How the World Ran Out of Everything Paints an Incomplete Picture of Pandemic-Era Supply-Chain Woes

Although Peter Goodman’s new book raises some valid concerns, none of them sufficiently compensate for the book’s shortcomings.

A t its most basic, the supply-chain crisis of 2020–2021 isn’t difficult to understand. Factories and their suppliers ran short of workers due to illness and pandemic-related lockdowns while consumers, leery of venturing outside and flush with stimulus dollars, shifted their purchases toward buying stuff instead of services. Trips to the gym and Disneyworld were out while binging Disney+ (and other streaming services) on the new TV — perhaps while working out on new home-exercise equipment — was in.

When demand for consumer goods spikes while companies’ ability to supply them is simultaneously restricted, disruption is inevitable.

While stresses and strains in the face of such seismic shocks — and few come bigger than a global pandemic — are understandable, however, the magnitude of the ensuing chaos suggested a more brittle supply chain than what perhaps was previously understood. Exploring these supply-chain vulnerabilities and their origins is the purpose of Peter S. Goodman’s new book, How the World Ran Out of Everything: Inside the Global Supply Chain Crisis.

Goodman, the New York Times’ global-economics correspondent, attempts to explain what went wrong by following novelty items called Glo Cubes — designed and marketed by a U.S. firm but produced in China — as they struggle to make their way across the Pacific in time for the holiday season.

As the Glo Cubes wend their way through the supply chain, Goodman uses their travels to delve into related issues. International shipping, ports, trucking, and the railroad industry are among the topics that have chapters devoted to them, along with occasional digressions into areas such as the meat industry and larger forces at play. By the end, the reader is left with a much-improved understanding of the supply chain’s inner workings and why it so often broke down or underperformed during the Covid pandemic.

Or at least that’s the premise.

Unfortunately, the book’s insights are often overwhelmed by commentary more at home in a tubthumping anti-capitalist screed than a clear-eyed examination of 21st-century production and logistics during a time of unprecedented stress. At times it’s almost formulaic. Problems are first highlighted and then their origins almost invariably traced to battered and mistreated workers caught in a maelstrom of deregulation and corporate greed.

Although a global pandemic may have been the supply-chain crisis’s proximate cause, its deeper roots lie in American capitalism. Covid merely exposed the rot. Goodman’s pronouncement on the book’s penultimate page that the supply chain’s ultimate threat is nothing less than “unregulated greed” is distressingly symptomatic of much of the book’s tone and analysis.

Driven by a short-term focus on next quarter’s profits, companies devoted themselves to a just-in-time (a phrase that appears over 50 times in the book) philosophy that minimized inventory costs but left little slack in the system for when things went wrong. Deregulation (some variation of the word appears over 30 times) initiatives meant to spark fierce competition instead spawned industry consolidation and monopolies (the word and its derivatives appear over 40 times, while the term “Robber Barons” is mentioned 14 times) make off with the profits. A monomaniacal obsession with stockholder returns meant that money flowed to investors while workers were short-changed and exploited (a term that appears over 30 times).

All this provided the necessary kindling for the supply-chain crisis — the pandemic was simply the match. The supply-chain crisis’ origins, it turns out, nicely align with rather bog-standard progressive critiques of the U.S. economy.

The chapter on ocean shipping is emblematic of Goodman’s narrative. He emphasizes the role of the 1998 Ocean Shipping Reform Act that (among other things) freed ocean carriers to cut special deals on price and service for their biggest clients. No longer would all customers pay the same rates. This was followed by a spate of industry consolidation as carriers raced for scale to reduce costs and lure the largest shippers (cargo owners) as clients. The result: Three shipping alliances comprised of eight carriers saw their market share increase from 30 percent to 80 percent over a decade.

When Covid struck, the carriers leveraged this market dominance to engage in “monopolistic predations” and lift shipping rates into the stratosphere. Deregulation begat consolidation which led to limited competition and soaring rates.

But this account raises some obvious questions. If competition among the shipping alliances was so limited, why didn’t carriers raise their rates before the pandemic? And why did rates return to their pre-pandemic rates by late 2023?

Perhaps there was more than just corporate avarice at play.

During the pandemic, demand for shipping increased — in 2021 the port of Los Angeles saw 14 percent more containers than in 2019 and over 20 percent more than in 2016. Simultaneously, the supply of shipping declined as vessels bobbed in the waters off major U.S. ports (in January 2021 the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach alone had a queue of 109 container ships) waiting their turn to unload, effectively removing them from circulation.

No points for guessing what happens to shipping rates when demand spikes while supply shrinks.

This is not to suggest that more granular explanations are unworthy of examination or that factors beyond supply and demand deepened supply-chain stresses. But a comprehensive understanding surely goes beyond industry consolidation and greed. As the UN Trade and Development (UNCTAD) wrote in a 2022 report, the causes of the supply-chain crisis were “many and complex,” and there is “little evidence that the situation would have been any better had carriers not formed alliances or coordinated their schedules.”

