How the West Wins from Globalization
Tony Morley, July 27th, 2025
This op-ed was published in an edited edition by the National Review, on July 25th, 2025. The unabridged is contained herein: If you'd like to support our work, please consider giving our work a bump on X/Twitter.
“America should continue to lean into what Americans produce best, brilliant minds and equally brilliant ideas, not toasters and plastic flamingos.”
The global adoption of the standardized shipping container fundamentally changed civilization across all countries, rich and poor alike. Few technologies, and certainly fewer so rudimentary in design and execution, have done more for the betterment of the world, than shipping containers, the vessels that carry them, and the ports that load and unload them.
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The United States became an economic superpower and a titan of trade, in no small part because of the global adoption of standard containers. Invention of American entrepreneur Malcom McLean who designed, and implemented the first standard containers in the mid-1950s, sailing the first container ship from the port of Newark to the port of Houston in 1956, carrying just 58, twenty-foot containers. McLean could have never known at the time that his creation, rudimentary in design though it was, would enable the largest increase in global living standards in human history, with America at the forefront of that growth.
Standardized containers reduced loading, shipping and unloading costs dramatically and immediately. As Alexander Hammond notes in his 2019 appraisal of McLean’s contribution, “In 1956, hand-loading loose cargo onto a ship in a U.S. port cost $5.86 per ton ($65.50 in 2023 money). However, thanks to McLean’s new containers, the price fell to just 16 cents per ton ($1.79 in 2023).”
The immediate, and then subsequently sustained decline in global shipping costs opened up the greatest opportunity to exploit comparative advantage civilization had ever seen. As the cost of moving energy, raw materials, parts and finished goods by sea fell, driven by continuous logistics innovation, shipping quickly became the least onerous aspect of the holistic equation for exporters and importers.
Almost instantly, on the scale of the ten-thousand-year history of the global economy, it became possible to have the raw materials for a product shipped across the world, manufactured into a finished product and then shipped back across the world for sale to the final consumer for a negligible increase in cost per unit. The sites of manufacture and consumption became progressively disconnected, with an increasing amount of manufacturing relocating to countries and regions that had a greater comparative advantage.
While this global offshoring of manufacturing was largely a migration from rich countries to low and middle-income countries, the benefits were unquestionably bi-directional. Containerization all but removed the logistics and economic impediments of trade, and in doing so made it possible for deeply impoverished countries, and the people in those countries, to climb out of poverty. Not by taking aid handouts, but by finding innovative ways to furnish rich countries with their wants and needs; from inexpensive mobile phones and computer hardware to inflatable pools, and children’s bicycles. It's the closest thing to an economic win-win for developed and developing countries alike, while doing more to lift the world’s poor out of extreme poverty than all the aid programs combined.
Between the dawn of the second wave of globalization, 1944-1971, and the third wave, 1989- today, GDP per capita in the United States grew from $19,300 (inflation-adjusted, in PPP$2017) to $65,900, while life expectancy at birth in the U.S. climbed by a little over 14 years. In short, trading with the world, and the innumerable resulting flow-on contributions, made for a richer and longer-lived America, while helping uplift the living standards and life expectancy of hundreds of millions of people across the globe. Over that same period of increasing international interconnectedness, global GDP per capita and life expectancy grew dramatically, from $3,780 and 42 years, to $17,800 and 74 years, respectively. Globalization and trade didn’t just work for some countries; it worked for nearly everyone — almost no exceptions.
“Sure enough, trade as a proportion of GDP shot up in the postwar era, and quantitative analyses have confirmed that trading countries are less likely to go to war, holding all else constant.” — Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now
Countries with higher interconnected trade have a significantly reduced likelihood of conflict beyond the superficial. Highly evolved trade systems between countries are the real mutually assured destruction, where a breakdown in trade results in both parties suffering. Globalization, and largely free trade, have, through the necessity of facilitating low-friction shipping, made trade routes economically sacred, as it was in everyone’s best interest to keep the containers freely moving. A world that turns its back on embracing the positive-sum gains of interconnectedness invariably splinters into a zero-sum game of warring factions. In fact, we ran this very experiment for nearly ten thousand years prior to the modern age of globalization with little success.
While globalization isn’t a perfect vaccination against nation state conflict, it has proven highly effective in reducing the frequency and severity of conflict, with the majority of trading countries more hesitant to enter into conflict, and more eager to find diplomatic solutions to conflicts that do arise.
Conflict aside, globalization has also proven spectacularly adept at furnishing the West with an unprecedented standard of material living. It’s easy to lose sight of just how significantly global manufacturing and the forces of comparative advantage have driven down the cost, and thus up, the availability, of the things we want and need to make for a better life. The cost of a dishwasher has fallen by 61 percent since 1979 , while air-conditioning has fallen by more than 97 percent since 1952 , and as Gale Pooley point’s out in his assessment of time price, “the time price of a refrigerator has fallen by 92.4 percent to 16.4 hours. You can get 13.2 refrigerators today for the time price of one in 1956.”
And all of that, is to say nothing of the smartphones, headphones, waterproof jackets, laptop computers, silicone spatulas and millions of other items that have become significantly less expensive and more abundant through the last fifty years of globalized trade.
The long story short is that no matter how you slice it, free markets and largely unrestricted trade have dramatically improved the lives of the average American more than nearly any other general policy position over the last four decades. The result has been much greater access to the goods and services that make the American dream possible. America should continue to lean into what Americans produce best, brilliant minds and equally brilliant ideas, not toasters and plastic flamingos.
Ultimately, continuing to lean into freedom, markets, and trade will continue to improve economic and material living standards for Americans and the global economy alike, as it has, with outstanding success, for nearly half a century.
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