Transportation

Then What is a Driver’s License For?

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Instapundit ask: Why have driver’s licenses at all?

Driver’s licenses began in America back in, IIRC, the 1840s when drivers of large cargo wagons in urban areas were licensed, supposedly to insure that they wouldn’t let the horses and the rig get out of control and plunge thorough crowded city streets. More likely, it was a tool to create a barrier of entry to protect established cartage companies against competition. The cry “it’s for safety” is a powerful economic tool of established concerns.

Supposedly, the government requires automobile drivers to have licenses to demonstrate that they have at least minimal driving skill and understanding of traffic laws. However, I’m not sure that is really the case anymore.

Take this recent story from here in Austin, Tx:

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TSA Patdowns

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Took a flight recently and in my security line they were putting everyone through the scanner. I didn’t want to be scanned so I asked for a patdown instead. Interesting experience. I don’t recommend it except that I sort of do (keep reading). It’s no fun having some gruff fellow with a shaved head run his hands up your legs and under your waistband. My impression is that the screeners do not enjoy this work, and that their attitude is that if you are dumb enough to ask for a hand search they are going to take some satisfaction in giving you what you asked for, good and hard. Or maybe they just don’t like it when passengers make work for them. Much easier to run everyone through scanners.

Perhaps more travelers should ask for patdowns, to slow down the system and pressure Congress to junk it or at least eliminate its worst features.

A while ago I traveled to Israel. On the way back an American guy in the security line started taking off his shoes, and a screener told him to keep them on because this isn’t America (unspoken: and here we do things rationally). Why is it so institutionally and politically difficult for us to treat airport security (and other issues) rationally?

Retro-Reading

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Picked up the March 1939 issue of Aviation magazine at a used book store. There is a lot of interesting content; here are some highlights…

(1)The big story was the delivery to Pan American Airways of the new Boeing 314 flying boats, intended to support Pan Am’s first transatlantic service, as well as for expansion of its existing transpacific service. (Atlantic service came 4 years later than the Pacific service due to strictly political reasons.)

The Boeing 314 (“Clipper”) could carry 74 passengers, but configured for overnight service, as it was for the transoceanic runs, the number of passengers was limited to 40. There was a 14-seat dining room, davenports convertible into upper and lower berths for the passengers, and a special private suite (“honeymoon suite”) in the tail of the plane.

There are several wonderful web sites about the Clippers. The Pan Am Clipper Flying Boats site covers several models operated by Pan Am, with the B-314-specific information here, including exterior and interior pictures. This image-rich site is also great, as is this one.

One-way fare, New York to Marseilles, was $375. According to the BLS Inflation Calculator, this would be equivalent to about $6000 in today’s money. I imagine the Private Suite was quite a bit more.

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A Manufacturing Renaissance?

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The value of the dollar (shown here measured against a basket of currencies) continues to fall–this of course makes imports more expensive to American consumers. There is inflation in China:

That means Americans, Europeans and other buyers will have to pay more for those goods or seek lower-cost suppliers elsewhere. In some cases, retailers are bidding for goods at prices the exporters consider too low.

“I hear that many Chinese exporters are rejecting orders from Wal-Mart and other Western retailers,” Mr. Tao said. “I’ve been covering the Chinese economy for a long time, and I’ve never heard that before.”

…which has the same effect of making U.S. manufacturing generally more competitive.

The natural effect of these phenomena is that manufacturing in the U.S., for export and for domestic consumption, becomes more competitive and hence factories operate at higher capacity, new ones are built, and employment increases along with economic growth. There are other factors that seem to point in this direction.

The greatly increased availability of U.S. natural gas, driven by new drilling technologies, offers potential advantages both to companies using gas as a feedstock and to those which are heavy energy consumers. Dow Chemical, for example, is increasing its production of ethane and of ethane’s downstream products: Dow’s plastics business has led earnings growth this year after lower natural-gas prices made U.S. production cheaper than oil-based resins made in Europe and Asia.

And in the broader manufacturing realm, quite a few companies are realizing that the “offshoring” boom was in some cases based on superficial analysis, ignoring the logistical realities of a 6000-mile-long supply chain and the consequent inventory, forecasting, and human communications problems. Our friends at Evolving Excellence cover this topic frequently. Note also that rising oil prices directly increase the costs of bunker fuel (for ships) and jet fuel (for planes) and hence have a significant negative effect on the economics of offshoring for many kinds of products.

So, can we expect a manufacturing renaissance in the U.S.? There are certainly indications of at least a temporary uptrend, and there are structural factors, as discussed above, which have the potential of creating growth over the long term.

I am afraid, though, that we are likely to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Multiple political and social factors will, unless they are reversed, make it difficult for U.S. manufacturing to live up to its full potential.

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Yes, Virginia (and Lisa), There IS a Railroad Industry

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There’s a Simpsons episode in which Lisa is on a nostalgia kick and is making a video on that theme…but real-world events keep getting in the way. For example, she is down by the tracks, doing an elegiac voice-over along the lines of “these lonely railroad tracks, where the trains come no more” when 4 or 5 diesel units thunder by with a mile or so of freight cars in tow.

I was reminded of this episode by some recent discussions in the blogosphere and elsewhere. In debates about high-speed passenger rail, it’s pretty clear that many if not most people conflate “trains” with “passenger trains” and think of freight-rail, if they think of it at all, as a vestigial holdover from the railroads’ glory days. The many people who remark on U.S. passenger-rail inferiority vis-a-vis Europe rarely notice that the situation looks a bit different when it comes to freight. And in reviews of the new movie Atlas Shrugged–the principal protagonist of which is a railroad executive–there have been suggestions that it might have been better to switch the action to something more modern, rather than continuing the book’s focus on “1950s industries,” as one commenter called them, such as railroads and steel. One newspaper reviewer, describing the film’s setting, called it “2016 in an alternative retro-future where everything has the look of mid-20th-century modern, the Internet apparently was never invented (people still read papers!), and trains are how goods get from coast to coast.”

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