Outside the Box

Summary

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 demography, 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