Posted on 05/17/2013 10:45:44 AM PDT by 1rudeboy
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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