Southern California looked like it was on lockdown.

More than 50 giant ships were bogged in the frigid waters of the Pacific, stranded near the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, California, as the days passed while they waited for their turn to dock and unload their cargoes. Onlookers with binoculars swarmed the water’s edge, trying to count the ships stretching to the dark horizon.How many ships are there?

This is not war. This is what happens when the global economy grinds to a halt.

It was October 2021, and the world was in the grip of the worst pandemic in a century.Confusing aberration.The most basic geography seems to have been reorganized, with oceans stretched and Chinese factories and American supermarkets further apart.

Given thatSize of container ship— The largest container ship is more than four times the height of the Statue of Liberty — any one of them at anchorEvery waiting container ship means a large number of orders have not reached their intended destinations. The containers, whose decks are piled high with everything from clothing and electronics to barrels full of chemicals used to make products such as paints and medicines, make up almost every aspect of contemporary life.

Among the waiting ships was the Hong Kong-flagged CSCL Spring, which was carrying 138 containers from China’s giant agricultural conglomerate Wilmar International, totaling about 3,300 tons of canola pellets — enough animal feed to feed 20,000 cows for a week. The delays are exacerbating feed shortages plaguing U.S. livestock producers.

Among the stranded ships were five carrying a total of about 5,900 tonnes of Fijian bottled water. More than 7,700 tonnes of Heineken beer were also delayed. The Singapore-flagged Wan Hai 625 was carrying nearly 1,300 tonnes of polyethylene terephthalate resin, a key element in making synthetic fibres and plastic bottles used to package soft drinks, and a commodity in short supply. The ship was also carrying about 2,300 tonnes of solar panels and 720 tonnes of chain-link fencing material.

All of this stuff should be somewhere else.

But the influx of containers overwhelmed the docks, even as quarantined Americans prepared for the apocalypse by stocking basements with exercise bikes, bedrooms with office furniture and kitchens with baking equipment. Most of these goods are made in Asia. The trucking industry complains that it can’t find enough drivers to deliver the tsunami of goods. Warehouses are full, but workers are scarce. The railroad industry, hollowed out by years of corporate cost-cutting, is struggling amid the surge in demand.

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The center of the stranded ships near Long Beach is the Danish-flagged container ship Maersk Emden, which is about 365 meters long and 48 meters wide. The ship had just arrived from the Chinese port of Ningbo and was loaded with about 12,000 containers.

Hagen Woerker had just one box on board the Maersk Emden – a 12-meter container recorded in the shipping manifest as MSMU8771295. But it occupied a central place in the short history of his startup.

Walker’s company, Glo, is based in a small town in Mississippi. It makes novelty plastic cubes that sparkle when placed in water. He recently received a breakthrough order.– Making bath toys for Sesame Street, includingIconic Elmo toysHe had planned to debut the product during the crucial holiday season, which was just two months away.

Like millions of companies, Walker’s operation relies on two key elements: factories producing in China and giant container ships that carry products to American shores. For decades, it’s proven to be a cheap and reliable way for big brands and small businesses alike to supply the world’s largest economy with everything from oven cleaners to aircraft parts.

But that equation is unravelling, and Walker finds himself facing some of the worst traffic jams along the Southern California coast.

whenMaersk EmdenAs Walker’s cargo joined the floating queue near Long Beach, people from Europe to Africa to North and South America were still enduring the masks andThere is a severe shortage of personal protective equipment such as surgical gowns. This has forced frontline medical staff to care for COVID-19 patients without adequate protection.

Toilet paper disappeared from store shelves as people panic-stockpiled. Feminine hygiene products, antibiotics and even medicines such as aspirin were also hard to find. Meat displays in supermarkets were bare. At one point, the popular breakfast cereal Grapefruit Nuts and tapioca flour, used to make bubble tea, all but disappeared.

In Asia, factories that make computer chips can’t keep up with a huge increase in demand, an emergency in an era when chips have become the brains of all kinds of devices. From Japan to the United States to Brazil, auto factories have stopped production because of chip shortages. American auto dealers usually have two to three times the number of cars they sell in a month. By the end of 2021, their inventory had fallen to a record low, less than half of sales. With fewer new cars, the prices of used cars have also begun to soar.

Medical device makers began a largely futile campaign to shame chip companies into prioritizing their orders over those from smartphone makers like Apple and Google. Electronics companies began secretly buying up old toys and video game consoles, disassembling ancient PlayStations and Barbie accessories for the chips inside.

For those who never needed to goconsiderGlobal Supply ChainAll of this is extremely disturbing to consumers who are not familiar with the complexity of the market.It intuitively confirms the idea that contemporary life itself has spiraled out of control, and reveals an uncomfortably dark truth: the situation is no longer under anyone’s control.

