2021-04-13

The ‘box’ in The Box by Marc Levinson is a shipping container.

You should read this book even if you are not, like I am, an absolute sucker for detailed descriptions of how things work. If you are like me you’ve likely already read it.

The blurb from the New York times reads “[A] classic tale of trial and error, and of creative destruction …” and that’s why I think you should read it. We so often blithely cite competition, disruption, creative destruction, and their spoils as the engine of the free market, with little thought to the actual mechanics of how this plays out in real life. The Box is indeed a detailed look at creative destruction, and one that illuminates the messy unpredictable ways that it moves forward. Those of us who saw disruption as the internet slowly eating newspapers or Uber making taxis more efficient can be forgiven for thinking this process is rather bloodless. Two details illustrate:

Longshoremen

I’d heard the term. I didn’t realize, or rather, I had never considered how goods got off of ships, and I hadn’t considered the fact that ships that aren’t designed around shipping containers were actually loaded and unloaded by people walking onto the ships, lifting the stuff and carrying it off. This took a lot of people. So many that the location of ports required space for people to live near them. Changing the way that we containerize goods, and the way that we load and unload ships didn’t just change the cost of shipping. It changed the shape of ships, it changed the location of ports; now you needed easy access to rail and road more than you needed access to armies of Longshoremen. This changed the composition of neighborhoods and the composition and fabric of cities across the world. The detail with which this change in society is covered in the book is useful, and highlights the human impact of technological change. I’m not here to litigate who won and who lost in this transition, as it’s happened and what is left for us is to learn from it. But, I think it’s an excellent backdrop against which we should view any discussion of massive technological changes that alter the nature of work. It gives a sense of scale that we loose if the most real example is Uber allowing you to hail a taxi, it changes how ride hailing works, but there is still a human at the wheel. The Box replaced neighborhoods with a crane operator perched on rails high above a shipping yard.

This is a serious issue. It seems that if we want the dynamism of creative destruction—and I’m certainly not nostalgic for dock work that I never did—then we need to think carefully about the safety nets that catch the folks whose livelihoods are caught up in progress. There is a Beckerian thread to pull here as the very areas that were populated by Longshoremen became high crime areas once the work at the docks left. It might be too glib to suggestively point to the fall in the legal value of skills and the rise in crime, but this link is worth considering.

Who got rich?

The classic story of American innovation features an entrepreneur that invents something that changes the world and in the process it makes them rich. The transition to the shipping container is a string of bankruptcies. Not because the technology was wrong (i.e. the trials and errors, though there were those), but because the time and sheet scale of the capital investments needed for the shipping container to truly take hold. For adoption to reach transformative levels entire fleets of ships and a global network of ports had to be constructed. To say nothing of the shipping containers themselves. Today the shipping industry survives more because it is essential rather than because it is profitable.

I keep coming back to the book because of these two things. A reminder of the human side of creative destruction, and the puzzle of an innovation that persistently disappointed those that pursued it, and almost in spite of them, came into being.