The Box - Marc Levinson [151]
The huge increase in long-distance trade that came in the container’s wake was foreseen by no one. When he studied the role of freight in the New York region in the late 1950s, Harvard economist Benjamin Chinitz predicted that containerization would favor metropolitan New York’s industrial base by letting the region’s factories ship to the South more cheaply than could plants in New England or the Midwest. Apparel, the region’s biggest manufacturing sector, would not be affected by changes in transport costs, because it was not “transport-sensitive.” The possibility that falling transport costs could decimate much of the U.S. manufacturing base by making it practical to ship almost everything long distances simply did not occur to him. Chinitz was hardly alone in failing to recognize the extent to which lower shipping costs would stimulate trade. Through the 1960s, study after study projected the growth of containerization by assuming that existing import and export trends would continue, with the cargo gradually being shifted into containers. The prospect that the container would permit a worldwide economic restructuring that would vastly increase the flow of trade was not taken seriously.18
“The market” got many things wrong when it came to the container, and so did “the state.” Both private-sector and public-sector misjudgments slowed the growth of containerization and delayed the economic benefits it would bring. Yet in the end, the logic of shipping freight in containers was so compelling, the cost savings so enormous, that the container took the world by storm. Half a century after the Ideal-X, the equivalent of 300 million 20-foot containers were making their way across the world’s oceans each year, with 26 percent of them originating in China alone. Countless more were being shipped cross-border by truck or train.19
Containers had become ubiquitous—and in addition to cheap goods, they were bringing a new set of social problems. Stacks of abandoned containers, too beaten up to use, too expensive to repair, or simply unneeded, littered landscapes around the world. The exhaust of containerships and the trucks and trains serving them had become a massive environmental problem, and the endless growth of traffic in and out of expanding ports was subjecting nearby communities to congestion, noise, and high rates of cancer attributed to diesel emissions; the price tag for a cleanup in Los Angeles and Long Beach alone was estimated to be $11 billion. The flood of containers had become a major headache for security officials concerned that a single box, loaded with a radioactive “dirty” bomb timed to explode upon arrival in a major port, could contaminate an entire city and throw international commerce into chaos; radiation detectors went up at the gates to many terminals in an effort to keep terrorist containers from being loaded aboard ships. The use of containers outfitted with mattresses and toilets to smuggle immigrants had become routine, with immigration inspectors unable to detect more than a tiny share of containers with human cargo among the hundreds of thousands of boxes filled with legitimate goods.20
None of these problems, serious as they were, posed the most remote threat