The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger
by Marc Levinson
14 popular highlights from this book
Key Insights & Memorable Quotes
Below are the most popular and impactful highlights and quotes from The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger:
In 1961, before the container was in international use, ocean freight costs alone accounted for 12 percent of the value of U.S. exports and 10 percent of the value of U.S. imports.
By far the biggest expense in this process was shifting the cargo from land transport to ship at the port of departure and moving it back to truck
The economic benefits arise not from innovation itself, but from the entrepreneurs who eventually discover ways to put innovations to practical use—and
certainly, no one in the early days of container shipping foresaw that this American-born industry would come to be dominated by European and Asian firms, as the U.S.-flag ship lines, burdened by a legacy of protected markets and heavy regulation, proved unable to compete in a fast-changing world.
The media have undertaken a similar reconsideration. Since the late 1980s, commentators have filled columns and airwaves with glib chatter about globalization, as if it were merely a matter of bits and bytes and corporate cost-cutting.
McLean understood that transport companies’ true business was moving freight rather than operating ships or trains.
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He responded with a tale about how, after spending hours in late 1937 queuing at a Jersey City pier to unload his truck, he realized that it would be quicker simply to hoist the entire truck body on board. From this incident, we are meant to believe, came his decision eighteen years later to buy a war-surplus tanker and equip it to carry 33-foot-long containers.
He was a restless soul, competitive, calculating, always thinking about business. 'He wouldn't be able to sit still five minutes,' a longtime colleague recalled before McLean's death. 'You'd either have to play gin rummy with him or discuss business with him.
The history of the shipping container is humbling. Careful planning and thorough analysis have their place, but they provide little guidance in the face of abrupt changes that alter an industry’s very fundamentals. Flexibility is a virtue in such a situation. Resistance can be a vice, but so can a rush to action. In this kind of situation, “expect the unexpected” may be as good a motto as any.
A ship carrying 9,000 40-foot containers, filled with 200,000 tons of shoes and clothes and electronics, may make the three-week transit from Hong Kong through the Suez Canal to Germany with only twenty people on board.4
Transportation has become so efficient that for many purposes, freight costs do not much affect economic decisions.
Capital, labor, and land, the basic factors of production, have lost much of their fascination for those looking to understand why economies grow and prosper. The key question asked today is no longer how much capital and labor an economy can amass, but how innovation helps employ those resources more effectively to produce more goods and services.
British prime minister Harold Macmillan, confronted with yet another strike threat, opined in 1962, “The dockers are such difficult people, just the fathers and the sons, the uncles and nephews. So like the House of Lords, hereditary and no intelligence required.
