My latest--and final--NYT column tells just a little bit of the fascinating story of how the shipping container transformed the world economy. Here's the opening, with the obligatory news peg:
The political showdown over a Dubai company's plan to operate terminals at six American ports briefly focused public attention on one of the most significant, yet least noticed, economic developments of the last few decades: the transformation of international shipping.
Just as the computer revolutionized the flow of information, the shipping container revolutionized the flow of goods. As generic as the 1's and 0's of computer code, a container can hold just about anything, from coffee beans to cellphone components. By sharply cutting costs and enhancing reliability, container-based shipping enormously increased the volume of international trade and made complex supply chains possible.
"Low transport costs help make it economically sensible for a factory in China to produce Barbie dolls with Japanese hair, Taiwanese plastics and American colorants, and ship them off to eager girls all over the world," writes Marc Levinson in the new book The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger
(Princeton University Press).
My column barely mentions one important part of the story--the regulatory environment. At first, containerization grew through cracks in the rigid regulatory structure of the 1960s. But today's fully integrated systems became possible only after trucking and rail were deregulated in the 1970s and maritime rates were deregulated (to very little fanfare) in 1984. Assumptions about transportation regulation have changed so radically that reading about the bad old days seems like science fiction.
As Levinson said in our interview, "Nobody even remembers what the Interstate Commerce Commission used to do. But you've probably been in the old ICC building on Constitution Avenue in Washington. It had a choice spot in Washington. Important agency, important location, big building. This was a key federal agency. And it spent its time hearing arguments about whether this truck line ought to be able to carry cigarettes in the same trucks as it carried textiles or whether the rates that were being charged to carry pretzels were adequate. People have trouble remembering that today."
Levinson's book is terrific--smart, well-written, and thoroughly researched. I highly recommend it. You can read the first chapter and watch an interview with Levinson on the book's Princeton University Press webpage.
My column was supposed to end with the following note, but editors higher in the chain of command than my boss nixed it:
This column, which marks my sixth anniversary in this space, will be my last. I am taking up a new assignment, writing a column on commerce and culture for The Atlantic, but will remain a devoted reader of Economic Scene.
I'm delighted that Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution fame will take over my Times slot, beginning in four weeks.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on March 22, 2006 • Comments
Here's a mini-interview with me from Sunday's Dallas Morning News. Meanwhile, Sally Satel reports that she's feeling better and is now able to work at her computer. According to her transplant surgeon, she says, "Our kidney is doing magnificently."
Posted by Virginia Postrel on March 21, 2006 • Comments
Speaking of cars, I'm a week late linking to Phil Patton's fascinating NYT article on mid-century automotive illustration, examples of which are currently featured in a Detroit museum exhibit. These illustrations demonstrate that glamour doesn't depend on a particular style or a Hollywood context. These illustrations don't look at all like Art Deco artifacts or black-and-white studio stills, yet they create a similar effect--an emotional, imaginative process in which the audience projects itself into an idealized world. From Phil's article:
Curators of the Detroit show are Jared Rosenbaum and Rachel Mackow of the Palace of Culture, an online "museum" of futuristic design, and Mark Patrick of the Detroit Library. They reached into a rediscovered cache of images by Arthur Radebaugh, an advertising illustrator best known for dreaming up and painting fantastic vehicles — streamlined flying buses, hovering monorails and other wonders of the future — in advertisements for Bohn Aluminum & Brass. In the 1930's, Radebaugh turned out gleaming images of production-line Dodges and Chryslers set against Buck Rogers backgrounds.
Many paintings in the show come from the collection of Jim Secreto, a photographer in Clarkston, Mich. Mr. Secreto found the images while working in the files of Detroit advertising agencies. "I fell in love with these illustrations for their romantic quality," he said. "They project an ideal lifestyle and fantasy that a lot of thought and effort went into creating."
Mr. Secreto said that his profession, photography, ended that of the auto illustrators. But it took a long time; photography gradually replaced illustration in most print advertising during the 1950's because it was less expensive and more versatile.
In auto advertisements, though, illustration dominated through the 1970's because painters could render effects that photographers could not. Before digital image manipulation existed, painters did a better job of romanticizing the cars, elongating and widening them, emphasizing highlights and shadows to bring out sculptural qualities....
