I’m an economist, historian, and journalist with a long track record of writing and speaking about economic and business issues. My book The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger, which explains how a seemingly simple innovation made globalization possible, has received many awards. The Great A&P and the Struggle for Small Business in America, which explores the fascinating history of government efforts to crack down on chain stores to protect mom-and-pop retailers, won praise across the ideological spectrum. My 2016 book, An Extraordinary Time, is an unusual take on the miserable decade of the 1970s, showing how the sudden end of the postwar boom led voters in many countries to choose leaders who promised to cut government down to size — Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Helmut Kohl, and others. But they couldn’t bring back the good times, because rapid productivity growth, the critical ingredient in higher living standards, is something political leaders can’t deliver. Outside the Box, an unorthodox history of globalization that has won wide readership in Asia, asserts that the international economic relationships that we’ve known since the late 1980s, based on intricate long-distance value chains, are shifting into a new stage in which the flow of ideas and services will be more important than the flow of boxes filled with goods.
My most recent project, The UPS Man, is the first-ever biography of James E. Casey, who co-founded a bicycle messenger service and built it into United Parcel Service. Casey was an innovator in a stodgy industry, laying the foundation of modern logistics. But he was also a ferocious competitor who led his company to act in ways that it prefers not to include in its corporate mythology. Our ability to obtain almost anything from anywhere with just a credit card and a couple of days’ patience rests on Jim Casey’s little-known accomplishments.
The links above will bring you to my biography, to information about my books, to some of my recent articles, and to my contact information.