Airplanes today fly no faster than they did in the 1970s. In many countries, road speeds have decreased. Flying cars never showed up. In developed countries, the tallest buildings have only inched higher. Most rich countries produce less energy per capita than they did 20 years ago, and the cost of building new physical infrastructure like railways seems to rise inexorably. Yet cruise ships continue to grow: a natural experiment in what can be achieved outside the constraints that have stifled progress on dry land. (...)
The great stagnation in everything but cruise ships
New buildings, airplanes, bridges, and trains built today are often barely distinguishable from those built decades earlier, apart from often costing much more money. There is some incremental progress, especially in safety and energy efficiency, but in many areas we have stopped making performance records at all. In some, like the speed of the fastest passenger airplanes, we have even gone backward. (...)
The cruise industry, in contrast, continues to break records. The title of world’s largest passenger ship has been broken nine times so far this century, including three times in the last five years. The trend for ever-larger cruise ships accelerated around the turn of the millennium when Carnival Cruise Line’s Sunshine became the first passenger ship to exceed 100,000 gross tons in 1995. By 2008 Oasis of the Seas had more than doubled that record at 226,000 gross tons. (...)
Passenger numbers have also increased from just over 7 million passengers per year in 2000 to 31.7 million in 2023. The industry suffered badly during the Covid-19 pandemic, beginning with the high-profile Covid outbreak aboard the Diamond Princess off the coast of Japan in February 2020, resulting in the quarantine of the 3,700 people on board. Subsequent lockdowns, capacity limits, and mask mandates that persisted long after widespread vaccination all contributed to depressed passenger numbers. But new megaships like Icon have driven a strong post-Covid recovery, and passenger numbers and revenues in 2023 surpassed pre-pandemic records.
Part of the reason for the relatively slower progress of physical infrastructure projects, compared to rapid progress in digital technologies, is sheer technological difficulty. Software products can be built rapidly and iteratively improved. Mistakes can usually be easily rectified by editing offending lines of code. When, on the other hand, Ford discovered in the late 1990s that ignition switches in its cars could cause fires, it had to recall 14.9 million vehicles.
But not all differences between the rates of progress in the worlds of bits and of atoms can be explained by technological difficulty. In the United States, housing, medical care, and childcare costs have risen faster than overall inflation since 2000, while consumer electronics, digital services, and small manufactured goods have become significantly cheaper in real terms. British researchers found something similar: in industries where increasing supply requires building new physical infrastructure, like houses, electricity pylons, power stations, and new railway lines, prices have risen. (...)
The cruise industry, in contrast, continues to break records. The title of world’s largest passenger ship has been broken nine times so far this century, including three times in the last five years. The trend for ever-larger cruise ships accelerated around the turn of the millennium when Carnival Cruise Line’s Sunshine became the first passenger ship to exceed 100,000 gross tons in 1995. By 2008 Oasis of the Seas had more than doubled that record at 226,000 gross tons. (...)
Passenger numbers have also increased from just over 7 million passengers per year in 2000 to 31.7 million in 2023. The industry suffered badly during the Covid-19 pandemic, beginning with the high-profile Covid outbreak aboard the Diamond Princess off the coast of Japan in February 2020, resulting in the quarantine of the 3,700 people on board. Subsequent lockdowns, capacity limits, and mask mandates that persisted long after widespread vaccination all contributed to depressed passenger numbers. But new megaships like Icon have driven a strong post-Covid recovery, and passenger numbers and revenues in 2023 surpassed pre-pandemic records.
Part of the reason for the relatively slower progress of physical infrastructure projects, compared to rapid progress in digital technologies, is sheer technological difficulty. Software products can be built rapidly and iteratively improved. Mistakes can usually be easily rectified by editing offending lines of code. When, on the other hand, Ford discovered in the late 1990s that ignition switches in its cars could cause fires, it had to recall 14.9 million vehicles.
But not all differences between the rates of progress in the worlds of bits and of atoms can be explained by technological difficulty. In the United States, housing, medical care, and childcare costs have risen faster than overall inflation since 2000, while consumer electronics, digital services, and small manufactured goods have become significantly cheaper in real terms. British researchers found something similar: in industries where increasing supply requires building new physical infrastructure, like houses, electricity pylons, power stations, and new railway lines, prices have risen. (...)
Compared with large-scale construction projects on land, the cruise industry is something of an outlier. Large modern cruise ships are sometimes even cheaper in real terms to manufacture than flag carriers of the past when measured per gross ton in 2024 dollars. The steady improvement of European shipbuilding suggests that it isn’t technological difficulty, a lack of skills, or the prices of raw materials that make infrastructure expensive in Europe, but flawed rules and institutions.
Cruise fares have also fallen in real terms. A cruise forum user unearthed a Royal Caribbean brochure from 1983 that shows pricing for its first dedicated cruise ship, Song of Norway. The prices indicated are per person based on two people sharing a room. The cheapest seven-day Caribbean cruise fare is $995 (about $3,000 dollars in 2024 prices) per person for an interior room. An equivalent cruise in 2024 aboard Royal Caribbean’s Freedom of the Seas was roughly five times cheaper, at around $600 dollars per person. A balcony room in 1983 cost $1,750 ($5,500 per person in 2024 prices) while a balcony on an equivalent weeklong Caribbean cruise aboard Wonder of the Seas (constructed in 2022) only cost around $1,000 per person in 2024. Even on Icon, which is in greatest demand, a balcony cabin costs around $1,700 dollars per person.
And it’s not simply that cruise lines are managing to cram more people into a smaller space on modern ships. If we divide the gross tonnage of a ship by its passenger capacity we find that each passenger on Icon of the Seas has about 33 percent more space than they would aboard Song of Norway. (...)
Cruise ships spend their lives either temporarily docked at a port or out at sea, where they impose almost no localized negative externalities and there is therefore little drive to subject them to national regulation.
They also have a trump card they can play to escape regulation that might come their way: the flag of convenience. Each ship sails under a specific nation’s flag, obliging it to abide by the laws and regulations of that nation. Cruise liners, because they are mobile, can choose which flag to fly. (...)
Cruise ships are held back – by land
Cruise ships could be even bigger and more numerous. The main limiting factor is not the ships themselves, but the land-based infrastructure with which they interact, such as ports, bridges, and canals.
The issue with ports is depth. Engineers therefore aim to maximize gross tonnage (the overall internal volume of a ship) without excessively increasing its length or draught (how deep a ship projects into the water). Typically, a heavier ship would be built with a larger draught to provide stability, but this curtails the range of ports that large cruise ships can access. Popular tourist destinations like Venice and Santorini have ports that can no longer accommodate the largest cruise ships. Deepwater ports like Miami and Barcelona have the necessary depth to handle vessels with significant draughts and typically provide better infrastructure for large numbers of passengers. As large cruise ships proliferate, more artificial deepwater ports like the international cruise port in Cozumel, Mexico, are being built to meet demand.
With ports limiting maximum draughts and important bridges restricting maximum sailing heights, the latest generation of megaships has expanded outward, resulting in the distinctive wide profile of modern vessels. The largest cruise ships are now too wide to use the Panama Canal, which can only take ships up to 51.5 meters in width, and must instead sail around Cape Horn if they are being redeployed from America’s East Coast to the West Coast or South Pacific.
by Michael Hopkins, Works in Progress | Read more:
Images: uncredited
