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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Today through Thursday, we're going to end the show with a series of 10-minute explainers with an expert who will demystify some familiar but little understood concepts. We're kicking off the series with the supply chain issues that we're currently experiencing. Maybe you've been waiting longer for packages, or have missed your favorite pasta shape at the grocery store, or have had trouble renting a car, but what's actually going on and what are some of the root causes? Here to make sense of all this for us is New Yorker staff writer, Amy Davidson Sorkin. She's written about it in her piece in The New Yorker, The Supply-Chain Mystery. Amy, welcome back to WNYC. Thanks so much for joining us again.

Amy Davidson Sorkin: Thanks for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Are shortages happening globally, and are all consumers impacted, or is this a United States thing?

Amy Davidson Sorkin: It's not specific to the United States. I wouldn't say it's happening every single place in the world, but it's happening in a lot of places in the world. The whole world has experienced COVID-19, and that has had an effect in different ways in different places, but it's also the fact that it's hard to separate out something that's happening here from something that's happening elsewhere.

For example, a lot of the bottleneck on supplies in the US right now are happening at the Port of Los Angeles and Long Beach, which is right next to it, where there's basically a traffic jam of container ships. Those are coming from manufacturers in Asia, bringing things to the US. We can't get them unloaded fast enough, partly because there's a labor shortage at the ports, partly because there aren't enough truck drivers to get them away from the ports.

That also means that those container ships aren't taking other loads of cargo other places. They aren't getting them to whatever other country that they might be going toward unloading things or loading things off at a port in Asia. It's hard almost to figure out when we say, "Is it just here? Or is it just there?" Because we're so interconnected. Any good that you could mention almost has an interconnected element to it.

I just caught when I came on your discussion of vodka and I was thinking about that. Say you're a maker of vodka and you can't get the exact chocolate that you want, it's harder for you to get your vodka across the country because there's a shortage of truck drivers. There might be a shortage of truck drivers because of something that's a big aspect of this. As anybody who's tried to buy a used car or rent a car, there's a shortage of vehicles that's related to a chip shortage, which is related to factory closures in Asia. Many of them because of COVID-19.

Another aspect of it though, is that there are a lot of other things that are disrupting our supply chains. For example, we've had Hurricane Ida, or in the UK, Brexit, and it's hard sometimes to separate out exactly what is what, but the thing they have in common is the COVID era revelation of how fragile our supply chains are and how

dependent they are on things that are happening in so many different places.

Brian Lehrer: We should mention to our potential members that there is no vodka shortage that's been documented.

Amy Davidson Sorkin: Not yet.

Brian Lehrer: This is absolutely a rumor from Amy Davidson Sorkin. Is there one?

Amy Davidson Sorkin: I will say that one piece of advice that people have is, whatever we're experiencing now there are worries that it's going to get more acute for the holiday season. When people start buying and buying, and if there is one particular thing that you want, it might require some flexibility. You might need a cinnamon vodka instead of a chocolate one.

I guess that that's another way of saying that, here in the US we're not in a scarcity economy in the sense that our stores are empty. There's something there, but there's something very disconcerting about going into a store and seeing something like every kind of one salad dressing is missing, because we're so used to the market being so responsive to us. The idea that it's not operating, that there might be willing sellers and willing buyers, but something's not connecting them, is very disconcerting. It reminds us that these things are all a little more to us mysterious and breakable than we realize.

When I mentioned the hurricanes, in some ways, the supply chain disruptions we're seeing now are a small way of prelude to what the climate crisis could bring. I should mention, a big part of the shorthand for a lot of the supply chain issues is also a labor shortage. The idea that you can't connect people who might not have jobs and the jobs that are empty. There's a lot of disagreement about why that is, and what to do about it. How much of it is people still worried about the effects of COVID? How much of it is the fact that wages might be too low? There was sometime just talked about as unemployment benefits being too high, but what that's really saying is that the gap between unemployment benefits and wages might be too narrow.

Brian Lehrer: That's a great way to put it.

Amy Davidson Sorkin: Workforce participation has not recovered to the level before COVID. The Wall Street Journal had a headline 4.3 million missing workers, but what does that mean? Does that mean people's families can't find the childcare that they used to? Because the rate of labor force participation among women has fallen more than among men. Does it mean that people who have worked in jobs that have taken so much out of them during the pandemic like in health care, education, deliveries, restaurants, are they looking for a different kind of work because just what you're paid isn't the only way you measure what you're valued or how you're valued.

Brian Lehrer: That thought has to be the last as we're out of time, but I'm glad we ended on that, because it's the two little discussed economic justice contributor to the supply chain shortage.

Amy Davidson Sorkin: I ended up feeling that this real supply chain question is

deciding how we want to live and survive.

Brian Lehrer: Amy Davidson Sorkin, explains stuff in The New Yorker, including her article out now, The Supply-Chain Mystery. Amy, thanks as always.

Amy Davidson Sorkin: Thank you so much.

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