An Unexpected Victory

By Zvi Mowshowitz

A miracle occurred back in October of 2021. Everyone I have talked to about it, myself included, was shocked that it happened. It’s important to

• Understand what happened.
• Understand how and why it happened.
• Understand how we might cause it to happen again.
• Make sure everyone knows it happened.
• Update our models and actions.
• Ideally make this a turning point to save civilization.

That last one is a bit of a stretch goal, but I am being fully serious. If you’re not terrified that the United States is a dead player, you haven’t been paying attention – the whole reason this is a miracle, and that it shocked so many people, is that we didn’t think the system was capable of noticing it had a stupid, massively destructive rule with no non-trivial benefits and no defenders. Much less scrapping said rule within a day. If your model did expect it, I’m very curious to know how that is possible, and how you explain the years 2020 and 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 rule was created, and I am not making this up, because it was decided that higher stacks were not sufficiently aesthetically pleasing.
• In normal times, this was annoying but not a huge deal. But thanks to Covid-19, there was increased demand to ship containers, creating more empty containers, and less throughput to remove those containers.
• Trucking companies started accumulating empty containers.
• The companies ran out of room to store the containers, because in many places 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.
• With trucks sitting idle, there was less ability to clear containers

At peak, over a hundred full size cargo ships were queued up at the port, waiting for capacity to unload them to become available.

Then in stepped Ryan Peterson, a businessman who worked in logistics but had no special connection to the port. He took a boat tour of the harbor, which doubled as a chance to have a really long conversation with a boat captain who worked there. And then he posted a series of thirty-two tweets, ending with six action items. The first item was to change the stacking rules. Which the mayors of Los Angeles and Long Beach could do for their respective cities unilaterally.

That initial tweet got 16k retweets and 33k likes, and even the others got thousands of likes as well, so this successfully got many people’s attention. It’s worth paying attention to the details here, as this was crafted in order to spread and be persuasive, and also not crafted to make people angry or to blame anyone. It’s a call to positive action. In particular, I notice these characteristics:

• Starts with a relatable physical story of a boat ride, and a friendly tone.
• Tells a 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Makes clear that the problem will only get worse on its own, not better, for reasons that are easy to understand.
• 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.
• Gives a shovel-ready solution on how to begin to overwhelm the bottleneck, at zero cost, by allowing containers to stack more.
• 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.

Despite this, again, no one I’ve talked to about this expected the problem to be fixed.

But nine hours later the mayor of Long Beach issued an executive order allowing higher stacking. And the cargo started to move.