The Box, by Marc Levinson

How shipping containers changed trade, transport and everything.

This book was really trendy* (*in my circles) a few years ago, and I can now concur that it's great. A lot of these "[noun]: how [concrete noun] changed [large social system]" books feel a bit oversold, y'know?, but this one was really convincing, that modern globalisation and the economy we've come to take for granted really is thanks to the humble shipping container. (Maybe I'm being unfair on the other books in this genre, though, maybe everything changes everything, in the end).

I was hoping my friend Dan had reviewed this book, because it would be better than my review and save me writing anything; I don't think he has, alas, but here's an interview he did with the author, which is also nice.

A few major points:

• look, the idea of containers is really cool. Dockers used to manually load and unload individual items from ships, it was incredibly laborious and stuff got broken (or stolen, etc) a lot, it really sounds like trying to pack a suitcase but your suitcase is an entire ship and the items you're packing are all kinds of random shapes and sizes.
  
  And then someone was like "if we abstract away from this and just have manufacturers or sellers or whoever put their stuff in standardised containers, then when we get to the docks we can just load those containers onto the ship and be done with it." That's really cool!
  
  "Oh yes also the containers fit perfectly as the load for a single truck, the truck drives to the dock and a crane lifts the container onto a ship, then at the other end it gets put onto another standard truck and gets driven away again." Even better!
  
  I think it all sounds kind of obvious now -- we see containers on trucks every day -- but it's awesome. Reading this book made me desperately want to come up with some equivalent innovation (simple, abstract, incredibly powerful) and revolutionise the economy; the desire lasted about a week, now I'm back to doing whatever I was doing previously, which is not-revolutionising the economy. Still, it would be fabulous.
  
• containers originally only saved transport companies a small amount of time/money; you needed system-wide changes in the docks and sea-to-road connections, etc, and eventually even in manufacturing and production and logistics, for them to have the ridiculously impactful impact they eventually did. And this helps explain why shipping containers didn't take off sooner, even though the "technology" is... a box.
  
• I think we forget how regulated the US economy used to be? E.g. regulators told you how much you could charge for transporting different goods, and maintained relative prices between rail and road and sea and stuff, which all seems really alien (I think) from the current perspective
  
• the biggest impact of shipping containers ultimately wasn't on transport companies, in a sense, so much as on the rest of the economy -- suddenly physical distance didn't exactly matter, companies could build factories in whatever country was cheapest or most convenient, could connect different parts of their supply chain in weird ways, often it's cheaper to ship from Asia to the US coast than from US heartland to US coast [citation needed], etc. Maybe it's the way the book is structured that makes this feel more potent, but basically you start out reading about this trucking magnate who's trying to make more money from transport, and then eventually shipping gets kind-of-commoditised and the "bigger" impact is on the non-transport sectors that just take container shipping for granted.
  
• truly we forget how weird it is to live in a world where it's "efficient" to ship whatever stuff people want from whatever country (or combination of countries), even if the stuff is super cheap and low-value -- it used to be the case that it was only worth long-distance-importing high-value objects, and now I kind of take it for granted that a $5 t-shirt will be shipped in from Bangladesh or Vietnam or Morocco (interchangeably!), and that's really supremely weird.

Finally: I told a friend I was reading this and he said "oh, because of the Suez ship thing?", and I thought "...no?, it's been on my list for a while and I finally just picked it up kinda-randomly?," but then I realised it was because of the Suez ship thing, I'd gone to a website called istheshipstillstuck dot com (or something) and they were advertising a couple of shipping-related books, and that's what triggered me into finally buying and reading it. And it's insane to have those moments when you realise how absolutely manipulable and constantly manipulated you are, so many of the things I think I did spontaneously and individually were actually just me getting carried along in a big wave, and that's... saddening, humbling, something-ing.