Such manipulation was common. In some cases, the show's curators said, skilled specialists took photos of cars, sliced them up and separated the pieces ever so slightly to produce an elongated image for painters.
The effect of this style was to lend a touch of fantasy and magic to the images, making them touchstones of their era. A 1960 image of a Ford Galaxie cruising through downtown Detroit, by Ross Cousins and John Killmaster — they were among the most respected advertising illustrators — captures a bright morning scene, offering a broadly optimistic vision of life in America.
In his new book, Culture and Consumption II, Grant McCracken has a fascinating essay called "When Cars Could Fly," documenting the connection between jet age imagery, automotive styling, and mid-century metaphors of personal ambition.
Last summer, Steve and I saw plenty of evidence for Grant's thesis at the Petersen Automotive Museum's Driving Through Futures Past, an exhibit that included both illustrations like the one above and a few prototypes like this Bonneville Special.
These exhibits pay tribute to culturally significant artwork that barely escaped the trash. As Phil writes:
The work of the designers was never meant to be saved, Mr. Sharf said. The studios at General Motors and other automakers produced thousands of sketches, of which only a few were spirited away — somewhat illicitly — by the designers. Most of the designers remain anonymous.
Part of Mr. Sharf's collection has been shown at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and some works from the collection will go on display in Japan in September at the Toyota Museum and at the Nagoya Museum. The collection is also documented in a new book, Future Retro: Drawings From the Great Age of American Automobiles (MFA Publications, $27.50 hardcover, $19.95 soft cover).
Mr. Sharf"s collection gives prominence to Richard Arbib, a versatile designer whose work included Packards as well as speedboats, outboard motors and the 1957 Hamilton Electric Ventura watch. Mr. Sharf said his favorites included a set of 20 drawings that show the evolution of Pontiac's Indian hood ornament into a futuristic jet airplane. "They were done in three days in June 1954," he said.
"My hope is that someone will dig into this material in a scholarly sense," Mr. Sharf said. "They didn't realize their importance then, and many still don't, but these men are important."
Phil Patton wrote the industrial design chapter of the SFMOMA catalog Glamour, to which I contributed the lead essay (excerpted here). For more on automotive illustration, check out the links I've added to the article. In addition, the online museum Plan59.com, formerly Ephemera Now, has a nice collection of Bohn ads, including this one, which I bought as a poster.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on March 19, 2006 • Comments
In today's NYTBR, I review iconoclastic development economist William Easterly's new book, The White Man's Burden. Although the context is different, the book's basic theme will be familiar to readers of The Future and Its Enemies (though there's no indication that Easterly has read my book). From the review:
In "The White Man's Burden," Easterly turns from incentives to the subtler problems of knowledge. If we truly want to help the poor, rather than just congratulate ourselves for generosity, he argues, we rich Westerners have to give up our grand ambitions. Piecemeal problem-solving has the best chance of success.
He contrasts the traditional "Planner" approach of most aid projects with the "Searcher" approach that works so well in the markets and democracies of the West. Searchers treat problem-solving as an incremental discovery process, relying on competition and feedback to figure out what works.
"A Planner thinks he already knows the answers," Easterly writes. "A Searcher admits he doesn't know the answers in advance; he believes that poverty is a complicated tangle of political, social, historical, institutional and technological factors." Planners trust outside experts. Searchers emphasize homegrown solutions.
The new book, while well worth reading, isn't as good as Easterly's earlier The Elusive Quest for Growth, which I highly recommend. As I note in the review, however, that's partly because The White Man's Burden is trying to tackle much more difficult questions.
Dan Drezner reviewed Easterly in Friday's WSJ. (This link does not require a subscription.)
Posted by Virginia Postrel on March 19, 2006 • Comments
Wired's Autopia blogger John Gartner explains the appeal of hybrids. It's not rational but essentially aesthetic:
While gearheads will pay more for the extra power off the line, we hybrid owners get our jollies from passing by the pump while guzzlers have to visit the Qwik Stop 3 times per week. Just like Porsches and Mustangs, hybrids aren't going away, so those who don't like them will just have to give it a rest.
