Economics is about the unseen, in Frederic Bastiat’s famous framing. The unseen includes concepts such as opportunity cost and unintended consequences, and that’s the dimension in which economics adds value.

　　Journalists specialize in seeing things. Their job is to report, to observe, to notice. When they do that well, they add value. Because their professional training does not lend itself to grasping the unseen, they rarely do economics well.

　　Peter S. Goodman is the global economics correspondent for the New York Times. You don’t get a job like that without being good at journalism, and Goodman is great at seeing things. His book, How the World Ran Out of Everything, is full of valuable anecdotes, descriptions, and stories about how global supply chains work.

　　But his book is also a demonstration of why most journalists aren’t very good at economics. When he tries to make broader economic points, his attempts at analysis fall flat, and he leaves readers worse off than if he had simply told stories about supply chains.

　　How the World Ran Out of Everything is organized around following a shipment of light-up bath toys for kids. At the start of each chapter, the reader gets a new update on the shipment as it makes its way from a factory in China to its customers in the United States.

　　And it’s very boring. Because the point of the book is to analyze what happened during the pandemic when supply chains were disrupted, a bunch of the updates are basically “nothing happened.” It’s so boring that even Goodman and his editors seem to have lost interest: The first name of the Mississippi business owner who ordered the shipment is spelled three different ways in the book.

　　This conceit rather awkwardly sets up a bunch of other stories that are much more interesting. Goodman describes how the shipping container was invented. It might not seem very revolutionary to put stuff in standard-sized boxes before loading it onto ships, but when Malcom McLean first did it in the 1950s, it changed shipping forever. Per-unit prices fell by as much as 95 percent, and global trade became possible at scale.

　　Goodman describes the origin of “just-in-time” manufacturing, the principle formulated by Taiichi Ohno of Toyota during Japan’s recovery from World War II. Just-in-time allowed for massive gains in efficiency by reducing the amount of inventory required for production.

　　He then narrates how “just-in-time” was spread throughout the business world, with varying degrees of success. Goodman writes about the rise of consultancy firms and the groupthink that can emerge and evolve with their influence.

　　He also describes many of the challenges of the pandemic in illuminating detail. He rides along with a drayage truck driver stuck in the tangled mess of the overcrowded ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. His experience as a world traveler shines through as he describes how things work globally with firsthand familiarity.

　　Goodman amply displays his years of experience as a journalist. He writes with crisp, clear sentences about things that have happened and are happening. He talks to people and listens to what they tell him. That’s his job, and he’s good at it.

　　The problem is that his skillset is incomplete to adequately analyze supply chains. The vast majority of the time—a freakishly high proportion of the time, when you think about the number of people and the complexity involved—supply chains work. Individuals and businesses can order stuff, and it will show up basically as promised almost all the time. When something works like it’s supposed to, it’s not news. It’s not seen.

　　When supply chains are seen, it’s because there was some kind of failure. So journalists, who specialize in seeing, are more prone to diagnose failure than to marvel at success.

　　One of the best examples of this is the book’s title. It’s not sensationalized to draw attention. It accurately represents Goodman’s thesis, which is that the pandemic exposed that supply chains are weak and fragile due to profiteering by big businesses and consultants, and that “we have surrendered our basic decency along with our sense of economic security.”

　　The world ran out of some things during the pandemic. Everyone can think of examples from 2020 of goods that are normally easy to find that were suddenly out of stock. But the world did not run out of everything. Here’s a graph of real personal consumption expenditures on goods from 2015 to today:

　　There was a sharp drop in the first two months of the pandemic. But by May 2020, personal spending on goods had nearly returned to what it was in February before the pandemic began. By June, it had far exceeded that level, and it continued to rise.

　　To be clear, this graph is adjusted for inflation, so it represents the value of goods that people actually received. And it doesn’t include spending on services, which would be less affected by supply-chain problems.

　　Far from running out of everything, the remarkable economic story of the pandemic is that despite all the supply-chain disruptions, Americans actually consumed more goods than they did before the pandemic. And once the disruptions were resolved, goods consumption remained at that higher level.

　　Remember 2020? Governments in the United States ordered millions of people to stay home indefinitely and shuttered many businesses. Many European governments were as strict or stricter. China, the world’s second-largest economy and the home of large amounts of global manufacturing, became a full public health police state.

