What keeps a dock floating above water? Pier pressure.

The most interesting point in Levinson's first chapter of How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger in my personal opinion was the description of how controversial the shipping container was once it was invented. I personally never thought that the humble shipping container would cause strikes, but, it makes sense. The shipping container made packing a shipping product streamlined. Just like the new technology reducing workers needed in cotton farms, the invention of the container significantly reduced the amount of workers needed to perform loading tasks.

Containerism contributed to globalization in some fairly obvious ways and a few less obvious ones. First, it reduced the cost and the hassle involved with shipping. Before containerism occurred, large amounts of manual labor was needed in order to pack ships full of product, these labor costs were quite high, so, shipping prices

had to make up for this. Also, owners had to pay multiple factions in order to receive their product: shipping the product to the harbor, loading the product, the boat voyage itself, unloading the product and moving the product to where it was sold. Because this process was not stream-lined, it took large quantities of time and money. Once the container combined with the computer was introduced, shipping the product was one cheaper price, you got the product in a more timely fashion and it was not a large hassle to do ship thing. Another less obvious way that containerism changed globalization (but what I find the more important point) is that it allowed companies to move internationally. Before containers, manufacturers needed to be close to where they were selling because the somewhat higher costs of being in that area were better than the costs of shipping the product. Once the costs of shipping diminished, companies could easily, inexpensively ship their goods across the world. This meant that companies could relocate to an area with cheaper manufacturing costs and even with the costs of shipping factored in, they made more money. I believe this is the largest reason why the container helped globalization; with cheaper, easier shipping, companies could easily move to cheaper areas.

In the short run, containers would help local economies. GDP= C+I+G+X-M. As the prices of products fell and variety of those products increased, consumer spending (C) would raise, thus raising GDP. Exports would increase but so would imports, so, the effects cannot be determined; it depends on how much exports and imports increase. In terms of employment, while new jobs were started with the demand for building these containers and for the new ports, there were also many jobs lost. I would think that there would be much more labor needed to physically haul large quantities of items individually onto boats than it would be to use cranes. I would assume that more people became unemployed because of the containers than the people who became employed from them. As for the long run, many lower income countries saw a shift in their economies. Because they would have cheap land and labor, many companies jumped at the opportunity to relocate and save money and thus helped raise the GDP of many low income countries.