Into the Maelstrom

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Into the Maelstrom

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Bibliographic details

• Authors: CHRIS WELLISZ
• Published: September 3, 2024

Overview

• Title reviewed: How the World Ran Out of Everything by Peter S. Goodman.
• Review author: CHRIS WELLISZ.
• Publication: F&D Magazine, September 2024.
• Book details as given: Mariner Books, New York and Boston, 2024, 406 pp., $37.
• Scope: Narrative account of global supply-chain disruptions revealed by the COVID-19 pandemic and their social and economic consequences.

Key narratives and reporting focus

• Ground-level reporting tracing disruptions from factories in Shenzhen, China, to ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach and inland truck stops and rail yards.
• Central anecdote: the travails of Hagan Walker, an entrepreneur attempting to ship an order of plastic toys from China to U.S. customers in time for the holiday season.
• Human-impact vignettes:
  • Sailors marooned aboard an idle container ship.
  • A California farmer unable to deliver almonds to customers in the Middle East.
  • A railroad worker refused paid leave to care for a sick child.
  • Workers in meat-packing plants exposed to horrific conditions and pandemic-related deaths, including an immigrant from Myanmar who didn’t live to see her grandchild born.

Explanations of causes and structural context

• Historical and technological drivers surveyed:
  • Economic reforms that enabled China’s export-led transformation.
  • The invention of the shipping container and its effects on reducing time and expense of oceanic freight.
  • The spread of just-in-time manufacturing and how extreme inventory minimization increased vulnerability to disruptions.
• Role of management practices and incentives:
  • Critique of management consultants who promoted inventory and payroll cuts under lean manufacturing.
  • Identification of the “investor class” as the principal antagonist in Goodman’s framing, described as pursuing profit at consumers’ and workers’ expense.

Critiques of the book’s perspective and tone

• Praise:
  • Goodman’s storytelling, vivid details, and on-the-ground reporting are described as gripping and enlightening.
• Criticism:
  • Recurrent denunciations characterized as “somewhat tedious” — specifically phrases used by the reviewer: “unregulated greed” and “cold-blooded exploitation.”
  • Final chapters on re-shoring and near-shoring presented quickly and the book’s conclusion judged pessimistic.
  • Goodman stops short of advocating abolition of capitalism; instead offers limited institutional remedies.

Policy prescriptions and concluding recommendations (as presented in the book and noted by the reviewer)

• Goodman’s concluding prescriptions (as reported by the reviewer):
  • Stricter antitrust enforcement.
  • Stronger labor unions.
• Tone of conclusion:
  • Described as somewhat perfunctory and pessimistic, given the reviewer’s framing that the root problem is the “pursuit of profit.”

Source: Review by CHRIS WELLISZ of How the World Ran Out of Everything by Peter S. Goodman; F&D Magazine, September 2024.

Content in this bundle

• Into the Maelstrom
  • Into the Maelstrom (Markdown version)
  • Into the Maelstrom (PDF)