The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger - Second Edition with a new chapter by the author

One fact above all had traditionally defined life along the waterfront: employment was highly irregular. One day, the urgent need to unload perishable cargo could create jobs for all comers. The next day, there might be no work at all. A port needed a big labor supply to handle the peaks, but on an average day the demand for workers was much smalle

Demand, robust though it was, could not possibly keep up with this explosion of supply. The result was a new and painful experience for the shipping industry: a rate war.

Whether containerships and containerports have reached their maximum efficient size, or even larger and costlier ships and ports could give rise to yet more economies of scale, making it still cheaper and easier to move goods around the globe, is a question of considerable consequence for the world economy.8

The problem, McLean decided, was the maritime mindset: Pan-Atlantic’s staff, experienced in the slow-moving ways of the maritime industry, did not know how to sell to an industrial traffic manager who cared not about ships, but about getting freight to the customer on schedule at low cost. McLean brought in a team of aggressive young trucking execu

The Box, I hope, has contributed to public understanding that inadequate port, road, and rail infrastructure can cause economic harm by raising the cost of moving freight.

When large-scale container shipping finally arrived in Pacific ports beyond Japan, in 1970, the question of whether it would be viable on long-distance routes quickly became laughable. The $36 million East Lagoon complex opened in June 1972, three months ahead of schedule, cementing Singapore’s reputation as an island of efficiency. As the only por

The supply experts “had never had grease under their fingernails,” a top army general groused, and from a distance of thousands of miles they had no actual knowledge of the rapidly changing situation in the field. Nor were they familiar with Vietnam.

When transport costs are high, manufacturers’ main concern is to locate near their customers, even if this requires undesirably small plants or high operating costs. As transportation costs decline relative to other costs, manufacturers can relocate first domestically, and then internationally, to reduce other costs, which come to loom larger. Glob

The economic benefits arise not from innovation itself, but from the entrepreneurs who eventually discover ways to put innovations to practical use—and most critically, as economists Erik Brynjolfsson and Lorin M. Hitt have pointed out, from the organizational changes through which businesses reshape themselves to take advantage of the new technolo