I don't think it's coincidental that the Prius took off only after Toyota abandoned its initial design strategy, making the hybrid look like an ordinary Toyota, for something cooler. Who wants a hybrid that looks like this?
At some point, of course, rational calculation does enter the equation. Since I drive my car only about 3,500 miles a year, I didn't even look at hybrids.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on March 19, 2006 • Comments
On his blog, BusinessWeek'sMichael Mandel suggests that journalists and politicians might not be so hostile to steroid use if their jobs required bigger muscles:
But would we be quite so horrified, I wonder, if we were talking about "smart pills" or memory pills instead of steroids? Suppose that a pharmaceutical company was selling a pill that would improve your memory by 30% or your IQ by 30%, with the same sort of side effects as steroids. Would you be willing to take them for 3 or 5 critical years in your career? What if you knew that everyone else was taking them? What if you knew that the Chinese or the French were taking them? And would you be willing to give your kids these pills in, say, the junior year of high school, to increase the odds of getting a good score on the SAT?
The real problem with steroids: They enhance Old Economy capabilities, not New Economy skills. They make us better factory workers, not smarter knowledge workers.
I'd challenge that last dichotomy. "Knowledge work" of the kind Mandel and I do isn't the only New Economy skill. Sports is one of those huge New Economy industries that people with high SATs tend to forget. And it's not just a matter of big-time athletes. The guy who would have been a factory line worker a generation ago is now a personal trainer at the local gym, a job that requires more "professional" people skills and personal discipline but is just as physical. Brainpower isn't the only source of intangible economic value.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on March 19, 2006 • Comments
It's National Kidney Month and I didn't even know it. So much for being the World's Leading Kidney Blogger.
Instead of kidney blogging, I should be finishing an essay on George Hurrell's Hollywood glamour photos. Ah, but there's a connection. Hurrell took some amazing photos of Jean Harlow--before she died of kidney failure at the age of 26. Back then, they didn't even have dialysis.
Courtesy of Pancho Barnes Trust Estate
I wrote a Slate slideshow on Hurrell here. My current project is the catalog essay to accompany a major exhibit this summer at the Queen Mary in Long Beach.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on March 16, 2006 • Comments
In a fascinating post, Grant McCracken explains how some 21st-century kids secured their secret clubhouse. No printed signs were involved.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on March 15, 2006 • Comments
Kidney patients in Boston can thank economist Alvin Roth (who could really use a website designer) for a clever new system of pairing living donors. The Boston Globe's Scott Allen reports:
Becky Borchert, a Wisconsin nurse, was eager to donate a kidney to her gravely ill friend in New York, but she had type A blood and her friend had type B. Richard Krafton, a school administrator in Massachusetts with advanced kidney disease, had the opposite problem: The friend who wanted to give him a kidney had type B blood, not a match for Krafton's type A.
But last week, Borchert saved her friend's life by giving a kidney to Krafton, a man she did not know, in the first test of a system that brings together strangers to exchange organs for transplant. At the same moment that surgeons at Massachusetts General Hospital began removing Borchert's kidney for Krafton, another surgical team at New York Presbyterian Hospital started taking a kidney from Krafton's friend, Steve Proulx, to implant in Borchert's friend, who asked to remain anonymous.
"This transplant could not have happened if we didn't have this program available," said Dr. Dicken Ko, who transplanted the kidney into Krafton. Organizers say the New England Kidney Exchange, a computer system that matches kidney disease patients with compatible organ donors, could eventually arrange 2,000 to 3,000 transplants a year if applied nationally, giving people like Krafton a way to shortcut the current three- to seven-year wait for a transplant. Krafton got his new kidney and a second lease on life in just under a year.
Read the whole thing. Ah, instrumental rationality--so much better at saving lives than blabbering about the "sacredness" of the body.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on March 15, 2006 • Comments
In her Bloomberg column, Amity Shlaes (a libertarian woman herself) puts a political spin on the kidney transplant story. This angle never occurred to me going into the procedure, but I suppose it's inevitable when you consider the professional world Sally, whose politics are actually unclassifiable, and I inhabit. Amity's column also plugs a smart tax-incentive idea from Professor Postrel.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on March 15, 2006 • Comments