Efficiency reduces stability, and vice versa

[eridani]

What I thought of was the computer system for the manned moon landing. The orbits were calculated by four computers "voting" on the correct calculations. In the event of a tie, a fifth computer was a tiebreaker. When it's really critical to get something right, you need a lot of expensive redundancy.

http://jamesfallows.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/12/first_in_a_series_of_year_end.php

The search for efficiency and the urge to consume has set us all up like a row of dominoes - there is no buffer, no resiliency. As one problem rises it causes another. As one solution is tried it drives another problem. We all pull back and the consumer economy stalls. The auto industry and credit firms feeds the media (40% of conventional advertising). Papers and TV and Radio networks, many subject to LBO's will have to fail as per the Tribune. Every sector will be laying people off. Sales of all things fall off a cliff - driving more business failures and layoffs. Cities and states that depend on sales tax and property tax and the credit markets can rely on none of these. So they too will have to lay off millions - thus making all the problems worse. National governments will be asked to save us all and of course cannot. As States and Cities get squeezed and cannot borrow, they will too lay off millions - teachers, firemen police. No one will be safe.

This is very close to what I was trying to explain three and a half years ago in my "Countdown to a Meltdown" imagined-history article in the Atlantic. The way that everything really is connected -- I recently saw a school in southern China that will be in trouble because its donors are losing money through the Madoff fraud in New York -- and that no one has "any buffer, any resiliency" is something we've known in theory but are only now comprehending in its daily, cascading reality. It's worth looking at the summary for similarly uplifting thoughts.


http://jamesfallows.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/12/pensee_dept_followup_on_the_no.php

Via reader Evan Oxhorn, I learn that the novelist David Brin has recently expanded on just this theme. Anyone interested in the first dispatch will find it worth reading Brin's thoughts, here. As a preview:

I refer to a brittle weakness in our economy, courtesy of the same smartaleck caste of MBAs who brought us derivatives and hyper-leveraged finance. A frailty that could, potentially, turn some short-term crisis into full-scale disaster -- and all because of a good theory that's been taken way too far.

For decades, we've been told -- by the same fellows who brought us "efficient finance" -- that manufacturing and commerce should be fine-tuned to squeeze every penny of profit, by trimming away all "fat." ... Under this principle, any reserves that are kept on-premises will only encourage sloppy management and incur unnecessary storage costs -- a calculation that has long been exacerbated by shortsighted tax policies that punish warehousing and inventory-keeping.

This approach, called "Just-In-Time," is based upon ... a wholly unjustified wager that the economy and its supporting systems will always remain stable and never experience disruption.

The whole question of what today's economic seize-up does to comfortable, accepted economic creeds -- from management theory, as above; to the pluses and minuses of full globalization; to the role of regulators; to theories of trade -- will be with us for many years. I do not remember a time when so many ideas seemed to be pressed so hard by fast-breaking events. Probably the last time it happened quite this way was in the 1930s.

[amandabeech]

1. Excellent article. n/t

[Speck Tater]

2. This works everywhere. For example...

The organism that has most efficiently adapted to a particular environment is the first one to go extinct when that environment changes slightly.