Outside the Box

Summary

From the acclaimed author of The Box, a new history of globalization that shows us how to navigate its futureGlobalization has profoundly shaped the world we live in, yet its rise was neither inevitable nor planned. It is alsoone of the most contentious issues of our time. While it may have made goods less expensive, it has also sent massiveflows of money across borders and shaken the global balance of power. Outside the Box offers a fresh and lively historyof globalization, showing how it has evolved over two centuries in response to changes in demography, technology, andconsumer tastes.Marc Levinson, the acclaimed author of The Box, tells the story of globalization through the people who eliminatedbarriers and pursued new ways of doing business. He shows how the nature of globalization changed dramatically in the1980s with the creation of long-distance value chains. This new type of economic relationship shifted manufacturingto Asia, destroying millions of jobs and devastating industrial centers in North America, Europe, and Japan. Levinsondescribes how improvements in transportation, communications, and computing made international value chainspossible, but how globalization was taken too far because of large government subsidies and the systematic misjudgmentof risk by businesses. As companies began to account properly for the risks of globalization, cross-border investment fellsharply and foreign trade lagged long before Donald Trump became president and the coronavirus disrupted businessaround the world.In Outside the Box, Levinson explains that globalization is entering a new era in which moving stuff will mattermuch less than moving services, information, and ideas