shipping container made the free trade agreements inevitable.
No, that’s unpossible. How could something so innovative be created without a gubermint center to guide its development???
The shipping container – a market-based innovation – has been more important for China....
It’s more like, if you build it ? they will come.
It’s not really chicken/ egg, it’s how things work. There’d been plenty of globalization going on already, but it was running into serious barriers of logistics. One of the biggest being when you changed transport mediums, ships trucks and trains all had different needs, and moving flats around was slow and required a lot of tracking. Put it all in a truck back that can work on ships and trains and bang, what was probably the biggest logistical nightmare of shipping disappears. It’s like the crest of that first hill of a rollercoaster.
I buried one at my ranch for storage...great things they are..and secure
“It’s like the crest of that first hill of a rollercoaster.”
Great analogy.
Those shipping containers helped Communist China....but sure didn’t help the EU. Pre-EU/Pre-Globalism Greece was a shipping and export giant. Not so today
I’ve heard that burying them is kinda dangerous - they are subject to catastrophic failure/collapse from lateral pressure.
There are ways to reinforce the insides to alleviate this - did you do that?
Couple the standardized container with bar code manifests, and shipping becomes as automated as production. You never have to open the container to sort the contents until it reaches its final destination. Also, the container port cranes more or less operate off the computer program to shift cargo.
I watched the operations one morning at Freeport in the Bahamas while our cruise ship was moored on the other side of the harbor. Even in a semi-third world dump like Freeport, it was like watching synchronized ballet.
Well, yeah, it increased shipping efficiency ten-fold ... but it probably inspired those PODS ... enables thousands of hoarders.
Now what could've the Greeks done to make that change for the worse? You're not blaming the Phoenicians, I hope.
Creative Destruction personified.
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