6 Containers High vs 2 Containers High

Source: TheZvi, Oct 2021

First, the setup.

• The Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach together are responsible for a huge percentage of shipping into the Western United States.
• There was a rule in the Port saying you could only stack shipping containers two containers high.
• This is despite the whole point of shipping containers being to stack them on top of each other so you can have a container ship.
• This rule was created, and I am not making this up, because it was decided that higher stacks were not sufficiently aesthetically pleasing.
• If you violated this rule, you lost your right to operate at the port.
  In normal times, this was annoying but not a huge deal.
• Thanks to Covid-19, there was increased demand to ship containers, creating more empty containers, and less throughput to remove those containers.
• Normally one would settle this by changing prices, but for various reasons we won’t get into price mechanisms aren’t working properly to fix supply shortages.
• Trucking companies started accumulating empty containers.
  The companies ran out of room to store the containers, because they could only stack them in stacks of two, and there was no practical way to move the containers off-site.
• Trucks were forced to sit there with empty containers rather than hauling freight.
• This made all the problems worse, in a downward spiral, resulting in a standstill throughout the port.
• This was big enough to threaten the entire supply chain, and with it the economy, at least of the Western United States and potentially of the whole world via cascading problems. And similar problems are likely happening elsewhere.
• Everyone in the port, or at least a lot of them, knew this was happening.
• None of those people managed to do anything about the rule, or even get word out about the rule. No reporters wrote up news reports. No one was calling for a fix. The supply chain problems kept getting worse and mostly everyone agreed not to talk about it much and hope it would go away.
• A bureaucrat insisting that stacked containers are an eyesore, causing freight to pile up because trucks are stuck sitting on empty containers, thus causing a cascading failure that destroys supply lines and brings down the economy. That certainly sounds like something that was in an early draft of Atlas Shrugged but got crossed out as too preposterous for anyone to take seriously.

 

Then our hero enters, and decides to coordinate and plan a persuasion campaign to get the rule changed. Here’s how I think this went down.

• He in advance arranges for various sources to give him a signal boost when the time comes, in various ways.
• He designs the message for a format that will have maximum reach and be maximally persuasive.
• This takes the form of an easy to tell physical story, that he pretends to have only discovered now.
• Since all actual public discourse now takes place on Twitter, it takes the form of a Twitter thread, which I will reproduce here in full.

 A call to positive action.

1. Starts with a relatable physical story of a boat ride, and a friendly tone.
2. Tells a (mostly manufactured) story that implies (without saying anything false) how the ride led him to figure these things out, which gives rhetorical cover to everyone else for not knowing about or talking about the problem. We can all decide to pretend this was discovered today.
3. Then he invokes social consensus by saying that ‘everyone agrees‘ that the bottleneck is yard space. Which is true, as far as I can tell, everyone did agree on that. Which of course implies that everyone also knows there is a bottleneck, and that the port is backed up, and why this is happening. The hidden question of why no one is doing much about this is deflected by starting off pretending (to pretend?) that the boat ride uncovered the problem.
4. Describes a clear physical problem that everyone can understand, in simple terms that everyone can understand but that don’t talk down to anyone. He makes this look easy. It is not easy, it is hard.
5. Makes clear that the problem will only get worse on its own, not better, for reasons that are easy to understand.
6. Makes clear the scope of the problem. Port of Long Beach effectively shuts down, we can’t ship stuff, potential global economic collapse. Not clear that it would be anything like that bad, but it could be.
7. Gives a decision principle that’s simple, a good slogan and again can be understood by everyone, and that doesn’t have any obvious objections: Overwhelm the bottleneck.
8. Gives a shovel-ready solution on how to begin to overwhelm the bottleneck, at zero cost, by allowing containers to stack more.
9. Gives more shovel-ready solutions on top of that, so that (A) someone might go and do some of those as well, (B) someone can do the first easy thing and look like it’s some sort of compromise because they didn’t do the other things, (C) encourage others to come up with more ideas and have a conversation and actually physically think about the problem and (D) make it clear the focus is on finding solutions and solving problems, and not on which monkey gets the credit banana.
10. Makes it clear solutions are non-rivalrous. We can do all of them, and should, but also do any one of them now.
11. Gives a sense of urgency, and also a promise of things getting better right away. Not only can you act today, Sir, you are blameworthy tomorrow if you do not act, and you will see results and rewards tomorrow if you do act. Not only reactions to the announcements, physical results on the ground. That’s powerful stuff.
12. Ends by noting that leadership is what is missing. You could be leadership and demonstrate you’re a good leader, or you can not do that and demonstrate the opposite. Whoever solves this is the leader.

The whole scenario is maximally designed to facilitate persuasion and action. Clear physical problem, clear physical solution, clear authority to implement it, no drawbacks, no losers, no cost, no associations with sensitive topics or unfortunate implications from any direction, it’s all good, you can simply do the thing and the thing is done and things are better, that’s it, no really, that’s it.