I have blogged in the past about "Brittle Systems" and the economy is one such system and it also has a problem with "brittleness" as I will explain in this blog.
Exactly what is "brittleness"? That is a fair question that I will try to answer. First. let's look at it in the forms of some physical thing like glass. We can all agree that glass can be very "Brittle". It is very strong and very stiff, but if it is hit by a single sharp blow, it can shatter. That is what general systems are like too. They work fine and do their jobs, but if the right conditions come along, they can "crash". Many computer systems are like this. The airlines are plagued with systems like this that can handle millions of passenger and airplanes until some point where they "crash". I think you are getting the idea.
Now to the economy. What do they teach in Business School? They teach business people how to make their companies more "efficient". That's good, right? Maybe not. One of the big pushes has been to figure out how you can operate a business with "just in time inventory". That is where you get by with the minimum investment in inventory. If you can do this right, you reduce your investment and make more money. Who would not like to make more money. Engineers do the same thing when they design a car. Why would you want to use more steel than you needed? The car would cost more and be heavier so the gas mileage would end up lower. When it comes to workers, like Henry Ford, you would hire the "least qualified" person possible to do the job. That means you would spend less on labor and thus make more money, but what if someone was sick with Covid-19? You would not have a replacement qualified to take over their job. Look at how hundreds of gas stations were impacted on the East Coast when one oil company's computer was hacked? It took weeks to get back to normal.
I think that you can start to see how the economy of the USA, over the past several years, has gotten more and more brittle while making our economy bigger and the quality of life for us all better. This just sets the stage for some incompetent like President Biden to "crash" our whole system by doing just a few stupid things. Most of us would never think that a President with a 50%-50% in the Senate could ever screw our economic system up as much as he has in just a few months, but he has. The reason is that our economy has gotten more and more brittle and most of us have not even noticed.
The bottom line again is that, "there is no free lunch". As we keep pushing our economy farther and farther it gets more "brittle". We are now running out of skilled more intelligent workers while our schools are turning out kids who rank 40th in the world in math. We did the same thing with doctors about 50 years ago. We now import over 50% of our new doctors. How long can we keep this up? I think that you can see that we don't need millions of uneducated immigrants coming over our Southern border. Even if global warming will be a serious problem, by the time that happens, the USA economy will be worthless and our economy will be in the toilet, So what will there be to save? Never thought about that did you and it is all caused by our "progress" to a more and more "Brittle" economy.
