WE HAVE A PRINTING PAPER PROBLEM: A new supply chain parable for our times.

• Author: Mangu-Ward, Katherine
• Position: FUTURE

I am a print magazine--the ordinary paper magazine familiar to all boys and girls and adults who can read and write.

I, Magazine, simple though I appear to be, merit your wonder and awe. I am seemingly so simple, yet not a single person on the face of this Earth knows how to make me.

FANS OF THE great Leonard Read will recognize (and hopefully forgive) the bastardization of his lovely market parable, "I, Pencil." As Milton Friedman wrote of this brief, powerful essay by the founder of the Foundation for Economic Education: "I know of no other piece of literature that so succinctly, persuasively, and effectively illustrates the meaning of both Adam Smith's invisible hand--the possibility of cooperation without coercion--and Friedrich Hayek's emphasis on the importance of dispersed knowledge and the role of the price system in communicating information."

While my affection for Read's essay remains undimmed, my faith in the mechanisms it describes has been tested over the last several months. I'm not alone in this: Consumers around the world are more aware than ever before of the workings of their supply chains--and of what happens to prices and availability when those lines are strained. From the toilet paper shortage that kicked off the pandemic to the semiconductor crunch of 2022, it's been an education.

Until recently, I had only the vaguest grasp of the specific complex market that enabled the physical version of Reason magazine to come into being. This is as it should be; my ignorance was one of the great gifts of functioning markets.

For the last 17 years, Reason has bought its paper in enormous lots from UPM-Kymmene Oyj, a Helsinki-based company. A typical order is 20 metric tons. Shipping containers of UPM paper float from Kotka-Hamina or other ports to Baltimore on the slowest of slow boats, where they are unloaded onto trucks and taken to Little Rock, Arkansas. There, Reason is printed by Democrat Printing & Lithographing Co., a family firm founded in 1871, alongside dozens of other publications. Each issue is then delivered to readers by the planes, trains, trucks, and weary feet of the U.S. Postal Service. All of this is coordinated by Reason's publisher, Mike Alissi.

Several months back, though, prices started to rise at every step of this process. And prices, as Hayek taught us, contain information. They were warning, it turns out, of a dire turn of events.

The story of what went wrong with the paper supply begins before the...