Pun Salad

People interested in this issue, and skeptical of self-described "fairness", should read Cato's analysis: https://t.co/a3K96Mf5ID

— Paul Sand (@punsalad) October 4, 2024

Unfortunately, it's a reply to something he posted back on September 19, so it's unlikely to be seen by anyone except… well, you, I guess. From the linked Cato article by Romina Boccia:

There follows a tutorial about why WEP and GPO were enacted in the first place, it's probably most interesting for the folks who will benefit. And the people who will wind up paying will not pay attention. It's kind of a classic "public choice" story.

Unfortunately, giving away taxpayer money is pretty popular among CongressCritters, including mine.

Also of note:

• Sitting on the dock of the bay. Noah Smith is a Kamala fan, but that doesn't mean he can't see that Make-work is not the future of work. (Whoa, a triple negative. I'm gonna leave it there though.)

  In case you haven’t yet heard, the ILA — the union that controls the dockworkers along the entire East and Gulf Coasts of the United States — has just gone on strike, threatening to paralyze much of the U.S. economy by cutting off a substantial percentage of imports. If a deal isn’t reached soon, inflation could come roaring back, and lots of Americans could lose their jobs at the same time. (UPDATE: The strike appears to have been suspended until early next year.)

  Here’s how [president of the International Longshoremen’s Association Harold J.] Daggett describes the potential impact of his union’s strike in the interview [at the link]:

  When my men hit the streets from Maine to Texas, every single port locked down. You know what's going to happen? I'll tell you. First week, be all over the news every night, boom, boom, second week. Guys who sell cars can't sell cars, because the cars ain't coming in off the ships. They get laid off. Third week, malls are closing down. They can't get the goods from China. They can't sell clothes. They can't do this. Everything in the United States comes on a ship. They go out of business. Construction workers get laid off because the materials aren't coming in. The steel's not coming in. The lumber's not coming in. They lose their job. Everybody's hating the longshoremen now because now they realize how important our jobs are.

  We should all be thinking very hard about whether it’s wise to have a labor system that can allow that sort of thing to happen. Is it right that the livelihoods of millions of Americans should hang on the whims of 50,000 dockworkers? Is it smart to give a single union the power to shut down a large portion of America’s critical infrastructure? Collective bargaining is important, but there should be limits on how destructive we allow that bargaining process to be.

  President Biden doesn’t see it that way. He has refused to use the powers of the Taft-Hartley Act to break the strike on national emergency grounds, declaring that “I don’t believe in Taft-Hartley.” But although the ILA may win their fight in the short term, I don’t think they’re going to come off looking very good as a result of this strike. Belligerently threatening the livelihoods of millions of Americans while proudly declaring that “everyone hates the longshoremen” is not a good look, especially if you’re a guy who makes around $900,000 a year (three times as much as other big union leaders), once owned a giant yacht, and has been indicted (though acquitted) by the U.S. government twice for racketeering.

  Smith goes on to note that it's more about banning automation at the ports than it is wages.

• And for more on that issue… Reason's Eric Boehm is not gonna be on Daggett's Christmas list; he advocates that we go ahead and Automate the Ports.

  The news that the International Longshoreman Association (ILA) agreed to suspend its strike until January is undeniably good news for just about every aspect of America's economy.

  But whether they are open or closed, many American ports rank among the least efficient in the entire world. The ports in New York, Baltimore, and Houston—three of the largest of the 36 ports that could have been shut down by the ILA strike—are ranked no higher than 300th place (out of 348 in total) in the World Bank's most recent report on port efficiency. Not a single U.S. port ranks in the top 50. Slow-moving ports act as bottlenecks to commerce both coming and going, which "reduces the competitiveness of the country…and hinders economic growth and poverty reduction," the World Bank notes.

  Boehm notes later in his article that Daggett also despises E-ZPass. Because all those human toll-takers were unionized! And none of the E-ZPass hardware is!

• And for a lighter look… Jeff Maurer provides Daggett some space at his substack to reiterate what his union really wants: We Demand That Ports Stop Using Automation, Ships Without Sails, Any Containers Whatsoever. (Just to be clear, it's a parody. I think.)

