Have you noticed how newer flatbed semitrailers arc upwards like a hunter’s bow when they are not loaded?
I ask that question rhetorically. Friends and family members have long told me that I am fascinated by little details that don’t interest many others. But even if you haven’t noticed that newer flatbeds look increasingly like raccoons or armadillos when they barrel down I-94 empty, the phenomenon is still important.
Indeed, it is a symptom of why the regimes of Fidel Castro or Kim Jong Il are doomed to economic failure.
Some truck trailers look like arches because their designers have found ways to make a lighter structure carry the same load. That means more freight can be carried with no increase in fuel use or driver time. Society gets more done for the same use of resources, and no one in any government ministry had to take any action to develop these more efficient trucks.
Well-functioning market economies foster innovation. Centrally planned ones do not. Market economies inherently use resources more efficiently and grow faster than centrally planned ones. The U.S. flatbed semitrailer industry demonstrates how this works.
Let’s start with some details. The number of semitrailer trucks grew enormously in the decades after World War II as federally subsidized highways and cheap fuel favored trucking over railroads. Early semitrailers were built with steel frames fabricated from standard hot-rolled beams and channels like those used to construct buildings or bridges.
These components were stock items, available from any large steel warehouse. Easily drilled or welded, these materials could be handled by any of the dozens of trailer manufacturers that sprang up around the country using ordinary, inexpensive fabricating equipment.
But the loads and stresses on a moving trailer are complex. A steel beam strong enough to bear the load at the points of maximum stress is stronger than necessary elsewhere.
Moreover, every pound of excess weight in the empty tractor or trailer is a pound of sacrificed freight. A trailer that weighs one ton less than another but that will do the same job easily can mean half a million more ton-miles hauled over the life of the equipment while expending no more fuel, tires or driver time than the heavier rig. That savings gives society four free fully loaded trips from Los Angeles to New York and back for the same resources.
Thus there is a financial incentive to produce lighter trailers that will still do the job. Trailer builders who can produce lighter products will sell more of them or be able to charger a higher price than competitors who turn out heavier rigs.
Manufacturers responded by moving from hot-rolled steel frames to ones stamped and welded from thinner material but shaped to be stronger where stresses are greater and less-strong where stress is less. Soon such frame members were made from special steels that could be heat-treated for greater strength and stress-resistance after being formed.
This took more expensive fabricating equipment, including 45-foot-long heat-treating ovens, and it meant that repairs could no longer be made by simple welding, but the weight savings were considerable.
In the last decade, some manufacturers have gone to forged aluminum alloy frames. Others, including one in a small town in eastern South Dakota, now fabricate frames out of sophisticated carbon-fiber materials in a process that is as sophisticated as Boeing’s in building 777 airplane wings. Other crucial trailer components are increasingly made from magnesium and even titanium.
Some of these newer materials can tolerate more flexing than could the common steel used until recently. Manufacturers now build semitrailers with 6 to 10 inches of “camber” when not loaded. The trailers arc upward that much in the middle when empty and bend down to a flat surface when loaded. This allows the frame members to bear the load more efficiently.
Saving weight in building semitrailers is a mundane success that interests few people. But multiplied over hundreds of products, this is how economies grow and how households get more goods and services to meet their needs. It is the creation of more wealth for society.
The magic of market incentives is that no one in government had to make any decisions about producing efficient trailers or allocate any funds for trailer research. No one in a government Ministry of Planning or Transportation did a study evaluating fuel costs, driver wages and freight rates in an effort to determine the optimal trailer design.
No planning was necessary. Markets created incentives for innovation and entrepreneurs responded with innovation, just as they have hundreds of times before.
Those built-in incentives for innovation simply don’t exist in centrally planned economies.
The USSR could turn out titanium-hulled nuclear subs and build huge booster rockets when a centralized decision allocated resources to the effort. But it never developed an aluminum coal car for its railroads nor, in Croatian feminist Slavenka Drakulic’s famous example, a tampon. Central planning was as inherently isolated from consumer needs as it was from ideas about how to produce a lighter semitrailer.
Cuba and North Korea are zombie economies, already dead even if their rulers don’t realize it. Examples of why central planning failed are rolling up and down our freeways every day.
© 2003 Edward Lotterman
Chanarambie Consulting, Inc.