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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 traces the dynamic history of globalization over two centuries, revealing how demographic shifts, technological advances, and changing consumer preferences shaped its course. Marc Levinson explores the transformative rise of long-distance value chains in the 1980s, which shifted manufacturing to Asia and disrupted industrial economies across the West. He examines the roles of transportation, communication, and computing innovations, alongside governmental subsidies and corporate risk assessments, in fostering and later challenging global trade patterns. Levinson concludes with an insightful look at globalization's evolving future, focusing less on goods and more on the movement of services, information, and ideas.
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Format: Paperback / softback
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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 economics, global trade, and business history, as well as those seeking to understand the challenges and future directions of globalisation in today’s interconnected world.

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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

Series: Princeton ANZ Paperbacks

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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 offers a fresh...
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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?

Kirkus Reviews praises Levinson's clear and accessible treatment of complex fiscal and trade policies, making the topic approachable without requiring economic expertise. They call the book a "rational, welcome exploration" of international trade at a pivotal crossroads. strategy+business highlights the book's value as a chronicle of the vulnerabilities and inefficiencies in the pre-2008 global manufacturing model.

Book Hero reading reviews

Book Details

INFORMATION

ISBN: 9780691218892

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Format: Paperback / softback

Date Published: 15 December 2020

Country: United States

Imprint: Princeton University Press

Illustration: Illustrations

Audience: General / adult

DIMENSIONS

Width: 156.0mm

Height: 235.0mm

Weight: 250g

Pages: 280

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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