Outside the Box
How Globalization Changed from Moving Stuff to Spreading Ideas
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
From the acclaimed author of The Box, a new history of globalization that shows us how to navigate its future
Globalization has profoundly shaped the world we live in, yet its rise was neither inevitable nor planned. It is also one of the most contentious issues of our time. While it may have made goods less expensive, it has also sent massive flows of money across borders and shaken the global balance of power. Outside the Box offers a fresh and lively history of globalization, showing how it has evolved over two centuries in response to changes in demographics, technology, and consumer tastes.
Marc Levinson, the acclaimed author of The Box, tells the story of globalization through the people who eliminated barriers and pursued new ways of doing business. He shows how the nature of globalization changed dramatically in the 1980s with the creation of long-distance value chains. This new type of economic relationship shifted manufacturing to Asia, destroying millions of jobs and devastating industrial centers in North America, Europe, and Japan. Levinson describes how improvements in transportation, communications, and computing made international value chains possible, but how globalization was taken too far because of large government subsidies and the systematic misjudgment of risk by businesses. As companies began to account properly for the risks of globalization, cross-border investment fell sharply and foreign trade lagged long before Donald Trump became president and the coronavirus disrupted business around the world.
In Outside the Box, Levinson explains that globalization is entering a new era in which moving stuff will matter much less than moving services, information, and ideas.
Customer Reviews
Money or the box
Author
American economist and historian, with a CV that includes business and finance editor of The Economist newspaper, a stint with J P Morgan Chase, seven books on economics and business strategy, regular contributions to the Harvard Business Review, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Foreign Affairs, the list goes on.
(At this point, it should be noted that Mark with a K not a C Levinson is an engineer who makes ridiculously expensive sound equipment for audiophiles).
This book is a sequel of sorts to The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger (2006), possibly Mr Levinson’s best known work. It was published fifty years after American trucking entrepreneur Malcolm McLean put 58 of what he called ‘trailer vans,’ later renamed containers, aboard a refitted tanker ship, which transported them from Newark, New Jersey to Houston, Texas.
Summary
Mr Levinson’s thesis in The Box was that widespread use of shipping containers revolutionised global trade by slashing transport costs, putting a shedload of wharfies and merchant seamen out of work, and ushering in what we now call globalisation. As the subtitle suggests, Mr L has been forced to rejig his thinking to account for the various ways in which companies and nations have sought to tilt globalisation in their favour since then, even before @RealDonaldTrump came along. Oh, and the internet too. That’s been a biggie in the spreading of ideas.
Bottom line
Meh. The first book was better.
Footnotes
1. Just like the shipping container, I too was born in 1956. Lest my wife make unflattering comparisons between me and a shipping container, it should be noted that Mel Gibson, Bjorn Borg, Martina Navratilova, Shane Gould, Bo Derek, Carrie Fisher, Tom Hanks, Rita Wilson, Joe Montana, Anita Hill, Ian Curtis (Joy Division), John Lydon (Johnny Rotten), Jerry Hall, and Patricia Cornwell, among numerous others, are also class of 56 and no one’s saying any of them looks like a big steel crate! (To be fair, you wouldn’t get much argument from Ian Curtis, who died in 1980, if you said it about him.)
2. For the record, 1956 was also the year Norma Jean Mortensen changed her name to Marilyn Monroe and married playwright Arthur Miller (who was then called to appear before McCarthy’s House Unamerican Activities committee although I’m not sure that was cause and effect), the year Elvis Presley had his first number one hit (Heartbreak Hotel, in case you were wondering) and made his first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show (he sang Hound Dog, I believe), the year Nasser became president of Egypt, the year of the Melbourne Olympics, the Suez Crisis, the Hungarian Revolution and subsequent Soviet invasion, the year Khrushchev had the temerity to suggest Stalin might have got a few things wrong (genocide, for starters), the year videotape and hard disks were invented, the year Grace Kelly married Prince Ranier of Monaco, the year heavyweight boxing champ Rocky Marciano retired undefeated, the year the Eurovision song contest was first broadcast, the year off spinner Jim Laker took 19 wickets in the Fourth Test against Australia (we wuz robbbed), the year the world’s first commercial nuclear power plant at Calder Hall in England commenced operations. Other stuff too. Just sayin’.