GeoHistory News | Q3 2024
Longshoremen strike, Mexico – Spain conflict, how Islam propelled Europe more than Protestantism, and more
This is the update on everything that happened this quarter to do with topics we’ve covered in the past. Today, two long notes (free) and 13 short notes (premium):
The longshoremen strike in the US
The conflict between Mexico’s President and Spain’s King
How Islam propelled Europe & Protestantism didn’t
The Industrial Revolution was not that revolutionary
Why the UK was the first to start the Industrial Revolution
Malthus was right in the past
Greek houses got big fast!
How the weakening of the Byzantine Empire and the strengthening of the Arab Empire affected Europe
You can see the scars of the war in Ukraine from space
At one point, there were only ~1,000 humans left
Israel’s ultra-orthodox must serve in the military
Florence today is like the Florence of yesteryear
We can now experience what history was like
What determines the shape of different alphabets?
Democracy doesn’t increase economic growth
It combines the content of two articles, so we’ll just have this article this week.
The Longshoremen Strike vs History
The longshoremen (dockers, people loading and unloading ships) of the US East Coast were on strike last week:
"I will cripple you, and you have no idea what that means. Nobody does."—Harold Dagget, Chief Negotiator for the International Longshoremen Association.
He continued:
"When my men hit the streets from Maine to Texas, every single port will be 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."
The strike was postponed to January 2025 to avoid the holidays and wait for a new government, and workers got a 61.5% increase in wages in the meantime. But they haven’t reached an agreement yet and the strike could start again, so it’s important to understand the huge stakes here.
What Did Longshoremen Want?
First, we need to understand the perspective of longshoremen, the workers who load and unload cargo from ships at a port.
What they see is that transportation companies make billions in revenue, and they are the ones moving the stuff. They want in! Many of them have also suffered accidents at work. The job is not easy. So they want a bigger share of the profits!
That’s why, to them, asking for a 77% increase in income seems to be “what they deserve”.
They also say they want to ban any automation. Why? Because they don’t want to see this:
They know that automation destroys jobs. They want to protect their jobs, progress be damned.
But this automation is why the port of Shanghai manages nearly as many containers as all US ports combined! It’s why the port of Rotterdam is much more productive than Oakland’s!
Rotterdam has the largest seaport in Europe and 10th in the world for cargo tonnage. The dock is 42km long and moves ~500m tons of cargo a year. It's operated by <20 people onsite.
This longshoreman from LA explains it well, as automation is reducing costs on the West Coast and increasing productivity and reliability, but all he sees is lost jobs:
So US longshoremen have been fighting automation so much that none of the top 50 most efficient ports in the world are American. US ports are 50% slower than the average. Meanwhile, Chinese ports work 24/7 and unload containers 3x faster.
So are they right in their requests? Is this strike justified?
How Justified Is the Strike?
It depends on how much they already make, right? We don’t know that, but we have a sense. This is from New York port longshoremen in 2018, before the previous hike. Their current salaries are likely much higher today.
I read somewhere that they only make $39/h. With about 210 days worked a year and 8h per day, that’s $65k—the median US income.1 Where does the rest come from?
This sentence can give us a clue:
I’m sure not all longshoremen do this, but this case is not unique:
Daggett, the chief negotiator of the International Longshoremen Association (ILA) I mentioned before, does not seem like the paradigm of a hard-working blue-collar worker or a serious person:
The union baron earned $728,000 last year from the ILA, plus another $173,000 as president emeritus of a local union branch, Politico reported.
He previously owned a 76-foot yacht, the Obsession, and has been spotted by his members riding in a Bentley, according to The New York Times.
The Justice Department, which has reportedly lost two cases against Mr Daggett, has accused him of being an “associate” of the Genovese crime family — one of the infamous “Five Families” of the US Mafia.
Charged with racketeering in 2005, Mr Daggett, took the witness stand and portrayed himself as a mob target, despite evidence against him from a turncoat Mafia enforcer saying he was under the mob’s control, the New York Times reported.
During that trial, one of Mr Daggett’s co-defendants, a renowned mobster named Lawrence Ricci, disappeared. His decomposing body was found in the trunk of a car outside a New Jersey diner several weeks later, with the killing still unsolved.—The Telegraph
Daggett thinks automated tolling on highways is bad because it destroys jobs.
My guess from this series of evidence is that there is likely salary inflation—people are paid for work they don’t always do. But of course, not only that. They make a lot of money from the work they actually do, like overtime and touch fees. From here:
You’ve heard about our crumbling highways and bridges? And the $1.2 TRILLION infrastructure bill Congress passed to fix them? Well, the primary culprit for that damage? Heavy loads.
The rest of the world gets it. They offload containers onto barges or feeder ships to save their roads and reduce fatalities. It’s called short sea shipping.
