#16 Chain of challenges: Inside the Global Supply Chains with Peter Goodman

Discover the changing landscape of global supply chains with Peter Goodman, The New York Times' global economic correspondent. He sheds light on the seismic shifts in global supply chains and the vulnerabilities laid bare by the COVID-19 pandemic and geopolitical tensions. Uncover how the rise of economic nationalism and elite influence is reshaping trade and labour, turning the promise of liberalised trade on its head.

Peter's insights from his book, "How the World Ran Out of Everything: Inside the Global Supply Chain," guide us through the complex dance between globalisation, market concentration, and economic inequality. We discuss the unexpected consequences of long-standing policies and the fragility of supply chains optimised for efficiency over resilience. From the dominance of a few corporations to the role of domestic policy failures, Peter paints a picture of how monopolistic power and democratic process capture have moulded today's economic landscape.

As we gaze into the future, explore the transformations in global supply chains with a focus on nearshoring and reshoring. Understand the emerging roles of Vietnam, India, and Mexico as pivotal players in this evolving scene. Climate change's impact on supply chains demands attention, prompting businesses to rethink production proximity and resilience. Peter critiques strategies like just-in-time inventory, urging a reevaluation of corporate incentives and labour rights for a sustainable and equitable global trade future. Join us for this compelling conversation that dissects the past, present, and future of global trade dynamics.

More inspiration from Peter Goodman:
Link to his latest book How the World Ran Out of Everything
Website: https://www.petersgoodman.com/

Please visit our website, www.businessandsociety.net, for more inspiration.

Chapters

• 1:50 How the world is different today?
• 4:55 About the book How the World Ran out of Everything
• 6:47 Things that surprised in global supply chains
• 9:09 Goal of the book
• 12:52 Did regions benefit from globalisation?
• 16:40 What's happening to world trade today?
• 19:26 On nearshoring and reshoring
• 22:52 Exploited labor in global supply chains
• 26:37 Impact of climate change on supply chains
• 30:28 Managing differences of opinion
• 31:40 Message to businesses that rely on global supply chains
• 34:00 Book recommendations

Transcript

Senthil

00:04

Hey, it's Senthil here. Welcome to the Business and Society podcast. Every fortnight, we speak to a world-leading thinker to better understand the role of business and society. We live in an era of global supply chains. Do you know even a humble cup of coffee requires 29 firms to collaborate across 18 countries, according to one estimate. This model of elaborate supply chains that underpin the global trade was running fine until the COVID struck. The resulting supply and demand shocks exposed vulnerabilities in supply chains. This, combined with geopolitical drifts trade war triggered a rise in economic nationalism. As a consequence, the supply chains are going through profound transformation. 

00:54

Today we have our guest, Peter S. Goodman. He's the global economic correspondent of the New York Times. In a journalism career spanning three decades, Peter has reported from more than 40 countries and won some of the journalism's top honors, most recently for the series on the future of globalization. His work as part of the New York Times series on the roots of the 2008 financial crisis was a finalist for the Pulitzer. Today, we'll discuss Peter's latest book, how the World Ran Out of Everything Inside the Global Supply Chain. It is a fascinating and lucid work that brings a critical perspective to global supply chains. We will also ask him where world trade is headed and how climate change is likely to affect it. Very warm welcome to the podcast, Peter. Delighted to have you with us today. 

Peter

01:45

Thanks so much for having me, Senthil, excited to be here. 

Senthil

01:50

Excellent. As a reporter, you have covered landmark events such as the dot-com bubble, the global financial crisis of 2008, the Great Recession, the emergence of China as a global superpower, Brexit, the pandemic and the impact of Trump's last global trade war. Tell us, is the world today fundamentally the same or different from what you have seen from the ringside as a journalist? 

Peter

02:17

It's definitely different than the global economy that I started covering early in my career. I mean then at the policymaking level. I mean there were already tensions over trade, if you talk to labour unions, if you talk to ordinary people. But at the policy level in most of the wealthy world there was an agreement that liberalized trade was good from the standpoint of producing economic growth the details were distribution but that the choices that we got, the wealth building opportunities we got through commerce, not only made us wealthier but also made us more peaceful. And that understanding is really broken down in a whole series of ways. I mean, for one thing, the idea that by integrating China into the global economy we promote democracy, liberalization. I mean personally I never bought that. I had a front row seat to that, based in China for the Washington Post, but nobody says that out loud anymore. 

