Marc Levinson has 3 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 3 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.7★ across 27 ratings. The most-rated is The Box.
The Box
Summary
In April 1956, a refitted oil tanker carried 58 shipping containers from Newark to Houston. From that modest beginning, container shipping developed into a huge industry that made the boom in global trade possible. The Box tells the dramatic story of the container's creation, the decade of struggle before it was widely adopted, and the sweeping economic consequences of the sharp fall in transportation costs that containerization brought about. Published on the 50th anniversary of the first container voyage, this is the first comprehensive history of the shipping container. It recounts how the drive and imagination of an iconoclastic entrepreneur, Malcom McLean, turned containerization from an impractical idea into a massive industry that slashed the cost of transporting goods around the world and made the boom in global trade possible. But the container didn't just happen. Its adoption required huge sums of money, both from private investors and from ports that aspired to be on the leading edge of a new technology. It required years of high-stakes bargaining with two of the titans of organized labor, Harry Bridges and Teddy Gleason, as well as delicate negotiations on standards that made it possible for almost any container to travel on any truck or train or ship. Ultimately, it took McLean's success in supplying U.S. forces in Vietnam to persuade the world of the container's potential. Drawing on previously neglected sources, economist Marc Levinson shows how the container transformed economic geography, devastating traditional ports such as New York and London and fueling the growth of previously obscure ones, such as Oakland. By making shipping so cheap that industry could locate factories far from its customers, the container paved the way for Asia to become the world's workshop and brought consumers a previously unimaginable variety of low-cost products from around the globe.
©2006, 2007 Princeton University Press (P)2014 Marc Levinson
Outside the Box
Summary
From the acclaimed author of The Box, a new history of globalization that shows us how to navigate its future. 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 centers 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.
©2020 Marc Levinson (P)2020 Recorded Books
Guide to Financial Markets (6th edition)
Summary
The definitive guide to why different financial markets exist and how they operate. This edition brings the listener right up to speed with the latest developments in financial instruments and provides a clear and incisive guide to this complex world that even those who work in it often find hard to understand. With chapters on the markets that deal with money, foreign exchange, equities, bonds, commodities, financial futures, options, and other derivatives, it looks at why these markets exist, how they work and who trades in them, and it gives a run-down of the factors that affect prices and rates. Business history is littered with disasters that occurred because people involved their firms in financial markets they didn't properly understand. Read this book and you and your company won't be new additions to this list. A fabulous source of reference for anyone wishing to understand financial markets - there is no better guide.
©2014 Marc Levinson (P)2014 Audible Ltd