In the rich world, society has long been steeped in the idea that the Internet has transcended traditional time and space constraints: you can go online at any time, any day, in any weather, click, and wait for the truck to arrive with your goods.

In a world of great uncertainty, this is one certainty.

Supply chains are more than just systems for circulating goods. They also provide a sense of control over the human condition, a rare coherent aspect of modern life. At a time when people are losing faith in government, skeptical of the news media, and suspicious of corporate motives, everyone can at least trust the invisible forces that bring the courier to your door. The connections that connect farms, factories, and distribution centers to homes and businesses seem inviolable.

As supply chains began to break, cities from Minneapolis to Milan were filled with the endless wail of ambulances carrying COVID-19 victims to hospitals, where people lay dying in hallway beds, wards were overcrowded, and ventilators were in short supply. From San Francisco to Stockholm, people breathed their last alone in nursing homes, without saying goodbye to their children and grandchildren. Every day brought more bad news, and the death toll continued to rise, eventually claiming nearly 7 million lives worldwide.

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In recent decades, multinational corporations from North America to Europe to Japan have staked their fortunes on a ruthless drive for efficiency. In pursuit of lower costs and higher profits, they have increasingly outsourced production to factories around the world, especially in China.

They act as if this strategy carries no risk, as if China’s industrial parks are extensions of Ohio and Bavaria. They either don’t know or don’t care that the shipping industry is essentially a cartel, largely unsupervised by any government regulator.

Once their products reach American shores, companies rely on transportation networks that, in turn, rely on millions of workers who do dangerous, lonely jobs for artificially low wages and working conditions. In structuring their supply chains in a relentless pursuit of efficiency, trucking companies and railroads treat workers as if their time is infinite, worthless, and uncompensated for the time they spend waiting for the next shipment.

Big companies along the supply chain, from railroads to trucking companies to warehouses, have long viewed workers as costs to be controlled rather than as people with families, medical conditions and other needs. Employers believe they can exploit them without worrying about the labor force drying up. Meanwhile, decades of enthusiasm for deregulation as a solution to almost every problem has handed the economy’s fate to a handful of companies that dominate key industries.

In Washington, both major parties have long held the unrealistic belief that allowing large corporations to control markets will produce greater efficiency.

It exposes the recklessness of the world’s heavy reliance on China for critical products like protective gear and medicines, especially as Washington and Beijing are locked in a trade war.

It reveals the risks of relying on transport systems whose staff have seen wages and working conditions slump due to cost-cutting.

Unregulated giants dominate the market in the name of efficiency, but it only produces efficient results on Wall Street.

Then, widespread disruptions in global supply chains fueled another economic pain: inflation.

By early 2022, central banks around the world have begun raising interest rates in the name of curbing price increases. This will make borrowing more expensive for homeowners and credit card holders. This will threaten ordinary workers with unemployment while depressing stock prices. While economists debate the causes of inflation, part of the blame is clearly due to the reality that an incredible amount of cargo is floating at sea, waiting to be brought into port.

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By early 2023, the worst of the pandemic’s disruptions are behind us. Ocean freight disruptions have all but disappeared, freight rates have plummeted, and product shortages have eased. Yet the same fundamental dangers remain, awaiting the inevitable turmoil ahead.

The global economy has entered a new era of sustained turbulence. As the natural world is transformed by climate change, global supply chains will be subject to new rules and a constant reassessment of risk. Russia’s attack on Ukraine raises the prospect of a world splitting into opposing camps, complicating the geography of international trade. China and the United States appear to be locked in a cold war, and its consequences are playing out around the world, reshaping alliances, trade agreements, and fundamental understandings about the nature of international engagement.

We can say with certainty that another upheaval is coming, and to prepare, we need to understand how we got here. We need to understand how supply chains became so complex, so extended, and so concentrated in one country. We must reconfigure supply chains to protect society by building resilience.

The globalization we have become accustomed to is driven by a particularly intoxicating form of efficiency, a concept known as Just in Time or Lean Manufacturing.

But pandemic shortages have prompted some companies to recalibrate, building up inventory as they shift from “just in time” to “just in case.”

As the U.S. and China view each other as competitors, multinational companies have moved some factory production to other countries, such as Vietnam. U.S. companies are building factories in Mexico and Central America to keep manufacturing low-cost without having to contend with the vagaries of the Pacific Ocean. Some companies are engaging in so-called “reshoring,” bringing factory production back to the United States.

The hard work of the past four years has taught us a truth: From lifesaving drugs and computer chips to toys and video games, humanity relies on a tangled and fragile global supply chain to get the products of our time. This system relies on various forms of labor exploitation, which makes it always face the possibility of collapse. It is built to reward the investor community, but often at the expense of reliability.

The Great Supply Chain Disruption is not a recent anomaly. It is a preview of the disruptions we are bound to encounter in the future if the machines don’t work properly.