How the World Ran Out of Everything
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How the World Ran Out of Everything

Inside the Global Supply Chain

Peter S. Goodman
Mariner Books, 2024
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Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, massive container ships congested commercial ports worldwide because they could not unload. As New York Times global economics correspondent Peter S. Goodman reports, the ships were a key part of a crucial supply chain – one that the United States depended on for transporting products from China to the West. The pandemic caused that long-standing system to break down, threatening the workings of globalization. But Goodman explains that this collapse wasn’t solely a pandemic phenomenon. Instead, COVID revealed that the supply chain system had become fragile and unreliable due to exploited workers and corporate monopolies.

Summary

Many American companies manufacture their products in China.

When a young engineering graduate in Mississippi started a business and scored a contract to manufacture luminous, floating Sesame Street figures, he needed a place to build them in an affordable way. Though he had received an internship in California and an offer for a well-paying job, Silicon Valley did not appeal to him. He wanted to stay home in the American South and provide local people with jobs.

China provided an appealing place for Western companies to manufacture their goods. It offered advantages as an increasingly important manufacturing hub. The United States had ceased developing or nurturing manufacturing and often lacked adequate capacity. In contrast, China is rich in raw materials. It spent decades cultivating its production capacity in multiple industries, including chemicals, plastics, rubber, and metal.

Chinese factories could manufacture just about any product and its parts, and had access to necessary, sometimes rare, materials. For example, the Mississippi start-up company could communicate online ...

About the Author

Peter S. Goodman, the global economics correspondent for The New York Times, also wrote Davos Man: How the Billionaires Devoured the World and Past Due: The End of Easy Money and the Renewal of the American Economy.

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