Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, a 15th-century Italian scholar, wanted to know everything there was to know. Nobody in the 21st century could entertain such a hope, except if he really knew nothing about the world. Are we lucky enough to have an American exception under our eyes? (On Pico, see Henri de Lubac, Pic de la Mirandole, Paris, 1974.)
In a social media post supporting the demand of a trade union (the International Longshoremen Association or ILA) to block automation at East Coast and Gulf Coast ports, the president-elect of the United States wrote:
There has been a lot of discussion having to do with “automation” on United States docks. I’ve studied automation, and know just about everything there is to know about it. The amount of money saved is nowhere near the distress, hurt, and harm it causes for American Workers, in this case, our Longshoremen. Foreign companies have … got record profits, and I’d rather these foreign companies spend it on the great men and women on our docks, than machinery, which is expensive, and which will constantly have to be replaced. In the end, there’s no gain for them, and I hope that they will understand how important an issue this is for me. For the great privilege of accessing our markets, these foreign companies should hire our incredible American Workers, instead of laying them off, and sending those profits back to foreign countries.
I think the qualification “just about” is not enough to save Mr. Trump from the claim that he is the 21st-century Pico. To know “just about everything there is to know” about automation at East Coast and Gulf Coast ports, one would need to be capable of answering, on the basis of credible theories and empirical studies, the questions that follow, and this is just a sample of classes of broad questions (hint: economics helps):
- How does automation affect production functions, product prices, as well as the production possibility frontier (ppf) of an economy?
- How does automation affect employment and real wages, both inside and outside the industry under consideration? Test your understanding by applying your conclusion to, say, American agriculture (whose proportion of the labor force decreased from 84% in 1810 to about 1.5% today).
- What impact did automation have on the Industrial Revolution? What would likely have happened to workers’ wages and general prosperity if the early-19th-century Luddites had won their combat?
- Are port operators and maritime companies willing to pay more or less for dockworkers who work with less capital and equipment and are thus less productive? How, and how long, can the companies and their shareholders be compelled to pay more?
- How can we compare the harm done to the shareholders’ families with “the distress, hurt, and harm it causes for American Workers, in this case, our Longshoremen”? How are such comparisons of utility scientifically possible?
- What is the elasticity of substitution of demand (foreign and domestic) of the services of East and Gulf Coast American ports for West Coast American ports?
- What is the elasticity of substitution of maritime shipping for air freight by American exporters and importers?
- To which extent does a relative cost and price increase at East Coast American ports translate into the substitution of shipping from the East to the West, or of maritime shipping for air shipping?
- How is remuneration related to productivity? How would stopping automation at East Coast and Gulf Coast ports affect the relative remuneration of the incredible American Workers at East and Gulf Coast ports compared to the no less incredible American workers of West Coast ports?
- Should containers and bar codes, which the ILA also unsuccessfully opposed some decades ago, have been stopped? What would have been the likely consequences?
- What would be the consequences of presently banning containers and barcodes (or, say, computers) on our incredible American Workers’ wages?
- How and for whom is a political system useful in which policies are decided according to how important an issue is for the main ruler (“for me”)?
- Why is the most efficient American container port at the 53rd rank of 405 such ports in the World Bank’s Container Port Performance Index (2023), preceded by a few Latin American ports and a large number of Asian ones?
- How can machines that “constantly have to be replaced” ever be profitable? Could this depend on the discounted difference between their productivity and cost over time? Or, to quote George Will, will America “be made great again using only machines that last forever”? Are workers themselves eternal and can they never go on strike?
- What would be the effect of the direct or (through trade union privileges) indirect control of the costs and prices of American ports on the efficient use of knowledge in society? How useful is F.A. Hayek’s analysis of this general issue in his 1945 American Economic Review article “The Use of Knowledge in Society”?
For the keywords “economics automation American maritime ports”, Google Scholar shows 25,800 results excluding citations, of which 15,600 refer to studies published over the past two years. The titles range from “Automation in Logistics Port and Freight Transport With Blockchain Technology” (Transportation Research Procedia) to “Investment in Infrastructure and Trade: The Case of Ports” (National Bureau of Economic Research). A modern Pico would have a lot of work to do if he wants to know just about everything of even a tiny part of everything there is to know.
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The featured image of this post is just a surrealistic shadow of what I instructed DALL-E to do. Interestingly, though, and perhaps by happenstance, the AI bot chose the name of the ship.
Unloading a ship without automation, by DALL-E