Europe: Big ship arrives ➡️ 🏗️ moves container ➡️ terminal ➡️ 🏗️ onto a barge ➡️ barge sails to a smaller port ➡️ 🏗️ onto a truck ➡️ short drive to warehouse.
That’s 3 crane *touches*
US (ILA ports): Big ship arrives ➡️ 🏗️ moves container ➡️ truck 🚛 drives *hundreds of miles.*
That’s 1 union crane *touch*
Why? Because every time the union crane *touches* a container, the union rakes in a massive fee.
So it’s somehow cheaper to truck containers hundreds of miles and let taxpayers foot the road repair bill than let the union *touch* it two more times for short sea shipping to work.
Only in America.
It’s so expensive for bulk carriers to move around that they go to ports farther away to avoid these waiting times.
So longshoremen make twice as much as the median US income and oppose automation. These facts are part of why the productivity of "Other transportation and support activities"—which includes marine cargo handling—has declined by 29% in the last 35 years:
You should be irate.
Is this normal? No. In the 1950s, containers reduced the cost of loading cargo from $6/ton to $0.16/ton. That’s what’s normal. Back then, union leaders didn’t realize that automation was coming for their jobs. They estimated that maybe 33% of their jobs would be automated away, but between 1963 and 1976, they lost 75%. This is good, because it means lower transportation costs for everybody. And that is crucial.
The Importance of Cheap Transportation Costs
Let’s take the example of touch fees. Since they’re so expensive, transportation is moving from seas and rivers to roads. But road transportation is an order of magnitude more expensive!
This is bad, because historically, reducing transportation costs has been the safest way to increase wealth. As I shared in Starship Will Change Humanity Soon, there is a maximum distance that a business can send their goods, after which transportation costs are too high:
Now if you halve the cost per km, you can double the distance:
But by doubling the distance, you are multiplying the number of cities that can be reached by 4.
And thanks to network effects, a network that has 4x more nodes is 16x more valuable, because value grows with the square of nodes, and 42=16.
And that’s with a 2x reduction in costs! Imagine what a 10x reduction could do! Theoretically, it generates 10,000x more possible business.
Now these numbers don’t fully apply here, because for most goods I assume transportation costs are not the limiting factor. But it does give you a sense of how sensitive we are to transportation costs. This is why it’s important to keep them low.
We do have evidence of how transportation costs have affected GDP in real life: This paper studied how the development of the US railroad affected the US economy. It found that:
Railroads were 36x cheaper than wagon transportation: 0.63c vs 23.1c.
Without railroads, the US GDP would have been 28% lower by the end of the 19th century—an annual loss of $3.4B in 1890 dollars.
The railroad investment paid for itself within 2 years, when measured as cost vs GDP growth.
When a county got 23% more market access thanks to railroads, compared to other counties, their overall productivity increased by 20%, and labor expenditure also increased by 20% (20% more in salaries!).
So it’s a matter of national importance to keep transportation costs low.
But the longshoremen union blocks that. Why is it so powerful?
Labor Monopolies
We all know that monopolies are bad: Monopolists can charge much more than when there’s competition.
The union of longshoremen is a monopoly because it controls most employees of the critical infrastructure of ports.
Unions make sense when they face employers who control the hiring market2 and can impose abusively low salaries. But this is not the case today. The US unemployment rate is at 4.2%, near historical lows. If certain ports offered low salaries, most longshoremen could just go elsewhere. Competition would be regulating their salaries.
Instead, they form a labor monopoly in critical infrastructure that can cripple the economy now with a strike, or cripple it in the future through lack of automation and productivity improvements, which would increase transportation costs for goods and decrease wealth for all.
What Mexico’s President Got Wrong About Spain
Claudia Sheinbaum is the new President of Mexico. At her inauguration last Tuesday, something was amiss: The King of Spain, Felipe VI, wasn’t there, since he hadn’t been invited. Why? Because he didn’t want to apologize for Spain’s role in historical crimes against American natives.
Now after our recent series on the history of Mexico, we are well equipped to understand what happened and whether an apology is in order. So today we’ll do a quick tour of what we learned to elucidate this question.
The Problem
Back in 2019, the previous Mexican President, AMLO, sent a letter to the King of Spain.
In it, he asked the King to apologize on behalf of Spain for the conquest and subsequent colonization of Mexico:
Should he? Well, that depends on what exactly happened.
The Aztecs
When Cortés arrived in Mesoamerica in the early 1500s, he was an outlaw breaking a mandate, and Mexico didn’t exist. Meanwhile, the Aztec Triple Alliance was in the middle of a conquest campaign—in green below.
But the Aztecs were foreign invaders! They didn’t come from the Valley of Mexico! They likely came from the northwestern part of Mesoamerica.
And they were recent invaders!
Tenochtitlan was founded less than 200y before the arrival of the Spaniards
The 1st king of the Mexica was crowned just 150y earlier
The Aztec Triple Alliance formed less than 100y earlier
Now, how nice were these foreign invaders? Not very (sensitive readers should skip this part). Tenochtitlan displayed walls of its enemies’ skulls. During their rise, they killed and skinned the daughter of an allied king!
