I may have used this title before, but it needs to be used again. I will explain it in this blog.
Most people have never heard of the concept of "brittleness". The best example that I can come up with is, "Don't put all your eggs in one basket". It might be a fast way to transport your eggs, but if you stumble it is clear that 100% of the eggs will be broken. This kind of thing applies to much more than you may think. Most of us want to make more money and to do things more efficiently. What is wrong with that, you might ask? Well, there is a down side and it is what we call "brittleness". Notice that, here again, there is no free lunch.
Socialism is a type of government that tries to optimize things by having the government control almost every thing. The government figures out how all the people need to do this or that and if it works right, it will result in an optimum result. How could anyone be against a plan by the government that ended up making more money for every one? It just might work if everything went right, but if some thing went wrong it could crash the whole economy. That is what we call "brittle".
I used to work hard to optimize all kinds of things in business without any idea that, in the process, I was making the whole system "brittle". I was lucky that nothing went wrong and I never was faced with a total crash. Look at cars. I wanted to have a car that was faster and I liked to drive it fast. As long as everything was under control, it was a lot of fun, but if just one thing was to go wrong, I would have been dead. I think that we all can understand the concept in this example, but what about in politics?
Look at schools. Back in the 1960's the teacher's union tried to make all school kids learn "new math" as a means to optimize the mathematical abilities of our children. The idea was to optimize math in our schools by making 100% of our kids study this type of math. What no one ever thought of was, "What if it did not work out"? Well, that is exactly what happened. New Math was a total bust and now we are farther behind the rest of the world even more. Had we tested the concept with just a few schools, we would have known that the program was a bust and we would not have damaged our math skills for years. We did not seem to have learned our lesson, because it appears we are at it again with math.
Like I said, most people never thought about the concept of "brittleness". When ever you do any thing that puts all or most of your eggs in one basket you are looking at making things more brittle.
I could go on and on with examples of where we all thought we were doing the right thing, only to find out that we risked our whole country by making our country more "brittle". Backing off on our law enforcement is another example. With good intentions, our government backed off enforcing the laws and to allow Blacks to grieve over the death of Mr Floyd. The idea was to let them get their grief out of their systems, but what happened is a total break down of law and order.
When we try to make some things better, we often make the whole system more "brittle". Now that you have some understanding of this concept, I hope that you are able to make better decisions.
Most people have never heard of the concept of "brittleness". The best example that I can come up with is, "Don't put all your eggs in one basket". It might be a fast way to transport your eggs, but if you stumble it is clear that 100% of the eggs will be broken. This kind of thing applies to much more than you may think. Most of us want to make more money and to do things more efficiently. What is wrong with that, you might ask? Well, there is a down side and it is what we call "brittleness". Notice that, here again, there is no free lunch.
Socialism is a type of government that tries to optimize things by having the government control almost every thing. The government figures out how all the people need to do this or that and if it works right, it will result in an optimum result. How could anyone be against a plan by the government that ended up making more money for every one? It just might work if everything went right, but if some thing went wrong it could crash the whole economy. That is what we call "brittle".
I used to work hard to optimize all kinds of things in business without any idea that, in the process, I was making the whole system "brittle". I was lucky that nothing went wrong and I never was faced with a total crash. Look at cars. I wanted to have a car that was faster and I liked to drive it fast. As long as everything was under control, it was a lot of fun, but if just one thing was to go wrong, I would have been dead. I think that we all can understand the concept in this example, but what about in politics?
Look at schools. Back in the 1960's the teacher's union tried to make all school kids learn "new math" as a means to optimize the mathematical abilities of our children. The idea was to optimize math in our schools by making 100% of our kids study this type of math. What no one ever thought of was, "What if it did not work out"? Well, that is exactly what happened. New Math was a total bust and now we are farther behind the rest of the world even more. Had we tested the concept with just a few schools, we would have known that the program was a bust and we would not have damaged our math skills for years. We did not seem to have learned our lesson, because it appears we are at it again with math.
Like I said, most people never thought about the concept of "brittleness". When ever you do any thing that puts all or most of your eggs in one basket you are looking at making things more brittle.
I could go on and on with examples of where we all thought we were doing the right thing, only to find out that we risked our whole country by making our country more "brittle". Backing off on our law enforcement is another example. With good intentions, our government backed off enforcing the laws and to allow Blacks to grieve over the death of Mr Floyd. The idea was to let them get their grief out of their systems, but what happened is a total break down of law and order.
When we try to make some things better, we often make the whole system more "brittle". Now that you have some understanding of this concept, I hope that you are able to make better decisions.