　　And despite all of that, the global supply chain that Goodman portrays as fragile and brittle was able, after a two-month drop, to deliver more goods to Americans and has continued to do so. It was hard to find toilet paper for a couple of weeks, some groceries were out of stock for a bit—we can all think of things that were frustrating about buying goods during a once-in-a-century pandemic. But can we give supply chains some credit for managing to facilitate an overall increase in goods consumption?

　　Firms don’t cooperate to deliver goods because they’re being nice. They do it because it’s profitable—and because the price system allocates resources to make it possible.

　　Supply chains were able to achieve this result not because some brilliant government official was planning how goods got delivered. It wasn’t because some brilliant businessmen were planning it. (A lot of businessmen are idiots.) The thing about modern global supply chains is that nobody is in charge of them. Movements and actions are mostly governed by price signals.

　　Goodman acknowledges this but portrays it in negative terms. “The shortages of goods conveyed a gut-level affirmation that contemporary life itself had gone haywire, exposing a dark and unsettling truth: no one was in control,” he writes. He never quite manages to say why someone should be in control, or who that someone should be.

　　Ocean carriers, trucking companies, airlines, railroads, terminal operators, freight forwarders, manufacturers, suppliers, designers, marketers, investors, and customers are all independent from each other. They don’t cooperate to deliver goods because they’re being nice. They don’t do it because the government tells them to. They do it because it’s profitable, and it works because the price system allocates resources to make it possible.

　　Part of the reason goods consumption was able to increase during the pandemic was that the price of shipping containers soared. That might seem counterintuitive, but the higher price signaled to ocean carriers that more capacity was needed, and many additional firms entered the transpacific market on a temporary basis to provide it.

　　Container prices have since collapsed, with most of those new entrants withdrawing, and ocean carriers’ profits, which had soared, returned to their low, pre-pandemic levels. If ocean carriers were actually the cartel that Goodman says they are, prices and profits would not have collapsed, because true monopolists restrict output and raise prices. Instead, the pandemic-era fluctuations in the ocean-shipping market were caused largely by a demand-side shock that caused a boom followed by a bust.

　　But because Goodman’s specialty is talking to people rather than analyzing economics, he effectively outsources his analysis to people such as Barry Lynn, who leads the Open Markets Institute influential among neo-Brandeisian antitrust advocates, or Barbara Ehrenreich, whose book Nickel and Dimed Goodman describes as “masterful.” Neither is an economist.

　　Goodman praises Ehrenreich for her description of “the exertions of poorly paid employees as a universal subsidy that held down the cost of living for all.” How this applies to Class I railroad employees, whose current labor contract includes an average annual total compensation of $160,000, is not clear. Yet Goodman wrote a whole chapter on Class I railroads in which he describes trains as being operated by “underpaid skeleton crews.”

　　Probably the clearest example of Goodman missing the unseen is his praise for the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), which represents dockworkers on the West Coast. He praises the order and high pay the union secures (though he mischaracterizes dockworkers’ average pay of $233,000, a number he does not mention, as “middle-class”). No doubt that’s nice for the dockworkers.

　　But the union can only command that pay by restricting entry into the workforce, which it can only do with the aid of government. The union’s hyper-progressive political activism—so progressive that it left the AFL-CIO, which it viewed as too moderate—keeps its relationship with California politicians strong. And the union opposes many technological advances adopted in other countries’ ports years ago, resulting in the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach being two of the least efficient major ports in the world.

　　Goodman acknowledges the problems the union creates for truck drivers, by keeping the ports slow and forcing them to waste time and fuel idling in lines while waiting to be loaded. But having productivity and modernization at America’s largest port complex held back by one union harms unseen millions of American workers through slower delivery times and higher prices.

　　The concentrated benefits to the ILWU are seen; the dispersed costs to everyone else are unseen. Goodman can interview an ILWU member who is happy with her job. He can interview a Dutch dockworker sad about job losses after the port of Rotterdam introduced automation. He cannot interview a US autoworker who does not exist because inefficiencies at Long Beach increase the price of auto-part imports. He cannot interview the marginal worker whose job was added at a German chemical plant because the Rotterdam port became more efficient.

　　Ironically, Bastiat was a journalist. But he was a rare one who understood political economy. “Not to know political economy is to allow oneself to be dazzled by the immediate effect of a phenomenon; to know political economy is to take into account the sum total of all effects, both immediate and future,” Bastiat wrote. Most journalists are dazzled by the immediate effects, which it is their job to see. That’s why they usually aren’t very good at economics.