Peter Goodman, New York Time’s Global award-winning Economics Correspondent, makes an extraordinary journey to understand the worldwide supply chain – exposing both the fascinating pathways of manufacturing and transportation that bring products to your doorstep, and the ruthless business logic that has left local communities at the mercy of complex and fragile network for their basic necessities. How does the wealthiest country on Earth run out of protective gear in the middle of a public health catastrophe? How do its parents find themselves unable to locate crucially needed infant formula? How do its largest companies spend billions of dollars making cars that no one can drive for lack of chips? I took a pandemic to radically highlight the intricacy and fragility of the global supply chain. Enormous ships were struck at sea, warehouses overflowed, and delivery trucks stalled. The result was a scarcity of everything from breakfast cereal to medical devices, from frivolous goods to lifesaving necessities.

As the World Trade Organisation approaches  it’s 30th birthday on New Year’s Day, 2025, the international trading system and global supply chain is in crisis.

Goodman details modern international trading system by following a single product – a light-up Sesame Street Figurine from its design by a pair of entrepreneurs in Mississippi through its manufacture in China, to its long journey to the US by seas and land. The resulting vignettes of life on board container ships plying the sea lanes between China and California, in the control rooms of automated unloading docks in Rotterdam, and on the road with hauliers in the American Midwest.

Global trade as it exists today, is intrinsically exploitative, in the grip of monopolists, and efficient only on Wall Street. Its collapse in 2020 was not ultimately the result of the pandemic or governments’ responses, but of a fundamental alteration of American capitalism over the last century, the elevation of shareholder interests to primacy, the triumph of financial consideration over all others.

Goodman exposes many iniquities and inefficiencies in the US economic system, and the pandemic certainly exposed a lack of resilience in global trade,. The Chinese labour actually benefitted from the interface of Western business. Given that China’s export-driven growth miracle has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, that the EU built whole industries on the back of the resulting demand for high-value goods and services, and that the US has become the richest and most technologically innovative nation on Earth as a result, that is a truly extraordinary claim.

Goodman explains why the global trade’s reform is crucial – not only to avoid dysfunction in our day to day lives, but to protect the fate of our global fortunes.

How The World Ran Out of Everything: Inside the Global Supply Chain by Peter S Goodman, Mariner  £25/$30, 416 pages.