Mark Blyth and Brett Christophers discuss:
Why we ran out of everything during the pandemic, and why it had less to do with the pandemic and more to do with the corporations that made us much more vulnerable to it – The Rhodes Center Podcast with Mark Blyth
Remember the supply chain problems of 2020 and 2021? The story we were told was that the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the global economy's ability to make and transport goods of every type imaginable: Surgical masks. Car parts. Infant formula. But as New York Times' global economic correspondent Peter Goodman explains in his new book, “How the World Ran Out of Everything: Inside the Global Supply Chain,” the story is more complicated than that. On this episode, Goodman and Mark Blyth discuss how, over decades, consulting firms and shareholders built a system that drove up profits but imperiled our economy, ultimately making COVID-related supply shocks (and the inflation that followed) much worse than they needed to be. Furthermore, if Goodman is right, it’s only a matter of time before we risk running out of everything again.Learn more about the Watson Institute’s other podcasts
- Why we ran out of everything during the pandemic, and why it had less to do with the pandemic and more to do with the corporations that made us much more vulnerable to it
- The expulsion of politics? What the UK’s Office of Budget Responsibility tells us about the limits of technocracy
- Money can’t buy happiness, but it can buy citizenship abroad
- How asset managers came to own everything and you failed to notice
- The business side of fighting climate change