03:17

I mean, given how that has played out, we've seen China get very wealthy. China's development scheme has been incredibly successful from the standpoint of lifting people out of poverty and that's a good thing that we ought to give credit to. But anybody who thought that was going to turn into democratic impulses in China has gotten a rude shock. And, as I argue in the book. Most of the people who matter never really believed that anyway. It was always about cracking China as a way to help publicly traded companies lower their costs and tap what was essentially the world's largest potential market for just about anything you can imagine. 

03:56

So just the reassessment of China's place in the global economy has gotten very different. But, as you note in the introduction, there has been this upsurge of nationalism, and that goes earlier, much earlier than the pandemic. I mean that’s really a function of economic inequality, and the fact that ordinary people have noticed that most of the bounty of modern society has been captured by people with enough money to hire lobbyists and write the rules in our democracies in their own interests. Wealthy people have essentially used their wealth to capture the levers of our democracy and then they've used democracy itself to help enrich themselves. The resulting inequality has produced a lot of anger, and that's created a lot of opportunities for especially right-wing populists who've been on the march really all over the globe. 

Senthil

04:55

I see there seems to be a lot brewing there. Peter, tell us a little bit about your book how the World Ran Out of Everything.

Peter

05:12

Yeah, so you know I'm trying to explain how it is that in our darkest hour, at a time when we needed things that we're not often accustomed to needing, like personal protective gear, parts for ventilators, to be made, you know, at the scale in which we normally think about making cars the global supply chain failed us. And the global supply chain is miraculous. It's almost science fiction level miraculous if you think about how the world was working just a couple of decades ago. But we have put enormous strain on it, and we've optimized it really for shareholder interests above societal interests, and so most of the time it works pretty well and investors do well. At the same time, Consumers have a bonanza. It's not always so good for labour, which is something I focus on quite a lot in the book, but when we needed it the most it failed. 

06:02

And my book traces a single shipping container from a factory town in China this is the city of Ningbo across the Pacific to the West Coast of the US, specifically the port of Long Beach in Southern California, and then along the way across the United States to a little town in Mississippi in the Southeast of the US, and I look at all of the industries that touch this box along on its way dock workers, truck drivers, rail workers and I expose all of the vulnerabilities that had been there for a long time. I mean, as I argue in the book, the pandemic was not the cause of these disruptions, it was the ultimate reveal, and I use this single shipment to illustrate that in the book. 

Senthil

06:47

I mean, look, I read a lot of book and I work in sustainable supply chains, but yours is so beautiful and unique because of that reason you talked about. You chose a single product, the Glow Cubes, and took the reader's track it from the manufacturing cluster in China to the consumption point in the United States. But look, you are a global economic reporter for some time, and you would have been already familiar with many aspects of global supply chains. Were there one or two things that were new to you or surprised you while you were writing this book? 

Peter

07:24

Well, actually most of it was new to me. I thought I knew something about the supply chain, and it had certainly been an element of my reporting for many years, but I'd never focused on shipping. I took for granted that the container ship is really important. I didn't understand the structure of the market. It was amazing to me to learn that it's essentially this unregulated international cartel. I mean it looks like there's lots of competition, there's 17 or 18 different major carriers you can book, but they're organized into three alliances, sort of like your airline alliances, your Star Alliance or Oneworld or whatever. And these three alliances dominate traffic on the most lucrative routes, that's, from East Asia to Europe and East Asia to the US and to Canada as well, and the result of that is enormous pricing power. 

08:13

So, in just a few months when the pandemic hit and disrupted traffic, we saw the price of moving a single shipping container I mean the one I followed go from about $2,000. That was the pre-pandemic price to move from the east coast of China to the west coast of the US From $2,000 to $28,000 in the space of a few months. And even at those prices often shippers could not get confirmed space on the ships. That just kind of blew my mind, and it wasn't until I started reckoning with the fact that we've got a lot of monopoly power in this supply chain. It became clear that you know, obviously, the laws of supply and demand. They're important to any economic question and they have a lot to say about what's happening. But if you don't understand market concentration and the power of monopolists, you're missing a lot of the story. 

Senthil

09:09

Hmm, interesting, and a question that came to my mind after reading your book was you know whether we overdo globalization? You highlighted the global commerce as controlled by a few companies to enrich a few, but what was your goal while writing this book? Was it to emphasize the vulnerabilities and inequities in global supply chains, or mount an attack on cartels and elite investors, or build a case for sustainable supply chains? 

