Each new book is promoted as the innovative work that will finally expose those scoundrels who want to ship your job overseas. The jacket copy on my review edition of “End of the Line: The Rise and Coming Fall of the Global Corporation” (Doubleday, 360 pages, $26) proclaims it “the first real history of globalization” and declares that it “shows in stark, provocative detail the perils the global corporation poses to the well-being of the nation, the citizen, the worker, and the economy.”

The author, Barry Lynn, is a fellow at the New America Foundation, a recently formed Washington think tank that is supposed to be “beyond right and left.” If Mr. Lynn’s book is any guide, what lies beyond right and left is messy, uninformed, thoroughly derivative polemic delivered in the prose style of a high-school civics textbook.

The most maddening thing about the book is that while it has a big argument to make – that the global corporation needs to be radically regulated in order to keep us safe – it doesn’t actually come out and make it. The ideas in this “history of globalization” are advanced entirely through innuendo. In Mr. Lynn’s world, liberalizing politicians are dimwitted gulls, globalizing corporations are blind greed personified, and all those economists who tell us free trade makes almost everyone better off are feckless ideologues or worse. But why, if the rebuttals to liberalization are so easy, doesn’t Mr. Lynn lay out, then demolish, the case for free trade, rather than simply informing us that his opponents are chuckleheads and quod erat demonstrandum.

But, then, Mr. Lynn’s ideas betray an almost willful ignorance of basic economics. For example, a chapter lightheartedly titled “Assets Backward” touts vertical integration of firms as the solution to fluctuations in the supply and price of goods: Ford Motors can prevent steel shortages from affecting its car business by buying steel foundries and iron and coal mines. But this is a fundamental economic error: a failure to consider opportunity costs.

If the price of steel spikes, and Ford continues putting steel into its cars when that steel could be sold on the open market for more profit than the cars the steel goes into, this is not good for the company. Nor is it good for the economy; the reason that other firms are bidding more for steel than it is worth to Ford is presumably that consumer demand is higher for their products than it is for automobiles.

Opportunity cost is a concept straight out of first-semester economics courses; for Mr. Lynn to make such an error (and many others just like it), and then go on (as he does) to treat Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman as some sort of soft-headed crank is a little embarrassing. It is like watching a drunk at the office cocktail party insisting on singing “Carmen” to prove he’s sober.

The bones of a serious argument are in this book, if it weren’t written so ineptly. The process of globalization has introduced new vulnerabilities into the American economic system; earthquakes in Taiwan can now affect us in ways they haven’t before by knocking out key links in the global supply chain. Corporations seeking low cost have eliminated the redundancy that they carried in less competitive eras, which can cause problems to cascade.

Much as connecting to the national power grid insulates us from the effect of frequent local power-plant outages, but creates the possibility of a truly massive outage once in a blue moon (remember 2003?), connecting to the global economy increases our resilience against local problems but increases the reach of the rare catastrophes. Eliminating redundant capacity means problems can quickly cascade up the supply chain, but it also means consumers can pay less for their goods.

Perhaps America should be having a serious conversation about whether such trade-offs are worth it. But Mr. Lynn’s book doesn’t really acknowledge that these are trade-offs; he treats supply-chain security as if it were an American value surpassed only by motherhood and apple pie. Economics is at its heart the science of allocating scarce resources between competing uses, but in Mr. Lynn’s world there are no alternatives, only the One True Answer.

Yet the actual examples he offers of dangerous failures in the global supply chain are pretty weak. An explosion in a plant knocked out 50% of the world’s supply of a key component and … computer prices temporarily rose by $100. After September 11 closed airports and customs checkpoints, it took days for things to get back to normal. Another damaged plant, this time in New Mexico, made – brace yourself – Ericsson lose market share to Nokia, which had lined up backup sources of supply. For this, we need the massive government intervention urged by Mr. Lynn?

As the Nokia example shows, the market, despite being filled with global corporations, seems to have dealt pretty efficiently with the problems – rewarding those firms that have backup plans and punishing those who don’t. Perhaps there is a strong case to be made that the sky really is falling, but if so Chicken Little needs to get better data, and marshal it in an intelligible order, before he can expect us to take his claims seriously.

Ms. McArdle last wrote in these pages on antitrust laws.