NEVER MIND ANTIFRAGILITY. THINK ABOUT RESILIENCE.

I want to start another meditation on supply chains with a history lesson.  Would you rather go to war, dear reader, with tanks that epitomized Platonic perfection and precision engineering, or would you take your chances with tanks machined to something less than precise tolerances, and where it would be wise to drop the oil pan 50 kilometers out of the works, to drain the metal shavings from the oil sump?

Those of you who are familiar with the War will recognize in the former the imposing looking German super-tanks that had an annoying habit of throwing a sprocket when the tread was digging into snow, and in the latter the Soviet T-34s that shrugged off tundra and steppe and mud all the way to the Elbe.

Or those of you who have been following my model railroading efforts over the years might be tempted to think about those oh-so-nicely-laid-out British etched brass kits, with lots of fiddly bits, and when they all go together right they're beautiful miniatures, and contrasting them with the North American machined brass mechanisms that look, well, not quite prototypical, but they're easier to assemble and they're good runners and relatively easy to service.  People who tinker with British sports cars will get the picture ...

When I wrote this, four years ago, I was not expecting the kind of confirmation we're now seeing.  "One of these days, the Invisible Hand is going to smack those investors and those companies that gave pride of place to short-term performance and shareholder value and liquidated the company."  Oh, there was also this.  "Business also operate in environments where evolutionary forces are at work, and perhaps the air carriers are now discovering what many other businesses have had to learn the hard way.  In economics, there is an efficient level of redundancy."

Now, it's the meat packers learning the same thing, also the hard way.  Here's Edward Tenner, in The Atlantic.

Overlooked is the fact that too much zeal for lean operation has pitfalls of its own. In practice, the pursuit of efficiency has often resulted in the consolidation of smaller companies and facilities into larger ones; in greater congestion as more people are packed into smaller spaces, whether in office towers or aboard commercial airliners; and in the tight coupling of deliveries and other business processes in ways that, at least when all goes well, speed up production and reduce warehouse inventories. But consolidation, congestion, and tight coupling may also make our economy less efficient in the long run—and our society more vulnerable to outside shocks such as the coronavirus. Efficiency, in fact, can be hazardous to our well-being, and a strategic amount of inefficiency is crucial in keeping society healthy.

By all means, read the whole thing. I consider it noteworthy when any Atlantic article acknowledges the Law of Unintended Consequences.  Then note that both Andrea Germanos with Common Dreams and National Review's M. B. Dougherty identify the same failing with tightly coupled meat packing relying heavily (in the best technocratic fashion, no less) on a few producers operating a few big factories.  There's still a bit of the old style commission merchant channel of distribution left, but it's not currently sufficiently nimble (and I have not gotten around to technocratic rigidities with the force of law) and not operating on a scale that the local grocers and food banks would benefit by.

The worst might be yet to come.

Cities are, however, particularly vulnerable to deliberate and focused sabotage, and a modicum of preparation might be wise.  "Just as the huge militaries of the early 20th century were vulnerable to supply and communications disruption, cities are now so heavily dependent on a constant flow of services from various centralized systems that even the simplest attacks on those systems can cause massive disruption."  That the majority of the world's population now lives in urban areas (and correspondingly relies for its food and fuel on the efforts of a relative few) makes rendering the supply networks antifragile a desirable thing.  To the extent that the cities and supply networks are themselves emergent, rather than the fruits of Intelligent Design by Wise Experts, their chances are better.

The Wise Experts with the M.B.A. and similar credentials are getting their comeuppance. Is it too soon to ask that the big city mayors who have been mishandling the response to the coronavirus get the same?