Knowing everything there is to know

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, an Italian scholar from the 15th century, wanted to know everything there was to know. No one in the 21st century could have such a hope unless they really knew nothing about the world. Are we lucky to have an American exception before our eyes? (On Pico, see Henri de Lubac, Pic de la MirandoleParis, 1974.)

In a message on social media In support of a union’s demand (the International Longshoremen Association, or ILA) to block automation at East and Gulf Coast ports, the President-elect of the United States wrote:

There has been a lot of discussion about “automation” in the ports of the United States. I studied automation and know just about everything there is to know. The amount of money saved does not come close to the suffering, pain and damage it causes to American workers, in this case our longshoremen. Foreign companies have… made record profits, and I would rather have these foreign companies spend them on the big men and women at our ports, than on machines, which are expensive and will have to be constantly replaced. Ultimately, there is no gain for them, and I hope they will understand how important this issue is to me. For the great privilege of accessing our markets, these foreign companies should hire, rather than fire, our incredible American workers and send those profits back abroad.

I don’t think the qualifier “just about” is enough to save Mr. Trump from the claim that he is the Pico of the 21st century. To know “just about everything there is to know” about automation in East and Gulf Coast ports, one should be able to answer, based on credible theories and empirical studies that one understands, the following questions – and this is just an example of broad questions (hint: economics helps):

1. How does automation affect an economy’s production functions, product prices, and production possibilities frontier (ppf)?
2. How will automation impact employment and real wages, both within and outside the sector in question? Test your understanding by applying your conclusion to, for example, American agriculture (whose share of the labor force fell from 84% in 1810 to about 1.5% today).
3. 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 battle?
4. Are port operators and maritime companies prepared to pay more or less for dock workers who work with less capital and equipment and are therefore less productive? How and for how long can the companies and their shareholders be forced to pay more?
5. How can we compare the harm done to the shareholders’ families with “the suffering, pain and damage this causes to American workers, in this case our longshoremen”? How are such useful comparisons scientifically possible?
6. What is the elasticity of substitution of demand (foreign and domestic) for services from U.S. ports on the East Coast and Gulf Coast by U.S. ports on the West Coast?
7. What is the elasticity of substitution of air freight for ocean shipping by US exporters and importers?
8. To what extent does a relative increase in costs and prices in U.S. East Coast ports translate into the replacement of east-to-west shipping, or of ocean shipping by air shipping?
9. How is compensation related to productivity? How would ending automation at East Coast and Gulf Coast ports affect the relative pay of the incredible American workers at East Coast and Gulf Coast ports, compared to the no less incredible American workers at ports on the west coast?
10. Should containers and barcodes, which the ILA also unsuccessfully opposed a few decades agohave stopped? What would have been the likely consequences?
11. What would be the consequences of currently banning containers and barcodes (or computers, for example) on the wages of our incredible American workers?
12. How and for whom is a political system useful in which policies are determined based on how important an issue is to the main ruler (“to me”)?
13. Why is the most efficient US container port ranked 53rd out of 405 such ports in the World Bank list? Container port performance index (2023)preceded by some Latin American ports and a large number of Asian ports?
14. How can machines that ‘constantly need to be replaced’ ever be profitable? Could this depend on the discounted difference between their productivity and costs over time? Or, to quote George WillWill America “be made great again with only machines that last forever”? Are the workers themselves eternal and can they never strike?
15. What would be the effect of direct or (through union privileges) indirect control over the costs and prices of American ports on the efficient use of knowledge in society? How useful is FA Hayek’s analysis of this general issue in his 1945 American economics magazine article “The use of knowledge in society”?

For the keywords ‘economy automation US seaports’, Google Scholar shows 25,800 results excluding citations, of which 15,600 refer to studies published in the past two years. The titles range from “Automation in logistics, port and freight transport with Blockchain technology” (Transport investigation procedure) to “Investments 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 wanted to know just about everything, or even a small fraction of everything there is to know.

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The featured image of this post is just a surreal shadow of what I instructed DALL-E to do. Interestingly enough, and perhaps coincidentally, the AI ​​bot chose the ship’s name.