Shippers and retailers would have been better able to cope with this year’s challenges if public and private leaders had not been so laser-focused on minimizing short-term costs such as labor and inventory. With supportive export-oriented policies and financial deregulation, companies have spent 30-plus years reducing warehousing space, subcontracting and outsourcing production, restructuring work arrangements to cut costs and delaying investments in transportation infrastructure.

In other words, we thoroughly starved the redundancy and agility out of these systems and dramatically increased our reliance on imports, because doing so delivered shareholder profits and “just-in-time” access to cheap goods — until the day our supply chains couldn’t deliver. So it is not surprising that we now face a broken system with no easy fix.