Money Talks: We Could Run Out of Everything Again

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3.8 • 546 Ratings

🗓️ 15 October 2024

⏱️ 42 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

For this Money Talks, it’s time to turn the rat race into a rat walk on the beach. Brigid Schulte, author of Over Work: Transforming the Daily Grind in the Quest for a Better Life, speaks with about America’s toxic relationship with labor in which employees at all levels are underpaid, under-rested, and over-hustled. They discuss what America can learn from work cultures in other countries and what it will take to achieve the four-day workweek. In this Money Talks: The pandemic wrecked global supply chains — but they were already set up for disaster. Peter S. Goodman, author of How the World Ran Out of Everything: Inside the Global Supply Chain, speaks with Emily Peck about the failure of the “just-in-time” logistics model, how a global shipping cartel is suffocating small exporters, and how another pandemic-style supply chain breakdown could leave store shelves empty once again. Want more Slate Money? Subscribe to Slate Plus to unlock weekly bonus episodes for each regular Slate Plus episode. Plus, you’ll access ad-free listening across all your favorite Slate podcasts. Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts by clicking “Try Free” at the top of the Slate Money show page. Or, visit slate.com/moneyplus to get access wherever you listen. Podcast production by Jared Downing, Cheyna Roth, and Patrick Fort. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to Money Talks, a special extra podcast from Slate Money, where we chat with brilliant and interesting people.
0:17.2	I'm Emily Peck. I'm a writer at Axios and co-host of Slate Money.
0:27.6	And I'm here today with Peter S. Goodman. He's the Global Economics Correspondent for The New York Times. Hey, Peter.
0:39.6	Hey, Emily. How you doing? And you have a new book out. You want to tell everyone what it's called? I do. It's called how the world ran out of everything inside the global supply chain, and it is written for ordinary people and supply chain geeks alike. And the book really pulls off this thing, Peter, that
0:45.6	you have always done really well, which is take the view from the helicopter, the big, high-level
0:51.3	view of the economy and world events events and connect it with actual human beings
0:55.5	on the ground so that we don't get incredibly bored and we see how things affect real people.
1:01.9	Thanks for that. Yeah. I traced the passage of a single shipping container from a factory town
1:08.0	in China across the Pacific through the mother of all traffic jams off
1:12.0	the twin ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. And then I look at every industry that touches
1:17.5	it along its way, but focusing on people, truck drivers, people maintaining rail, warehouse workers.
1:24.0	I do want everyone to think about the army of people we're counting on to make our
1:29.9	stuff and get it to our door. So what I want to do before we sort of dig in to why this all happened,
1:36.5	I want to just remind people what happened and start with the supply chain crisis itself.
1:41.6	And Peter, you have a great anecdote at the top of the book where you talk about
1:45.3	what you and your family went through with the supply chain crisis. You want to get into that?
1:50.4	Yeah, I mean, that really brought it home. We were living in London during the first wave of the
1:55.2	pandemic. I was based there for the times. And we had a baby born on April 8th, 2020, which was a crazy time to have a
2:05.1	baby. And my wife was really quite stoic about the fact that her parents couldn't fly over from
2:10.2	New York to help with the baby. And I can only be in the hospital for an hour during the day
2:16.0	of the birth and when we got home, all the
2:19.2	government offices were closed. So for a while, our kid didn't exist on paper, wasn't ratified
	...

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