This aerial picture taken on July 11, 2024 shows Royal Caribbean’s “Utopia Of The Seas,” billed as … [+] the world’s largest cruise ship, docked at Port Canaveral in Cape Canaveral, Florida. (Photo by Miguel J. Rodriguez Carrillo / AFP) (Photo by MIGUEL J. RODRIGUEZ CARRILLO/AFP via Getty Images)
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Coco Cay, Bahamas – Royal Caribbean’s Utopia of the Seas cruise ship had its maiden voyage just last month. Construction of what exceeds 1,100 feet in length took place in Saint-Nazare, France, but it’s more realistic to say that this monument to the vastness of the human imagination was produced around the world. And that’s no insight.
What’s so big, what’s so fast, and what defies description in consideration of the myriad of features on board speaks to something that’s well beyond the capacity of Saint-Nazare’s inhabitants to create. And that’s not only not an insight, it’s also not an insult of those who live and work in Saint-Nazare.
When it’s remembered that something as basic as a pencil is a brilliant consequence of impressive amounts of global cooperation, what can be said about the almost tiring vastness of the Utopia of the Seas? Really, how to describe that which moves so fast on the ocean, but that entertains thousands of passengers of varying interests all day and night for three and four-day excursions? If Amazon is “the everything store,” Utopia is the everything ship full of endless eating, swimming, sporting, and entertainment options. Which is a description that most certainly insults the ship’s vastness. Better to just check it out, ideally in person (particularly if you have very generous in-laws), but at least online. Then marvel. In particular, marvel at the incredibly sophisticated blending of global effort, parts and knowledge that was necessary to create the Utopia in five short years.
In his uneven but at times wildly insightful 2011 book Adapt, Tim Harford wrote about an individual who set out to build a rather prosaic toaster oven all on his own. Ok, not so fast with prosaic and toaster. As Harford noted, an ordinary model “has more than 400 components and sub-components, made from nearly 100 different materials,” after which consider all the components, sub-components, and materials that go into the making of those 400 components, sub-components, and materials. It wears you out just thinking about it, and this is but a toaster oven.
Needless to say, the end result of this individual endeavor was a much-less-than-sleek looking toaster oven that soon enough wasn’t one. It broke. Harford’s essential point was that an individual could spend his life constructing a toaster that wouldn’t measure up to the cheapest version on sale at retailers, and that likely wouldn’t last long as is.
Contemplate the limits of the individual working alone relative to the Utopia of the Seas. To then say that it’s a spectacular product of staggering amounts of globalized cooperation of man and machine insults statement of the obvious. It also raises the obvious question of the why behind embrace of tariffs and other barriers to the allegedly dirty word that is “globalization.” Utopia of the Seas rejects such anti-progress thinking.
That’s because there’s quite simply no way the Utopia of the Seas would exist absent mostly free global trade. Not a chance. Not only would the cost of the Utopia’s production in a parts and labor sense soar exponentially if it were constructed in autarkic fashion, it’s arguably even truer to say that limits of human knowledge within any one country would make construction of something so vast an utter impossibility.
Interesting about all this is that the Utopia of the Seas set sail during a summer in which Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are battling it out for the right to be president of the United States. As part of their battle, both are telling voters they’ll employ tariffs aimed at substantially raising the cost of cooperation for individuals and machines the world over. In Harris’s case, she likely just doesn’t know that it literally “takes a world” to create any market good. In Trump’s case, the fact that his last name can be found on buildings around the world signals that he intimately knows what Harris doesn’t.
Despite this, both candidates have made their support of tariffs about protecting the typical worker. A walk of the Utopia of the Seas (more than a few Make America Great Again caps were spotted by yours truly) calls such a stance into question. Jeff Bezos’s yacht is 417 feet to Utopia’s 1,100+ feet, but the working-men and women on Bezos’s Koru are working.
On the Utopia of the Seas they’re playing in a fashion that even people like Bezos couldn’t have imagined not terribly long ago, not to mention the 2,000+ that the Utopia employs. Royal Caribbean’s latest (but certainly not its last) creation is a reminder that free trade doesn’t just bless workers with plenty at prices that continue to decline, it can also lay claim to substantial work opportunities as a consequence of people working together without regard to country origin.
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Publish date : 2024-08-29 10:02:00
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