Welcome back to the Ten Blocks podcast. This is Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal.

Joining me on the show

today is Jordan McGillis, who's City Journal's economics editor. Jordan writes about energy,

technology, economic innovation, geopolitics, and other issues for City Journal. Today, we're going

to discuss his superb essay from our spring issue on the 21st century waterfront,

which looks at the opposition of some longshoremen unions to automation technologies and

American ports and explores just generally the role of ports in American prosperity. So, Jordan,

thanks very much for joining us. Great to be on this side of the microphone, Brian.

Yep.

You know, your essay, and I do encourage readers to go out and check it out, reports on how

U.S. ports, especially on the East Coast, have been lagging technologically behind ports

in some other countries, which have embraced automation and robotics in a way that the U.S. ports

have not. So I wonder if you could just describe how American ports do currently stack up

against international competitors, especially China, when it comes to the adoption of automation,

robotics, artificial intelligence, this kind of technological upgrade?

Yes, there's a couple of different planes to analyze this issue from, one of which is the China

competition. And as with many other areas of the industrial economy, China is rapidly moving

from a primitive state to a state that's more advanced than ours in terms

of its production capability, its transportation capability, and indeed its logistics at ports.

China has a couple of enormous, very new, just a couple of decades-old ports near Shanghai and

then down near Shenzhen. And these ports are largely operated in autonomous

fashion. The other comparison that I think is more, a little bit more applicable, though, is

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