Stephen Karlson

It’s A Little Late to Develop A Conscience.

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Matt “Dean Dad” Reed offers an instructive look at what Jascha Mounck felicitiously describes as the “cage of norms.”  That book is among those stacked to be reviewed.  Maybe this year?
Some of my earliest lessons in ethical behavior, as a child, came in the form of a question: “How would you feel if someone did that to you?” It was reasonably effective because it was simple. I could guess how I would feel, and I didn’t want to make anyone else feel that way. Although I couldn’t have spelled the word at the time, the theory underlying that lesson was reciprocity.

Reciprocity relies on an underlying sense of relevant equality. You and I may be different people in any number of ways, but we’re both fully human, and that entails some basic respect. There’s an implicit politics within the ethical norm of reciprocity, too. I’m no better than anyone else, but I’m no worse, either. Taken seriously, that ethical position tends to lead to a rough egalitarianism. There may be hierarchical roles for various reasons, but the people occupying those roles are just people. They have the same human flaws as everybody else. And the power they’re granted is both a grant—that is, removable—and for a limited purpose. It is not license. Nobody is entitled to abuse anyone else, and nobody deserves abuse.
There’s a lot going on in those two paragraphs.  In that “How would you feel” is the basis for the first rule of interaction in the three Faiths of the Book.  There’s an important corollary, as well: the precocious child might ask Mom or Dad “How would you like being put in time-out?”  Kids don’t like being put in time-out, and the wise parent will note something to the effect that the grown-up version of time-out lasts for days, not minutes, in a place called “jail”.  The concept of reciprocity, though, is a straightforward elaboration of the things that matter that are learned in kindergarten.

The second paragraph appeals to the Framing of the Declaration of Independence.  The “endowed by their Creator” passage vesting rights in individuals is a rebuttal to the divine right of kings: it was not the Hand of God that made the Stuart Tudor Hanover Battenberg Windsor family Defenders of the Faith, Emperors of India, and sovereigns over British North America.  People consented to their rule, and people had the right to withdraw their consent.  Note, dear reader, how the Holy Spirit has been more catholic in identifying popes, a position of power that up to 1978 seemed to be reserved to Italian cardinals.  Ideally, a rough egalitarianism ought to hold in education as well. Yale Law do not hold the franchise on staffing the High Bench, nor is the Southeastern Conference endowed with the right to dominate football.

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Isn’t It Simpler to Speak of Bourgeois Norms?

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Or perhaps, where people from different backgrounds find themselves in more frequent interactions with each other, to have concepts such as diplomacy (for the leadership classes) or simple good manners?

A political scientist called Eric Kaufmann coined the expression “whiteshift” to refer to the current evolution of those norms, when the modal ancestry of the polity is shifting.  It’s not enough to sell a book of that title, his “How Can We Manage the Process of Western ‘Whiteshift’?” is for Quillette subscribers only.  Fair enough, an academician has to earn a living too.

I have the book, and it’s in the stack of stuff to read and review, if perhaps in the “this is not off to a compelling start and I’m not obligated to stay current with stuff that makes me sleepy” part of the stack.

Michael Barone read, or at least skimmed, the book, in order to see if there’s any punditry to do.

Kaufmann, a Canadian who teaches in Britain and is of Jewish, Chinese, and Latino ancestry. His most recent book is called Whiteshift, which he defines as “the mixture of many non-whites into the white group through voluntary assimilation.”

As he points out, something like this has happened before. A hundred years ago, Catholic, Orthodox, and Jewish immigrants pouring into Ellis Island were considered to be of different “races” by white Anglo-Saxon Protestant elites.

Half a century ago, their descendants were regarded as still culturally and politically distinctive in Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s description of New York ethnics groups, Beyond the Melting Pot. A “balanced” ticket in those days had to include Irish, Italian, and Jewish candidates.

Today, all these groups are lumped together as “whites,” even though there are still perceptible, though muted, differences in political attitudes and perspectives between those with different ancestries.

I vaguely recall some of that writing about “unmeltable ethnics” during my adolescence in Milwaukee. Although Americans All was a rallying cry during Woodrow Wilson’s war, the existence of a Croatian soccer collective different from the Serbian soccer collective still meant someone not conversant with the past millennium of feudin’ and fussin’ in the Balkans ought be circumspect.

