## Into the Maelstrom

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**Canonical URL:** [Into the Maelstrom](https://www.imf.org/en/publications/fandd/issues/2024/09/book-review-into-the-maelstrom-wellisz)

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## Bibliographic details
- Authors: CHRIS WELLISZ
- Published: September 3, 2024

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### 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.*

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_Source: https://www.imf.org/en/publications/fandd/issues/2024/09/book-review-into-the-maelstrom-wellisz_