Peter

09:36

Well, a little of all of those. I mean, I'm an accountability journalist by inclination. I mean I am looking not just for what is happening, but why is it happening? And are there bad actors who need to be exposed in understanding why our economies function the way that they do? And certainly, you know I should say that this book draws heavily on my last book, which I wrote immediately before, called Davos man: How the Billionaires Devoured the World, which is all about economic inequality, giving rise to right-wing populism and lots of resentment and the power of the world's wealthiest people to write the rules in their favour. And then the supply chain crisis hit, and I realized that that required a book-length treatment. But there were similar themes active in both and I am a real admirer of the ingenuity that goes into the supply chain and I'm a believer in trade. 

10:42

I'm by no means an anti-globalization person. I think on net we've had enormous benefits from being able to trade. I mean, you know, look absent trade. You and I are not having this conversation. We're out hunting and gathering or trying to figure out how to knit sweaters, so we don't freeze to death in the winter. Trade is a miracle, but the question is who's in control and who's getting most of the benefits. And what I came to see in digging into the origins of the supply chain crisis is what we've got is a supply chain that's been optimized for big box retailers, for large investors, squeezing out consideration of really important costs environmental costs, costs at a national security level, if you run out of semiconductors or you're dependent upon a giant country, China, with whom you happen to be having a trade war, to deliver basic components for medicines or personal protective gear in a pandemic. And so, I came to see that the reason the supply chain functions as it does is that we've taken a lot of sensible components like just-in-time, which we can get into. 

11:59

You know this idea that you should not just stash parts in warehouses. That can be wasteful of space. It can be wasteful of capital. You should have your supplies show up on assembly lines just as you need them. But we've gone too far with that in the interest of serving publicly traded companies that are just thinking about the next quarterly earnings report, and that's left us very vulnerable. We slashed inventory beyond any prudent level, and time and again, the same can be said about working conditions for truckers, the way we compensate people who maintain our rail systems. Time and again, it's the interest of the investor class taking precedence over other participants in the economy and ordinary people who are counting on stuff to show up at their doors when they need it. 

Senthil

12:52

I see and understand the flaws and the notion that scale, and efficiency are good for consumers, with ideas like just-in-time, etc. Reading your book also jolted me on the spread of inequality across. I thought it's concentrated to some geographies, but because you took us on that journey on the entire supply chain, we could see no country is an exception to this phenomenon. At the same time, isn't a once-in-a-century shock, like the pandemic, an outlier event? Haven't regions immensely benefited from global supply chains? I have in mind Asia. I'm from Asia, which has seen a lot of poverty reductions due to these global supply chains. 

Peter

13:32

For sure. Yeah, without any question, that has to be part of the full accounting of globalization. I mean what the Chinese government has pulled off. I mean people in western countries now tend to describe China as this sort of giant job-killing conspiracy, this juggernaut transferring wealth from our societies to their society. First of all, it's not like every other country on earth, especially a country that experienced colonialism, wouldn't love to have had the enormous poverty reduction successful poverty reduction that came out of this rapid industrialization. And if it was so easy, every other country would have done it. I mean it required some extreme foresight, some intelligent investing in infrastructure, in skills training, basic education. The levelling phase of modern Chinese history, by which we had much more equality in terms of the gender divides than in many other societies, put Chinese society in a uniquely strong position to send women to cities to go work in factories alongside men. And because of this levelling phase of Chinese history, you had people with primary education, you had basic public health, you had a society that was very well positioned to benefit. The same can now be said for India. More recently, I mean, there are reasons to be optimistic about the possibility that India could grow into a significant export powerhouse that could also lift a lot of people out of poverty, and that's to the good. 

15:16

And wealthy societies have done really well too. I mean the US and Britain, two places I'm most familiar with. You know Britain has this sort of rebellion against globalization, expressed as the Brexit vote severing the country from its largest trading partner. In the US it's impossible to reckon with the rise of Trump without looking at the impacts of deindustrialization, but these are both cases I argued in my previous book as well as this book. These are examples of domestic policy failures, not flaws in globalization. 

15:50

It wasn't that the US got crushed in the global economy. The US is absolutely at the top of the list in terms of beneficiaries. We chose to abandon people in factory towns whose jobs got lost in the face of a surge of cheap imports from places like China and Mexico, and we failed to cushion them. We don't have national healthcare. We don't have programs to help communities where everybody's house suddenly loses value because the factory closed. We have very poor and underfunded job training programs. In societies that have done better with these things, you don't have that same sort of backlash against globalization, and we should be able to have a conversation about how to hang on to the merits of global trade while fixing the obvious vulnerabilities. 

