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At the same time, decades of zealous reverence for deregulation as the solution to nearly every problem served to cede economic fate to a handful of monopolistic companies that dominated key industries, from the railroads to meatpacking. Here was the outgrowth of a fundamental alteration of American capitalism over the last half century, the elevation of shareholder interests to primacy, the triumph of financial considerations over all others. The executives running corporations that controlled critical swaths of the economy—manufacturing, transportation, food processing—answered not to their customers or local communities but to distant yet omnipotent bosses: the money managers of Wall Street. They had cut capacity as a way to limit supply and boost the prices for their products and services. That had left markets prone to disarray and shortages whenever trouble arrived.

In Washington, both major political parties had long placed faith in the fantastical notion that gigantic companies left to seize commanding holds over their markets would yield greater efficiency—a concept that took on cultish currency. Far from happenstance, this represented a triumph of corporate lobbyists deployed over decades. Successive presidential administrations and Congress dismissed decades of lessons about the perils of unchecked monopoly power, deactivating basic antitrust law. They bought into the idea—or at least the accompanying campaign contributions—that scale secured through mergers was the best way to supply consumers with abundant choices and lower prices.

The pandemic exposed the dangers of all of these assumptions.

It laid bare the consequences of relying on faraway factories and container ships to keep humanity supplied with goods.

It exposed as reckless the world's heavy dependence on a single country—China—for critical products like protective gear and medicine, and especially as Washington and Beijing were locked in a trade war.

It revealed the risks of leaning on transportation systems staffed by people whose wages and working conditions had been decimated by cost cutting, leaving companies wide open to revolt.

And it demonstrated the pitfalls of handing responsibility to monopolists for the supply of meat, baby formula, and other basic fortifications—a recipe for skyrocketing prices and empty shelves. Unregulated behemoths left to dominate markets in the name of efficiency turned out to yield results that were efficient only on Wall Street.

The United States, the world's most powerful country, had successfully mobilized to defeat the Nazis, put humans on the moon, and catalyze the computer age. Yet, in the face of a lethal pandemic, it could not make or secure enough face masks to outfit medical workers. It was unable to build enough ventilators to allow its most vulnerable citizens to count on their next breaths. And it could not secure adequate stocks of basic medicines. Here was a repudiation of the cult of efficiency that had long ruled American business.

Still, if COVID-19 produced the shock that was the most immediate cause of this pronounced supply chain distress, it merely unmasked vulnerabilities that had been there all along, mounting over decades.

Trucking had long depended on a steady stream of recruits to compensate for the fact that it was a horrifying way to make a living, one subject to the predatory financial shenanigans of employers. American railroads had frequently been looted by their investors and run less as transportation systems than as wellsprings of dividends—a story that went back to the Robber Barons of the nineteenth century. From meatpacking plants to warehouses, the people producing goods and delivering them to our homes had long been forced to choose between their lives and their livelihoods.

The pandemic did not create this situation, but it brought the consequences into stark relief.

And the broad chaos in the global supply chain helped deliver another economic affliction: inflation.

By early 2022, in the name of snuffing out price increases, central banks around the world would begin lifting interest rates. This would foist higher borrowing costs on homeowners and credit card holders. It would threaten ordinary workers with joblessness while depressing stock prices. Though economists debated the causes of inflation, part of the blame clearly fell on the reality that astonishing quantities of goods were stuck floating off ports. Distress was rippling around the globe, and ordinary people were paying the mounting costs.

By early 2023, the worst disruptions of the pandemic years had subsided. The floating traffic jams had all but disappeared, shipping rates had plunged, and product shortages had eased. Yet the same foundational perils remained, awaiting an inevitable future disturbance.

The global economy has entered a new era of enduring volatility. As climate change alters the natural realm, the global supply chain will be subject to new rules and constant reassessment of risks. Russia's assault on Ukraine has enhanced the prospect of the world splintering into rival camps, complicating the geography of international trade. China and the United States appear locked in a cold war whose consequences are playing out around the globe, reshaping alliances, trade pacts, and fundamental understandings about the nature of international engagement.

These are monumental variables. We do not know when the next shock will arrive or where it will occur, but we can be certain that such a moment is coming.

To meet the challenge of the next disturbance, we need to grapple with how we got here. We need to understand how the supply chain became so complex, extended, and centered on a single country. And we must reconfigure the supply chain to safeguard society through greater resilience.