  Let’s start with automation. It’s true that many American ports are some of the least-efficient in the world, but that’s because a port like Oakland (ranked #397) doesn’t have the built-in advantages of a global hub like Luanda, Angola (#389) or Port Sudan (#388). The ILA will not to be dragged into the mid-20th century against our will. Some foreign ports are already automated, using dangerous, untested technology like computers, bar codes, and video cameras. In Mobile, Alabama, the port tried to install something called an “automatic gate” — what in the devil is that?!?!? We will never allow greedy corporations to deny someone the dignity of earning a living by standing next to a gate all day. If we don’t act, it won’t just be the standing-next-to-a-gate-all-day jobs that will go away; jobs like guy-who-carries-an-orange-flag-around-sometimes, guy-who-stands-next-to-a-guy-who-is-loading-things, and guy-who-leans-on-a-forklift-all-day-listening-to-sports-radio will be threatened, too.

  By why should the pro-labor measures be limited to the docks? It’s time to confront the fact that modern, diesel-powered ships destroy jobs. Dock workers would benefit if shipping reverted to wood-built, wind-powered ships that served humanity just fine for thousands of years. That’s true for two reasons: First, today’s steel-and-diesel behemoths slide into port with virtually no help from the docks. In contrast, a three-masted schooner laden with spices from the orient would require at least 20 stout men to pull her ashore. Second, modern ships haul huge amounts of cargo with sparse crew, which reduces demand for hardscrabble chaps from port towns who wear cable-knit sweaters and clinch corn cob pipes in their teeth. Sailors and longshoremen share many things: A love of the sea, a penchant for feeding peanuts to pet monkeys who perch on our shoulders, and a stew of venereal diseases contracted from dockside whores. What’s good for sailors is also good for dock workers, so we must retreat from this post-Monitor/Merrimack hell that has befallen us in the past 160 years.

  Daggett's bottom line:

  President Biden has said that he won’t force us back to work. I applaud his decision to affirm union solidarity as we cause supply chain disruptions that will bring back inflation right before the election — that is true commitment! Vice President Harris and former president Trump have also expressed support, so there seems to be a broad consensus that the ILA will not be forced to accept technological change just because it makes goods cheaper, facilitates commerce, and increases productivity. The future of global commerce will be decided in the coming weeks. And I will do everything in my power to see that that future closely resembles the distant past.

  And I enjoyed the "disclaimer" at the end too:

  For the lawyers and ILA-connected mafia members: This is a bit. So, you can’t sue me or kill me and toss my body in a drainage ditch off the Jersey Turnpike, because satire is protected speech.

  So there. And if this is my last post ever, you'll probably find me in that ditch too.

Recently on the book blog:

A hefty tome, weighing in at 580 pages. But many of those pages are tables with row after row of data, and I hope you'll forgive me for skipping over those. Obtained by the Interlibrary Loan service at the University Near Here, from Wesleyan.

You may remember the 1980 Simon–Ehrlich wager, where techno-optimist Julian Simon bet eco-doomster Paul Ehrlich that the prices of five minerals (copper, chromium, nickel, tin, and tungsten) would go down in real terms over the next decade. Simon won that bet. This book's authors (Marian L. Tupy and Gale L. Pooley) deem Simon their hero, and this book is their effort to expand and generalize his sunny optimism.

Their approach is to calculate the "time price" (TP) of various commodities and services; how long it would take a typical worker to earn enough money to buy them. And to see how those TPs have changed over time. Spoiler: nearly without exception, the TPs have declined over the periods they examine. I.e., the items have become more "abundant". And, in many cases, the growth in abundance has outstripped the growth in population; the authors term this "superabundance".

Reader, did your school teachers chide you to "show your work" in your math classes? And to "cite your sources" in other classes? Tupy and Pooley do so, in mind-numbing detail. Again, a lot of pages skimmed over. I trust them.

Other than those core calculations, the book is an examination of the history and causes of economic prosperity. It is a rebuke to the gloomy followers of Malthus, like Ehrlich. (And also, amusingly, Thanos, the mass Malthusian murderer from the Marvel movies.) Here, they mainly follow the arguments of folks I like too: Deirdre McCloskey, Steven Pinker, Matt Ridley, Michael Shellenberger, and the like.

No surprise, I think the authors are largely correct in their cheerleading for technological optimism and free-market capitalism. And also that the main dangers to continued prosperity are the too-popular advocates for (various flavors of) socialism, economic degrowth, technophobia, and (generally) predictors of doom, unless we stop our sinful ways.

One small nit to pick: the phrase "infinitely bountiful planet" up there in the book's subtitle. I'm more of a fan of (Herbert) Stein's Law: "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop." (Example: Moore's Law: even its originator admitted that would eventually bump into fundamental limits.)

Also, the authors make a decent argument that innovation is driven in areas with large populations. (You want a country where Jobs has a better chance of meeting Woz, for example.) But large doesn't necessarily imply growing indefinitely; I think the authors tend to blur that distinction.