Senthil

16:40

Right. Tell us, Peter, what's happening to world trade today? The United States has elected a president who claimed that his favourite word is tariff, and institutions like the WTO are not as strong as they used to be. Where do you think global trade is headed? 

Peter

16:58

I think it's difficult to say right now because we're waiting to find out how much of these tariff threats from the incoming president-elect, Trump, are going to turn into reality. So I think it's fair to say that there will really be across the board tariffs on imports from China, and Trump seems to be a real believer that we need to decouple if you will de-risk there's lots of jargon that goes into this conversation but that American companies should be less dependent upon Chinese industry to make goods, and so we have seen, and will continue to see, some shifting of production to other countries. Vietnam has been a big beneficiary of the shift. Vietnam is heavily dependent upon the Chinese supply chain. India has been a beneficiary as well. Walmart is actively moving production from China to India. 

17:51

Mexico, for companies that sell into the North American market, is becoming a significant place for so-called nearshoring, where you move production closer to customers. 

18:04

But, of course, trump has most recently said he's going to put a 25% tariff on imports from Mexico and Canada, which you can take either as a bluff, an opening ploy in a negotiation to get a slightly better deal out of the North American Free Trade Agreement with higher rules of origin. What percentage of a good must draw on domestic supplies in order to qualify as a made in Mexico product, so it can be shipped into the US duty free. Or it could be real, in which case Trump is hoping and betting that by making it very difficult to count on production in our neighbouring countries, Canada and Mexico, that will lead to this big investment into production in the US. That's a dubious proposition. There are a lot of factories that are set up in the US that are dependent upon imported components from Mexico, from China, from Canada as well, and right now we're kind of in a holding pattern. A lot of businesses are waiting to see what Trump's really going to do, but there is reason to think that global trade will be hampered by these tariffs. 

Senthil

19:26

Hmm, that sounds a bit scary, particularly from a region that relies on global trade a lot. You talked about these buzzwords nearshoring, reshoring which essentially means bringing production closer to customers. Is this the future of global supply chains or do you think it is a passing fad? And eventually I think you quoted one of your interviewees in your book it all ends in price. So where do you see this heading? 

Peter

19:52

Well, I hope it's not a passing fad. I think it should be the solution to some of the vulnerabilities that we've seen. So, let's go back to just-in-time, which I'm very tough on, in the book. Just-in-time is this idea, pioneered by Toyota at the end of the Second World War, that you can cut waste by having your suppliers deliver your products to the assembly line just as they're needed, sort of like the way a supermarket manages milk. You want enough milk on the shelves that nobody leaves unhappy that they can't buy milk, but you don't want so much that you're spilling it because some of it's spoiled. This is how Toyota managed their supplies, and the story I tell in the book is… along comes the consulting class. 

20:35

I'm very tough on McKinsey in particular, but there are other consultant groups that go into this, and they essentially turn this into this crude imperative to just slash inventory to the bone. They tell corporate CEOs; this will make your share price go up. Just cut your inventory, corporate CEOs. This will make your share price go up. Just cut your inventory. That'll increase your return on asset, and you can take the savings that you used to spend stashing parts in warehouses. Give it to yourself as a bonus, a reward for being smart enough to hire McKinsey. Give it to your shareholders in the form of dividends, and that sets us up for the vulnerabilities that we've seen. Well, if you shrink the distance between the factory and the customer, you actually can do just-in-time more effectively. I mean, if you're selling into North America and you've got a factory in Mexico to complement what you've got in East Asia, if something goes awry, if shipping prices spike, if there's a shock, if there's another pandemic, if a conflict affects shipping, well, now you can draw on a factory that you can reach by truck, by rail, you're not dependent upon the international shipping cartel. So that's to the good. 

21:41

But, as you point out, I am concerned that the basic incentives are unchanged for publicly traded companies. So, if you're running a publicly traded company and you say, hey, I want to set up a second factory in Mexico to give us a little bit of resilience, that may be a really sensible idea. But your activist investor may come along and say, well, hold on a second, you're spending more money that's going to dilute the next quarterly earnings. By the time somebody realizes the wisdom of your idea. You're out of a job. The CEO who says no, let's just buy from the cheapest source. If that's China, so be it. We'll still be 90% dependent upon one country for our supplies. Well, one day that will again be exposed as folly. But with any luck you'll have to cast your stock options and be lying in a hammock on some beach hoisting a cocktail. And as long as those incentives are unchanged, price will continue to largely dictate what happens. 