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Rediscovering the Competitive Advantage.

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We’ve long understood that the cost advantage in freight transportation depends on distance, with railroads, and water carriers where waterways are available, making the longer hauls more cheaply, particularly with bulk commodities.  The cost advantage of rail over highway transportation appears for shipments travelling farther than five hundred miles, give or take.  The railroads, however, have been shying away from much of that intermodal business, that despite signs of strain in long-haul trucking manifesting themselves long before anybody heard of Wuhan, let alone of virology research there.

A week ago, I noted, “There are no short-term solutions, and the railroads have to think about how best to do shorter-haul and retail intermodal trains.”  Then an executive with a freight-forwarding company rented a boat to look at what was going on shoreside at Los Angeles and Long Beach and posted his impressions.  Among his suggestions to ungum the works was an all-hands effort by the railroads to get the containers somewhere inland and let the truckers pick them up there.

I don’t know if somebody in Omaha heard him, or if somebody noticed that there was money to be made.
Union Pacific, the Port of Long Beach, and the Utah Inland Port Authority have announced the launch of direct rail service between the Long Beach and Utah facilities to help address ongoing port congestion.

The executive directors of the two facilities, Mario Cordero of Long Beach and Jack Hedge of the Utah authority, said in a joint statement that the direct, regularly scheduled service “will allow cargo destined for all of the Intermountain West to be rapidly evacuated from terminals in Long Beach to Salt Lake City for further distribution throughout the region. Much of this cargo traditionally moves to Utah, Colorado, Nevada, and Idaho by truck, and thus must be removed from the port terminals one container at a time. Reengaging this direct rail service will allow removal of blocks of containers at a time.”

Cordero also said the agreement immediately reduces pressure on terminal storage, gates, chassis, and the local drayage community on the coast. … It’s a major step forward for exporters from the region.”
It’s a research project for another day to work out why those boxes weren’t already moving on stack trains to Salt Lake City rather than as one container at a time with a driver putting in more than a full day on the road between the coast and Salt Lake.  Several commenters on that post are noting that the reluctance of the railroads to go after those 500 mile intermodal moves goes beyond Union Pacific.  Perhaps, dear reader, you’ve heard of North Baltimore, Ohio.

How much money might Union Pacific have been leaving on the table?  A Railway Age analysis includes this.  “Millions of TEUs [a 20′ x 8′ x 8′ basic container load — Ed.] of international goods are imported to or exported from the Intermountain West annually, but only 10% of this cargo currently moves by rail. This initiative aims to provide consistent, reliable movement of cargo by rail, which improves fluidity and reduces delays of shipments already set to come to the Intermountain region, rather than increase cargo volume.”  The value proposition might have been there as early as 2018, and the allocation studies I referred to at the start of this post are over fifty years old.  And only now Union Pacific and Utah Inland are going after this traffic, and only now claiming the environmental benefits and less highway congestion??

I’m also puzzled by the way Our Political Masters are working the problem.  There’s now a Container Excess Dwell Fee in Los Angeles, applied to containers that aren’t railed out within three days or trucked out within nine.  Forgive me my age, but what ever happened to per diem charges for rolling stock in motion, and demurrage charges for rolling stock sitting around?  The per diem charge is the rental a railroad company pays to the owner of the car for a day, and there used to be a chess game called get-the-foreign-road-cars-interchanged-by-midnight, sticking the receiving road with the per diem charge; while the demurrage charge applied to a consignee who treated a freight car as free warehouse space rather than unloading it promptly and releasing it for service.

Power Line’s Paul Mirengoff suggests that the Biden administration’s efforts to untangle the ports aren’t likely to succeed quickly.  But if you’re thinking about parallels to incapacitated presidents current and past, some of the port jam-ups bring to mind the logistical nightmare that was mobilizing the American Expeditionary Force.  That, too, is outside my area of expertise.

Why, though, weren’t the freight railroads better positioned to go after some of those container hauls before the current emergency manifested itself?

(Cross-posted to Cold Spring Shops.)