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Oakland had never hosted a containership, but it immediately began to promote itself as a future containerport. Nutter dreamed up a lease very different from the norm of so many cents per ton: Sea-Land would pay a minimum fee high enough to cover the cost of building its terminal and would pay more as its tonnage rose, but beyond a certain point
... See moreMarc Levinson • The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger - Second Edition with a new chapter by the author
The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger - Second Edition with a new chapter by the author
Marc Levinson • 3 highlights
amazon.com
These new ports, by and large, were privately managed, and in some cases privately financed. Their creation was a deliberate response to the economics of container shipping, in which keeping the ship moving is what matters most. Only the biggest ports are worth a time-consuming stop: in 2014, 46 percent of world container shipments moved through
... See moreMarc Levinson • The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger - Second Edition with a new chapter by the author
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
Marc Levinson • The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger - Second Edition with a new chapter by the author
Why large modern projects are so expensive: paying market rate for the accountability and alignment that older systems provided for free.
TRANSCRIPT
And this is why. And again, so if you go back to this patronage thing we were talking about earlier, it's like, you know how there is this thing we ask all the time, which is like, why do big projects cost so much money? Right. Why is this like this? The New York City subway was dug for one dollar a mile. Why does it cost a billion dollars now?
... See moreThe equation was simple: the bigger the port, the bigger the vessels it could handle and the faster it could empty them, reload them, and send them back out to sea. Bigger ports were likely to have deeper berths, more and faster cranes, better technology to keep track of all the boxes, and better road and rail services to move freight in and out.
... See moreMarc Levinson • The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger - Second Edition with a new chapter by the author
These two unrelated developments—the rise of New York, the neglect of Tampa and Mobile—revealed the economics that would affect seaports as container shipping grew. For ports, capturing container traffic was going to be expensive, requiring investments out of all proportion to what had come before. For ship lines, the days when vessels meandered
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