Since I couldn’t find it quickly on the web, GPT o1 estimated that the labour hours per ton kilometer of trucking is about 100 times as much as ships, and rail is just about the same as ships (I would have thought rail would have been at least a few times higher than ships). So based on the historic US and current Europe, maybe water transport in the US would increase an order of magnitude if the Jones act were repealed. As Zvi points out, even though the US ship manufacturing jobs would be lost, there probably would be an increase overall shipping employment because of repairing ships and staffing ships. So let’s say staffing the ships is 3 times as much as the current employment of manufacturing and staffing very few ships. I suspect that most of the lost inland transportation due to the shift from shipping would be rail, but even if 10% of it were trucking, that would mean the loss of jobs in trucking would be 10 times as much as the staffing of the additional ships, and 30 times as much as the employment constructing and staffing the current ships.[1] So if you had to compensate 30 times as many people, it would be much more difficult. Now it is true that the majority of total cost of rail and shipping is energy (it’s about even between energy and labour for trucking), so the large overall economic savings of moving to shipping should be sufficient to compensate all those truckers, but it’s just not nearly the slamdunk that it appeared to be when only looking at marine employment.
Technically not all the freight that would be moved by ships is currently moved by truck/rail/pipeline because a smaller amount gets transported because of the higher cost. But using Zvi’s example of $0.63 per barrel increase, since it is 42 gallons per barrel, that’s 1.5 cents/gallon, or ~0.5% of the total cost, which wouldn’t change quantity demanded very much, well within other uncertainties of this analysis.
Since I couldn’t find it quickly on the web, GPT o1 estimated that the labour hours per ton kilometer of trucking is about 100 times as much as ships, and rail is just about the same as ships (I would have thought rail would have been at least a few times higher than ships). So based on the historic US and current Europe, maybe water transport in the US would increase an order of magnitude if the Jones act were repealed. As Zvi points out, even though the US ship manufacturing jobs would be lost, there probably would be an increase overall shipping employment because of repairing ships and staffing ships. So let’s say staffing the ships is 3 times as much as the current employment of manufacturing and staffing very few ships. I suspect that most of the lost inland transportation due to the shift from shipping would be rail, but even if 10% of it were trucking, that would mean the loss of jobs in trucking would be 10 times as much as the staffing of the additional ships, and 30 times as much as the employment constructing and staffing the current ships.[1] So if you had to compensate 30 times as many people, it would be much more difficult. Now it is true that the majority of total cost of rail and shipping is energy (it’s about even between energy and labour for trucking), so the large overall economic savings of moving to shipping should be sufficient to compensate all those truckers, but it’s just not nearly the slamdunk that it appeared to be when only looking at marine employment.
Technically not all the freight that would be moved by ships is currently moved by truck/rail/pipeline because a smaller amount gets transported because of the higher cost. But using Zvi’s example of $0.63 per barrel increase, since it is 42 gallons per barrel, that’s 1.5 cents/gallon, or ~0.5% of the total cost, which wouldn’t change quantity demanded very much, well within other uncertainties of this analysis.