Audio Transcript
Brian Anderson: Welcome back to the 10 Blocks podcast. This is Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal. Joining me on the show today is Jordan McGillis, who’s City Journal’s economics editor. Jordan writes about energy technology, economic innovation, geopolitics, and other issues for City Journal. Today we’re going to discuss his superb essay from our spring issue, “On the Twenty-First-Century Waterfront,” which looks at the opposition of some longshoremen unions to automation technologies and American ports, and explores just generally the role of ports in American prosperity. So Jordan, thanks very much for joining us.
Jordan McGillis: Great to be on this side of the microphone, Brian.
Brian Anderson: Yeah, your essay, and I do encourage readers to go out and check it out, reports on how U.S. ports, especially on the East Coast, have been lagging technologically behind ports in some other countries, which have embraced automation and robotics in a way that the US ports have not. So I wonder if you could just describe how American ports do currently stack up against international competitors, especially China when it comes to the adoption of automation, robotics, artificial intelligence, this kind of technological upgrade.
Jordan McGillis: Yes. There’s a couple of different planes to analyze this issue from, one of which is the China competition, and as with many other areas of the industrial economy, China is rapidly moving from a primitive state to a state that’s more advanced than ours in terms of its production capability, its transportation capability, and indeed its logistics at ports. China has a couple of enormous, very new, just a couple of decades old ports near Shanghai and then down near Shenzhen, and these ports are largely operated in autonomous fashion. The other comparison that I think is more a little bit more applicable though is Europe, which has a longer industrial history and more comparable household economics and labor economics to the United States, but the comparison to Rotterdam, U.S. ports and then at the leading European port of Rotterdam, that comparison is not favorable to the U.S. at all either.
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