The Aztecs sacrificed tens of thousands of people. They practiced cannibalism. They had a special treatment for children, breaking their bones, burning their feet, and etching their skin, to make sure they cried a lot to placate the gods of rain.
The Other Natives
Not nice is definitely how some other peoples viewed the Aztecs. The Aztecs had been trying to subdue the Tlaxcalans, who were fighting for their lives and their independence, when the Spaniards arrived. The Tlaxcalans helped the Spaniards and in exchange remained largely independent, and they remain so to this day.
Not only that. The Tlaxcalans used the Spanish in their internal wars, conquering the city of Cholula, which had recently abandoned them in favor of the Aztecs.
The Tlaxcalans were not the only ones to use the Spaniards. The Totonacs did, too. In fact, it’s not clear who used whom the most.
Even some Aztec allies turned on the Aztecs! The Aztecs were made up of the triple alliance of the Tlacopan, Texcoco, and Mexica people of Tenochtitlan. Texcoco turned on Tenochtitlan as the alliance of Tlaxcala, Spain, and other natives gained the upper hand.
Mexico vs Spain?
Another fact is that Mexico didn’t exist back then, nor did Spain. Mexico was a bunch of incohesive and budding civilizations. Spain was the union of Castilla and Aragón, but was not yet united. And Hernán Cortés was acting on his own, not sanctioned by the Crown.
Even the name of “Mexico” is confusing. The Mexica were just one of many ethnic groups in Mesoamerica, and they didn’t even come from the Valley of Mexico, but from the northwest. They eventually settled in the middle of Lake Texcoco and built Tenochtitlan, but most other cities in the region were neither Aztec nor Mexica.
And since Tenochtitlan was decimated during the Spanish invasion, the descendants of present-day Mexico are mostly not Mexica!
So why name the country “Mexico”?
Because Spain made Tenochtitlan the new capital, and used the name of its former inhabitants: Mexica ➡️ Mexico City.
When Mexico became independent, it was fashionable to name new countries for their capital city:
Rome ➡️ Roman Empire
Byzantium ➡️ Byzantine Empire
Mexico ➡️ Mexican Empire
The capital and countries of Guatemala, Salvador, and Panama also share their names.
But little remains of the Mexica people, and present-day Mexico is certainly not their heir except for the name!
So one way to look at this is that Spain invaded Mexico.
Another is that a guy led an expedition to quell a bloodthirsty foreign invasion and liberate the region of Mesoamerica. Present-day Mexico has nothing to do with these old foreign invaders.
Whites?
Today’s Mexicans have a mix of native and Spanish blood. About half of the Mexican genetic code is Spanish, and a majority of Mexicans have at least some Spanish blood.
These are the descendants of the Spanish conquerors: Present-day Spaniards are the ones who did not invade. So should all the white Mexicans apologize for what their forebears did?
Should that include the entire cabinet of the new Mexican President?
To be clear, the Spanish did commit lots of hideous acts we wouldn’t sanction today, as AMLO highlights in his letter:
The principle of the royal fifth (tax) was violated.
The Catholic faith was imposed, and Catholic temples were built over ancient pyramids using their materials.
Slavery and the encomiendas system were established.
Lands owned by indigenous peoples were usurped and distributed to colonizers and religious orders.
A sustained plundering of natural resources, particularly through mining, took place.
A social order based on caste and racial segregation was imposed.
The Spanish language was imposed, and there was a systematic destruction of Mesoamerican cultures.
After Mexico’s independence on September 21, 1821, following eleven years of war (1810-1821), Spain made several unsuccessful attempts at reconquest, causing significant damage to the nation.
Between 1821 and 1854, Spain sent various military incursions.
The true question is: Was this better or worse than what the region would have gone through without Spain? Based on the evidence, I think it was probably better, but we can’t know.
More importantly, I think all previous societies were assholes, and singling out the worst assholes doesn’t help. We should study their behavior and renegue on it, but if we start apologizing, where should we start? Should a Londoner apologize for all the British conquests? For the French blood on his hands from the invasions of the Franks in 1066? For the Anglo-Saxon invasions of the 1st millennium AD? For the elimination of the Beaker culture? Of the Neanderthals?
But surely some apologies are good, like when Australia apologized to its natives, or Germany for Nazi sins. So what’s the difference?
I think the true meaning of an apology is: never again. Germany in 1951 still had a population that supported Nazism. Native discrimination has a recent past in Australia. Catholic Church priests still have pedophiles.
But is Spain about to conquer Mexico? That’s why I think that the message from AMLO3 and Claudia Sheinbaum to Spain is politically motivated and hypocritical: It’s not really about finding out what happened and making sure it doesn’t happen again. It’s about earning status points for themselves.
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