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My own family was based in London during the first two years of the pandemic, and well aware of our relative privilege amid the deprivations of lockdown. My wife, Deanna, and I were both able to work from home. We had outdoor space for our two older children, and ample internet bandwidth to accommodate their suddenly remote education. We had space to stockpile popcorn, toys, and jigsaw puzzles—anything that might provide a momentary diversion from the stress and angst. Still, we were consumed by a looming event of seismic proportions for our household: eight years after the extremely premature birth of our daughter, Deanna was due to give birth to our third child in early April 2020.

I watched my wife remain stoic as one plan after another succumbed to the wrenching realities of the pandemic. Her parents could not fly in to help with the baby, and no friends could stay with our older children during the birth. The peaceful parental leave we had envisioned devolved into conditions that felt like wartime. I watched her deliver our baby—a healthy, perfect boy—knowing that I would be forced to leave her side within minutes of meeting him, that our older children, who had for years begged for another sibling, would not be allowed to visit him in the hospital.

I watched Deanna accept the fact that our son's very existence could not be verified by any birth certificate, because government offices were closed. When the hospital discharged her within a day and a half after a medically necessary C-section, I helped her climb the staircase to our bedroom, enraptured, with the baby in her arms. I watched her nurse him, recording his feeding times, diaper output, and weight with the understanding that no pediatrician would be able to evaluate him in person.

Then Deanna tried and failed to order toilet paper, which I had resisted panic-buying. She tried to order hand sanitizer, then resourcefully sought to make it herself, only to discover that the key ingredients—rubbing alcohol and aloe gel—were out of stock everywhere. She tried to order disinfectant wipes and N-95 masks. She tried to order backup baby formula. It was only when she found herself unable to summon these necessities to our doorstep that I finally saw her break down.

Rationally, Deanna knew that our lives were not in imminent danger, that we were still among the most fortunate people on the planet. Yet on an emotional and practical level, life as we knew it had ended.

"All we thought to wish for was a healthy baby," she told me. "And now he's here, but the world has fallen apart."

Something foundational had indeed broken. A basic mechanism of contemporary life was suddenly inoperative, yielding the stupefying impossibility of buying simple things that had previously been everywhere.

What on earth was going on?

The answer, as I've come to understand it, was nothing less than the breakdown of globalization.

 

Over recent decades, multinational companies from North America to Europe to Japan had placed their fate in a ruthless sort of efficiency. They had steadily entrusted production to factories around the globe, and especially plants in China, chasing lower costs and fatter profits.

And they had behaved as if this strategy was devoid of risk, as if China's industrial parks might as well have been extensions of Ohio and Bavaria, because low-cost shipping was assumed to be an immutable reality. They either did not know or did not care that the shipping industry was basically a cartel, operating largely beyond the oversight of any government watchdog.

Once their products reached American shores, companies relied on transportation networks that depended on millions of workers who submitted to dangerous, lonely, and soul-crushing jobs, even as their pay and working conditions were downgraded to free up cash for shareholders. In constructing a supply chain governed by the relentless pursuit of efficiency, trucking and railroad businesses treated their workers as if their own time was both limitless and without value, deserving of no compensation for hours stuck waiting for the next load.

In a quarter century of writing about economics from Asia to Europe to North America, I've frequently been exposed to a conventional narrative in which the supply chain is typically discussed as separate from the rest of commercial existence—a distinct network of connection points linking factories to customers, spanning ships and trucks and warehouses. This is wrong. What we refer to as the supply chain is inextricable from the broader economy. How it operates—who gets paid, who bears risk, who is allowed to work at home during a pandemic, and who must stand in harm's way—reflects the same power dynamics and values that shape the rest of life.

From the railroads to trucking firms to warehouses, major companies had long treated their workers like costs to be contained rather than human beings with families, medical challenges, and other demands. Employers assumed that they did not have to worry about running out of laborers, even as they engaged in wanton exploitation. Unions were weak and working-class people were desperate for a paycheck—so much so that adequate numbers could presumably be counted on to submit to the grueling undertaking of delivering freight, processing meat, and other brutal yet critical functions of the supply chain.

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***** TABLE OF CONTENTS *****

PROLOGUE: "The World Has Fallen Apart."

PART I: The Great Supply Chain Disruption

1. "Just Get This Made in China."

2. "Everyone Is Competing for a Supply Located in a Single

Country."

3. "No Waste More Terrible than Overproduction"

4. "The Lean Taliban"

5. "Everybody Wants Everything."

6. "An Entire New Way of Handling Freight"

7. "Carriers Are Robbing Shippers."

PART II: Across the Water

8. "The Land of the Forgotten"

9. "I Think I've Heard of Them."

10. "Everything Is Out of Whack."

11. "Crazy and Dangerous"

12. "Is It Worth Even Getting up in the Morning?"

13. "Building Railroads from Nowhere to Nowhere at Public Expense"

14. "The Almighty Operating Ratio"

15. "Sweatshops on Wheels"

16. "Thank You for What You're Doing to Keep Those Grocery

Store Shelves Stocked."

17. "We Do Not Have a Free Market."

PART III: Globalization Comes Home

18. "We Just Need Some Diversity."

19. "Globalization Is Almost Dead."

20. "Okay, Mexico, Save Me."

21. "People Don't Want to Do Those Jobs."

Conclusion: "A Great Sacrifice for You"