Why an interwar cash-for-scrap scheme would not transform cargo ships

Would a post-Washington cash-for-scrap program create much faster, larger, less labor-intensive cargo ships?

Not dramatically; the decisive changes awaited mature diesel propulsion and container shipping in the postwar decades.

The interwar cargo ship occupied an economic niche that a replacement subsidy alone would do little to change. The proposed scheme could sustain shipbuilding, but its premise does not supply an economic reason for radically different cargo ships. Large changes awaited the improvements in diesel reliability and cost associated here with the 1960s and 1970s. Containerisation is then identified as the decisive change in cargo shipping, limiting what an earlier cash-for-scrap programme could achieve.