World Trade - March 2009 - (Page 8) POLICY PERSPECTIVES How Long-Haul Trucking Drove America’s Neo-Liberal Market Revolution oday’s industrial infrastructure—the combination of factories, farms, roads, rail, and everything else that makes our economy move, not to mention the rules and regulations that govern it—is so vast and complex that it’s hard to imagine it ever being different. And yet we all know that there was a day before justin-time trucking, intermodal logistics, and interstate highways. Go back far enough and you’ll find a time when canals and rivers were the primary means of moving goods. Somehow, though, we got to the day when an avocado picked in California can be in Boston within 24 hours and a toy built in China can be on a Wal-Mart shelf in Cleveland within a week. Moving from a rail-based infrastructure to a just-in-time, trucking-dominated infrastructure is hardly an overnight event; it is no understatement to call it one of the most important developments in American economic history. And it is a story about much more than rails and roads— because how we move goods is often intricately entwined with what we move, how we pay the people who move them, and what laws we pass to oversee it all. This story is the driving force (no pun intended) behind Trucking Country: The Road to America’s Wal-Mart Economy, by the University of Georgia’s Shane Hamilton. The underlying message of Trucking Country is one that anyone in the business world can learn from: technology and politics drive each other, and in turn drive everything from wages to profits to industrial turnover. T BY DANIEL GRISWOLD BY CLAY RISEN Technology and politics drive each other, and in turn drive everything from wages to profits to industrial turnover. Hamilton’s subtitle may promise an explanation of the “Wal-Mart Economy,” but his book focuses exclusively on agriculture, and specifically on the milk and beef industries. Still, there is a lot to chew over (again with the puns!): These two sectors, he promises, reveal “the extent to which the politics of the farm problem—and, by extension, labor, consumer, and business politics—were inextricable from the nation’s reliance on railroad technology.” 8 WORLD TRADE MARCH 2009 It’s a promise Hamilton largely keeps. By “farm problem,” he is referring to one of the biggest political issues of the first half of the twentieth century—namely, how to get cheap food to market while keeping farm incomes high—an issue that became particularly acute during the Great Depression. The answer, hacked together by unions, Washington New Dealers, and farm state senators, was a regulatory structure that privileged big farms and beef producers and consumers at the cost of small farmers, all relying heavily on the nation’s rail infrastructure. This political-economic balance, in turn, was big enough to support the entire, precarious New Deal coalition, which expanded the power of government into all corners of American life. But this balance began to collapse almost as soon as it was built. Advancements in truck technology, the expansion of the interstate highway system, and the emergence of logistics as a mature discipline created a new way of moving food around the country: long-haul trucking. It was more efficient, able to deliver goods directly to multiple supermarkets (another new industry) quickly, which meant not only cheaper goods but a wider variety of perishable foods could appear on consumers’ dining tables. “In an era of giant supermarkets widely distributed in suburban shopping centers,” Hamilton writes, “tractor-trailers were the only machines capable of delivering in volume to geographically diffuse customers.” This new infrastructure operated largely outside the rail-dominated, New Deal-oriented political-economic consensus. As it grew—and along with it, the companies like Wal-Mart that depended on it, and the consumers who relied on those companies, and the politicians who represented those consumers—it created a new political consensus, one that agitated against an increasingly outdated regulatory system. The result was a “neopopulist,” anti-big government movement that erupted across the country in the mid-1970s, leading to the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. “In doing so,” Hamilton concludes, “truckers and congressional deregulators paved the way for the low-wage, low-price capitalism that would define the final decades of the twentieth-century U.S. political economy.” WT Clay Risen is the author of A Nation on Fire: America in the Wake of the King Assassination
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