Senthil

22:52

And I want to specifically talk about a few lines, I just read it out…”The reconfiguration of the global supply chain that's underway may be able to adjust to the geopolitical alterations, but it will not reckon with its fundamental vulnerability, the permanent fragility arising from dependence on exploited labour.”  Please tell us more about this. Are you suggesting that exploited labour will be a part of global supply chains, irrespective of which country the labour is based in? What are you implying by this? 

Peter

23:14

I mean, I'm saying that that's how it's been right. So why have we moved so much production around the globe? Why have we moved production from wealthy countries to poorer countries? It's labour arbitrage. Why was Walmart so interested in participating in the fairy tale that letting China into the World Trade Organization in 2001 would promote democracy in China? Because, ultimately, there was wealth to be made there. Because China was a country where you could do a deal with a local Chinese Communist Party official. You get access to land you knew there were no labour unions. I mean, despite the fact that this is a government that rules in the name of peasant led revolution, labour unions are banned and so this was like a paradise for giant retailers like Walmart, later Amazon and until that changes, until labour has more of a say over who's benefiting from global trade, we will still have that impulse at the corporate level to go and seek out a place where you can do what you want, where you can undercut workplace safety standards that are operative in more developed countries, where environmental regulations don't come into play. And that basic setup remains. 

24:41

And part of my mission in writing this book is to note that there was a lot of talk as I began writing the book. When will the supply chain return to normal? Well, normalcy rests on the assumption and now I'm speaking specifically about my own country that trucking will be handled by people who are paid so little that they often need public assistance just to do their job. Who accept that they will be on the road with no idea of their schedules, unable to attend children's birthday parties, unable to be home, sometimes for the birth of children or the deaths of relatives, because they have no power in the system, and they are takers of schedules from the people who are optimizing the plans for their own benefit. That's normalcy. Normalcy is people having to choose between their own health and their own pay checks. 

25:42

I mean, I tell the story of slaughterhouse workers in the States who lost their lives in the middle of a pandemic because Trump signed this executive order that set into effect the talking points of the meatpacking industry that we either had to have people continuing to labour in the middle of the pandemic or Americans would somehow go hungry and never mind, as I reveal in the book that at the time, meatpackers were actually sitting on record volumes of frozen product and they were boosting their exports of frozen meat around the world. We essentially killed slaughterhouse workers in the name of supposedly feeding Americans. Really, we were funnelling monopoly profits to the handful of meatpackers who dominated the trade. That's normal. So, unless we reform that, we are indeed dependent upon exploited labour to make and distribute the goods that we depend on in modern life. 

Senthil

26:37

Interesting. I asked you what surprised you when you were writing the book. When I read your book, what really surprised me is the truck driver story, a chapter you dedicated for that. That's really really eye-opening. One last question before we move into the last section… In what ways do you expect climate change to reshape global supply chains? You talked about Panama Canal facing a drought and supply chains getting disrupted. I mean, we don't read about these kind of incidents in the past. Do you see this kind of shocks occurring frequently because of climate change? 

Peter

27:15

For sure, For sure. Yeah, I mean the natural sphere is going to do what it's going to do, and I mean, first of all, there's the policy level right. So, the European Union is now leading the way in terms of major economies changing the rules of the supply chains. They're going ahead with carbon tax, their initiatives to force companies that sell I think it's half a million euros a year of products in the European Union to disclose their plans to limit deforestation. Eventually we'll get more and more transparency. That's the plan in Europe. 

27:47

And as we make explicit what economists refer to as externalities, shipping can operate now just freely, as if the pollution has no cost at all. Well, as those costs are made explicit under things like carbon taxes, that will make it less economic to pretend that place doesn't matter. I mean essentially… you asked me at the outset how's the global economy changed? Well, global economy for most of our adult lives we were invited to believe that place didn't matter, that a factory in Southern China was the same as a factory in the middle of the United States as long as there's a port, a rail connection, the internet works, there's basic connectivity and stuff moves around and shipping's basically free and pollution doesn't exist. So, let's carry on Well as we reckon with the reality of climate change and we get regulatory regimes that make it more expensive to move things around, that will tend again to close the distance between factory production and customers. 

28:53

Meanwhile, again, there's the natural sphere. So, the Panama Canal, for much of last year, was rationing traffic, limiting traffic from 36 or 38 ships a day passing through the canal down to 22 about a year ago. This is because the Panama Canal is this natural system that has at the centre of it this lake. It's actually a man-made lake, but there's no mechanical pumping, it's just water flowing downhill in both directions toward each shore, and as the lake got depleted by a drought, there wasn't enough water to make the system function as normal, so they had to limit traffic. That presumably will happen around the globe. 

