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Outside the Box

How Globalization Changed from Moving Stuff to Spreading Ideas
Book Hero Magic crafted this summary to help describe this book. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! Summary
Outside the Box by Marc Levinson presents a dynamic history of globalization over two centuries, exploring its impact on global trade, economics, and society. The book highlights how shifts in demography, technology, and consumer preferences have driven the evolution of globalisation. Levinson explains how the rise of long-distance value chains in the 1980s transformed manufacturing, moving jobs to Asia and disrupting industrial regions in the West. The narrative examines advancements in transport, communication, and computing that enabled cross-border production, while critiquing overextension due to government subsidies and business misjudgements. The book concludes by outlining a new phase of globalisation focused less on moving goods and more on the exchange of services, information, and ideas.
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Book Hero Magic created this recommendation. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! IS THIS YOUR NEXT READ?

This book is ideal for readers interested in economic history, international trade, and globalisation, especially those seeking a thorough yet accessible understanding of the forces shaping the modern global economy. It suits academics, policymakers, business professionals, and informed general readers curious about economic trends and policy implications.

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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

Book Hero Magic formatted this description to make it easier to read. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! Description

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 centres 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.

'Levinson deals lucidly with thorny matters of fiscal and trade policy, and though his book presupposes an interest in such things, it requires no background in economics to follow it. A rational, welcome exploration of an international trade that is now at a crossroads, becoming less global than regional.' - Kirkus Reviews

'Outside the Box is most useful as a chronicle of how the pre-2008 model of complex, globe-spanning, just-in-time manufacturing has been exposed as fragile, inefficient, and opaque.' - strategy+business

Book Hero Magic summarised reviews for this book. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! HOW HAS THIS BEEN REVIEWED?

Praised for its clear and insightful analysis, the book has been described as a smart and exceptionally well-timed exploration of global trade's past, present, and future by Bloomberg. The Wall Street Journal calls it an absorbing and thought-provoking survey that reveals global systems' vulnerability to unexpected events. strategy+business notes it as a valuable chronicle of the fragility of just-in-time global manufacturing. The writing is commended for its smooth style, sharp analysis, and light irony by the International Social Science Review. The book also won the Gold Medal in International Business / Globalization at the Axiom Business Book Awards.

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Book Details

INFORMATION

ISBN: 9780691227092

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Format: Paperback / softback

Date Published: 28 September 2021

Country: United States

Imprint: Princeton University Press

Audience: General / adult, Tertiary education, Professional and scholarly

DIMENSIONS

Width: 133.0mm

Height: 203.0mm

Weight: 250g

Pages: 288

About the Author

Marc Levinson is the author of several books, including The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger (Princeton) and The Great A&P and the Struggle for Small Business in America. He was formerly finance and economics editor at The Economist and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He lives in Washington, DC.

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