‘How the World Ran Out of Everything’ and ‘Recentering Learning’

How the World Ran Out of Everything: Inside the Global Supply Chain by Peter S. Goodman

Published in June 2024

Nowadays, we don’t seem to talk very much about the COVID-19 pandemic. Trump’s mismanagement of the pandemic was hardly mentioned in the 2024 presidential race. If there are lessons to be learned in a global health emergency that changed almost everything about how we work and live (and killed over 1.2 million Americans), they are little discussed.

Two new books seek to change that situation.

One is New York Times global economics correspondent Peter Goodman’s book How the World Ran Out of Everything.

The other book is one that I co-edited with Maggie Debelius and Eddie Maloney, Recentering Learning: Complexity, Resilience, and Adaptability in Higher Education (JHU Press, 2024).

How the World Ran Out of Everything untangles the hidden global infrastructure that our economy depends on. Very little of what we make and consume is 100 percent locally sourced, constructed or grown. Our globalized economy, enabled by the evolution of containerized shipping and the growth of manufacturing in low-wage countries (especially China), means that most everything we buy is assembled (or contains components from) far away.

The pandemic severely strained global supply chains because the demand for goods significantly outpaced (for a time) that of services. With large portions of the population now working from home and needing everything from exercise equipment to computer monitors (and no longer spending money on in-person activities such as vacations or haircuts), there were not enough ships, containers, trains and trucks to deliver everything.

As Goodman details, the combination of deregulation and ownership concentration made supply chains more brittle. A structural shortage of truckers brought on by high turnover due to low wages and stressful working conditions meant that there were too few trucks. Allowed by the federal government to acquire each other and lacking competition, the few freight rail companies left were free to direct profits to investors rather than capacity expansion and track maintenance. 

For Goodman, the economic lessons of the pandemic are that we pay a high price for cheap goods, as extended supply chains, deregulation and concentrated ownership all add up to a brittle system. Lacking policies that privilege resiliency over low cost and shareholder returns, we will experience similar economic disruptions during the next global crisis.

For colleges and universities, the pandemic revealed a number of hidden truths. As the contributors to Recentering Learning explore, the pandemic revealed both the ability of old institutions to adapt quickly and the structural inequalities that lie just below the surface. While devastating for learning and degree completion for the most disadvantaged of learners, the pandemic also demonstrated the resiliency and creativity possible within higher education during a crisis. 

As we note in the Introduction to the book, “The pandemic centered teaching and learning as the overriding institutional priority across research-intensive universities and liberal arts colleges, regional publics and community colleges alike.” 

We then observe that from the perspective of 2024, “For the most part, teaching and learning at research-intensive universities have returned to their status of enjoying high levels of rhetorical support and low levels of institution-wide investments.”

Reading How the World Ran Out of Everything is a good reminder of the risks we face in a globalized economy that prioritizes investors over workers.

We hope that our community will check out the essays in Recentering Learning, contributed by a who’s who of academic/learning innovators and educators, to hopefully generate a renewed campus conversation on what we learned over the past few years about what an institutionwide focus on learning might entail.

What are you reading?