29:35

Moreover, climate change is exacerbating military conflicts. Right, I mean, a lot of military conflicts are about scarcity of resources, and so we've got incidents of the Houthi rebels in Yemen opening fire on ships headed toward the Suez Canal, which is this vital waterway connecting Europe to Asia. And now you've got container ships traveling the long way around Africa to complete the journey from China to Europe. That's additional cost. One can imagine the worse climate change gets; the more intense conflicts get between societies. So, for all of these reasons, yes, climate change will certainly force us to rethink how we're making and distributing goods. 

Senthil

30:28

That's very insightful, Peter. Let's move to the last segment, called how I Did it, where we ask all our guests three personal questions to draw lessons from their life and career. How do you handle differences of opinion and setbacks. 

Peter

Differences of opinion?

Senthil

Exactly!

30:45

You know, I think you have to stay open-minded. I'm not a believer that cynicism, as some of my colleagues almost wear as a badge of honor, like it shows you've been around the block a few times. If you have this sort of cynical, jaded take on everything, I actually think it's kind of lazy and closes you off from learning about new things. So, I think you just have to stay open-minded and constantly test your own assumptions. Make sure that you're speaking to people with a diversity of opinions. I think diversity itself is really important. I think most of us are in whatever bubble we were born into, and we have to try hard to expose ourselves to alternate ways of seeing everything, and from that comes better, sharper thinking. 

Senthil

31:40

Interesting. What would be your call for action to leaders who run businesses that rely on global supply chains? 

Peter

31:48

Think seriously about the vulnerabilities that you might not be aware of. You may think that you have a diversity of suppliers, but if you dig two layers down into the supply chain, you may discover that all three of your vendors, for a critical part, are dependent upon a single vendor for one component, and that's something that you'd better reckon with. Think about whether you're running your business in the same way in which you would run your household. I mean, that's an analogy that doesn't always hold, but I think in some ways it does. And in the same way that we wouldn't if we knew that our roof needed patching, we wouldn't just carry on. We would spend the money right now to patch our roof and not wait for some disaster. 

32:36

We should take a similar approach to inventory and resilience, and we should come to understand that there's a lot of inefficiency in this kind of ruthless efficiency that we've been marinated in. 

32:48

I mean, I tell the story in the book of how, in the middle of the pandemic, a big railroad in the western part of the US was intentionally hauling cargo to the wrong destination, because this publicly traded company, Union Pacific, had sold Wall Street on the idea that it was going to lower dwell time, this metric that captures how much time cargo spends in any particular place. So, somebody running a rail yard in the centre of the United States had taken this as the imperative to just attach as many rail cars as possible to the next train leaving the yard, regardless of where it was going. And so, the conductor that I spoke to discovered he's pulling a train that's going north to Oregon. He's carrying auto parts that are supposed to be going south to California, some shippers waiting there at the other end of it for parts that are now late. That's efficient on paper. Because we've catered too aggressively to these metrics. We need to think much more commonsensically instead of just robotically trying to produce whatever numbers we think are going to make investors happy. 

Senthil

34:00

Finally, can you recommend a book or two to our listeners? It could be on any subject. 

Peter

34:05

Oh, wow, that's a big question. Marc Levinson's book The Box. I thought was terrific for my own research. Matt Stoller's book Goliath on the power of monopolies. That's unique to the American experience but I imagine it holds in other societies as well our failure to reckon with the lessons of the Robber barons at the end of the 19th century. The robber barons are always trying to recreate their monopolies, and we shouldn't be letting them do it. 

Senthil

34:34

Excellent! Peter, what an honor talking to you today. Thank you so much for joining me. 

Peter

34:39

Oh, I'm delighted Senthil. This was really great. I appreciate your careful read of my book. 

Senthil

34:42

That was Peter Goodman. Peter acknowledges the importance of global trade and the benefits it brought to global societies, but, as an accountability journalist, he asks a very important question who's in control of trade and who's getting most of the benefits? What are the policy failures and what are the communities that are left behind and are negatively impacted by trade and globalization? And in search to answer these questions, he took a single product from China and traced it back into the United States, and the lessons are captured in his fascinating and vivid work “How the World Ran Out of Everything.” I think it's one of the important books published last year and if you're a supply chain professional or management professional, or even a development professional like me, I think it's a crucial read. Happy New Year and enjoy reading. Thanks for listening to our podcast today. 

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