breathing life into an account of business shakedowns- The Week

Globalisation. It had a nice ring to it for long. The cure and panacea for all our ills. Want to increase your GDP? Get globalised. Want to get jobs and improve your living standards? Globalisation, it is. Want to solve wars and bilateral strife? Globalisation was the way to go since, as the logic went, a ‘global’ economy where every country was interconnected with each other would ensure peace and stability.

Yes, indeed, globalisation was nice, goody and aspirational. Until, of course, an invisible virus put paid to all those rose-tinted visions—first by going global itself, and then ripping down a fragile global supply-demand ecosystem down to the wire while at it. That is the story, in compelling detail, that The New York Times’ global economics correspondent Peter S Goodman weaves out in his book, How The World Ran Out of Everything.

The heady nineties surely had a lot to do with it. The end of the Cold War, the rise of China and the neoliberalism that swept much of the world (remember Clinton mania and Cool Britannia in the West, and India’s own heady days during the initial flush of liberalisation?) gave rise to ebullient visions of the ‘end of history’, where the pursuit of happiness, and wealth, seemed like all that was to it. Post-GATT and WTO, it led to the rise in prominence of global corporations and, more importantly, a global scale of operations, where companies spread out their production (a good chunk of it to China) and depended on an intricately, but precisely, mapped logistic chain to handle.

Between sweatshop labourers in the mainland and a final consumer of, say, a mobile phone in the mid-west of the US would be a complex chain of warehouses, shipping companies, transhipment ports and container terminals, delivery vehicles and an army of professionals from the assemblers on the factory floor to a retail exec at a supermarket checkout counter. The difference was that the entire network was so smooth and seamless that no one realised it. Or bothered.

Until the pandemic hit and the supply chain mismatch hit the aam janta. As global as the virus was, it manifested in anything from massive cargo ships either filled with containers and waiting for a slot at ports, where, ironically, empty ships waited for orders before going back. Or factories that stopped producing because of a lack of orders (or demand) compared to empty supermarkets that could not arrange supplies.

Goodman takes the entire shakedown we were familiar with from the business headlines during this 2021-2022 period and gives life to it. In the form of voices of people on the frontlines of this supply chain crash, from consumers who could not get the infant formula for their newborn child to train engineers who found to their horror how this saw goods being misrouted, leading to disastrous consequences. He also brings in voices, anyone from the CEO to the factory floor worker, and paints a picture that global inequality may just be the unwanted child of the traumatic union of a pandemic and a global logistics unravelling. This book is essential not just to understand how it all happened and get a ringside view but also to comprehend how greed is at the root of it all, a lesson that shouldn’t be forgotten.

How The World Ran Out of Everything: Inside the Global Supply Chain

Author: Peter S. Goodman

Published by: Mariner Books/Harper Collins India

Pages 404

Price: Rs 599 (Paperback)

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