Book review: How the World Ran Out of Everything: Inside the Global Supply Chain
by Peter S. Goodman
Through a gripping exposé of actual events and people caught at every point along the array of the critical supply chain dysfunctions that have affected everyone, Peter S. Goodman brings to life for the reader the lives and suffering of multiple real people struggling with circumstances not of their own making. Goodman’s presentation places these persons directly and personally in front of you—along with the sights, smells, and untenable tensions in the worlds they are compelled to try to exist in. This is a real world account of the impossible choices faced by manufacturers, shippers, truckers, railroads, and maritime shipping companies. This book contains story after story after story of the choices that no one should ever be forced to make—yet it’s happening every day, crying out for someone to stop it.
Goodman demonstrates that the suffering of the real people chronicled in this book is not happening by accident or other forces of nature—certainly not by the mythical abstraction called the “free market.” Although there are numerous real life heroic actions in this book (some done out of necessity), any solutions to the underlying causes are not immediately apparent. Globalization became established as a fact of life, with its conveniences and lower prices for consumers accompanied by job losses in the industrialized countries and sweat shop conditions in the producing countries—factors that are demonstrably interrelated. With consultants distorting the just in time logistics methodology to irrational extremes, the supply chain was already becoming stressed when the COVID-19 pandemic exposed its rupture points. Goodman illustrates clearly that the main cause for this dysfunction was and is finalcialization, with its unyielding demands for shareholder value above all other concerns. Even with partial trends toward onshoring or at least nearshoring, the uncertainties of nation state conflict (including war) add to the costs eventually paid by everyone just to prepare for contingencies—and these efforts in and of themselves provide no cure for financialization.
Against this backdrop is the dominant corporate arrangement, in which CEOs have little choice than to make their every move aimed toward making the books appear maximally profitable in the immediate moment—any executive failing to do so may expect to be replaced with someone willing and able to squeeze out more pennies (regardless of the means applied to do so). In the relentless effort to pursue shareholder value (ahead of greater moral values), corporate boards and executives are acting like private equity firms by cannibalizing their companies to feed the greed of their oligarchic masters—it’s their own house they’re eating (and our house too). With inequality at obscenely extreme levels, this behavior is unsustainable.
This book (perhaps unwittingly) conveys the tone and gist of the classic 1960s song, The Pusher (look up the song and its lyrics if you’ve never heard of it)—substituting “financializer” for “pusher” in the song provides a fair sense of Goodman’s point about the immense damage produced by placing shareholder value and short term profits ahead of all other concerns. The consultants who are pushers of shareholder payouts over the health of companies, employees, customers, and communities are rightly damned for the losses and human suffering they’ve caused. Journalists, also, have become pushers in their own way—in a world where survivability requires surrendering any semblance of professionalism in return for access to news sources and the parties that have become essential to staying in the game. The lack of public outrage over the flagrant violations of human decency documented in this book is itself the result of Journalists (like social media algorithms) prioritizing clickbait over truth—Journalism is yet another profession hollowed out by the inhuman emphasis on shareholder value.
We need an effective no-nonsense industrial policy—something that is clearly lacking with the current oligarchic manipulation of the government. Although it is reasonable for investors to expect a fair return on their investments, no one has the right to do so using methods that destroy human lives along with the planet itself. Financialization should be classified as a “Schedule I” economic narcotic—and enforced as such.