Complexity and nuance, however, are often given short shrift in Goodman’s narrative. Instead, the reader is frequently presented with a straightforward sequence of deregulation, consolidation, and corporate greed that leaves workers — and by extension the supply chain — hanging by a thread. Rinse and repeat. The causes on offer are ideologically blinkered, sometimes almost cartoonishly so, and relevant information that contradicts such explanations is conspicuously absent.

The chapter on U.S. ports is a case in point. In Goodman’s telling, one of the ports’ most notable features is unionized dockworkers’ resilience in holding the line against corporate greed to secure a fair share of the economic pie. While he concedes many of the workers earn “far more” than $100,000 annually and that their compensation is “above normal, with terms generous enough to banish fears of household duress,” Goodman also characterizes these as “middle-class wages” and the rare jobs in the industrial U.S. economy that provided a “solid, middle-class existence.”

That’s one way of putting it. According to the Pacific Maritime Association, an organization comprised of ocean carriers and terminal operators that operate at West Coast ports, registered longshore workers have average earnings of nearly $233,000 per year (up from just under $200,000 in 2022) plus generous benefits. For perspective, such an individual salary would place a family of four in the top 17 percent of all household incomes in the greater Los Angeles metropolitan area. A solid middle-class existence indeed.

Why are such numbers not simply presented instead of euphemistically hinted at (arguably inaccurately)?

More puzzling, however, is the lack of discussion around U.S. ports’ abysmal performance in international comparisons. Indeed, according to a recent World Bank report, the highest-rated U.S. port (Charleston) ranks 53rd out of 405 ports, while Long Beach and Los Angeles — ports profiled by Goodman — rank 373 and 375. UNCTAD, meanwhile, notes that U.S. ports typically take significantly longer (page 92) than their foreign counterparts to move containers.

But none of this is mentioned, which is more than a little odd for a book that specifically discusses the role of ports in U.S. supply-chain weaknesses.

One wonders if this is because injecting such facts would place the longshoreman union’s fight against automation (which lags at U.S. ports) — discussed at length and presented by Goodman as a battle over job preservation — in a less flattering light. It all adds to a sense the reader isn’t quite getting the whole story, with the bias all running in one direction.

And the port discussion is no anomaly.

In a chapter about alleged monopolist exploitation of the pandemic, Goodman invokes the baby-formula shortage that arose in early 2022 when Abbott Labs — a company that, along with two conglomerates, controlled 98 percent of the domestic baby-formula market — shut down one of its factories and issued a product recall over fears of contamination. Goodman chalks much of this episode up to limited competition, which meant reduced pressure to safeguard quality and helped explain why Abbott’s prices were roughly twice as high as baby-formula prices in Europe.

So far, so good.

Absent, however, is any discussion of the tariffs and regulatory barriers that stand in the way of European exporters or domestic firms challenging the U.S. baby-formula oligopoly. Similarly, a discussion of industry consolidation and high prices in the meat industry makes no mention of tariff rate quotas that tamp down competition and increase the pain to consumer pocketbooks.

Other opportunities to highlight protectionist policies that reduce competitive pressures and exacerbate supply-chain woes similarly go begging.

Goodman, for example, observes a shortage of chassis — used by trucks to haul containers — that “no presidential decree could summon more of,” and points out that over 2,000 of those used by the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles were in some state of disrepair. Unmentioned is that obtaining new chassis from Chinese firms — by far the largest producers of such equipment — was made far more expensive by 221 percent antidumping duties that came on top of 25 percent tariffs slapped on Chinese imports by the Trump administration.

The chapter on railroads, meanwhile, features plenty of talk of burgeoning corporate profits and industry consolidation. Unmentioned either in that chapter or anywhere else in the book is the Jones Act, a protectionist shipping law that has crippled the ability of water transport to compete with rail on domestic routes.

Goodman is certainly correct that too many industries suffer from insufficient competition. But consistently ignored is the role of protectionist policies and other government interventions that help produce such outcomes by thwarting market forces. Almost invariably, assigned blame lies in insufficient government intervention, not a surfeit.

Such omissions reinforce impressions the book is more of an exercise in ideological axe-grinding than an even-keeled assessment of the supply chain’s flaws and vulnerabilities.

That’s not to say Goodman’s tome is without its virtues. As one would expect of a New York Times journalist, the author is a gifted writer, and the book is highly readable. Those unfamiliar with the supply chain and modern logistics will find much to learn, such as containerization’s role in forging our globalized economy.

And some valid concerns are raised. Goodman’s contention that “just in time” inventory management exacerbated the pandemic’s impact by reducing slack in the system seems at least plausible (whether this added risk offsets efficiency gains that benefit the global economy, however, is unclear). He’s also correct in his diagnosis (if not his policy prescriptions) that too many sectors in the U.S. economy suffer from a lack of competition.

Unfortunately, none of this sufficiently compensates for the book’s shortcomings.

Given the massive shocks experienced by the global economy during the pandemic, significant disruption was unavoidable. But it didn’t have to be as bad as it was, and there is great value in identifying exactly what went wrong. Answers such as “corporate greed” may present satisfying red meat to a particular readership but offer little wisdom to help the country mitigate future crises.