fragile ... the word is fragile. We've built an insanely fragile economy. Take a look. There's been no war. 100% of the (not so great) US infrastructure that was there before SARS-COV-2 is still there. We've lost about 100k people, which is horrific but in the scheme of things at "USA" scale, and with the skewed demographics, not much of a hit to the economy.
And yet the economy is staggering and it's likely to get worse. Why? Because people have stopped doing things
We've built an entire economy around people doing things they don't really need to do. In and of itself, that's not so bad, but we've also built an economy with so little resilience, so much fragility, so little spare capacity that the mere fact of people stopping doing a bunch of stuff has the potential to cause complete economic disaster for, what 15-20M Americans?
This is utter insanity. It's like claiming that the only vehicle you need is an F1 race car because of course that's all you need: lean, fast, stripped down, powerful and ultimately focused on increasingly one thing. Meanwhile, it's totally obvious to anyone with a pair of eyes that it's a completely unsuitable design for anything except racing on a specially built course, and that the smallest thing is capable of destroying it.
We've built this insane economic system despite the blinding obviousness of calamities like pandemics, wars, storms, unrest, climate change and so on. The "system" will continue to function (very probably), but at what cost and to how many?
And yet the economy is staggering and it's likely to get worse. Why? Because people have stopped doing things
We've built an entire economy around people doing things they don't really need to do. In and of itself, that's not so bad, but we've also built an economy with so little resilience, so much fragility, so little spare capacity that the mere fact of people stopping doing a bunch of stuff has the potential to cause complete economic disaster for, what 15-20M Americans?
This is utter insanity. It's like claiming that the only vehicle you need is an F1 race car because of course that's all you need: lean, fast, stripped down, powerful and ultimately focused on increasingly one thing. Meanwhile, it's totally obvious to anyone with a pair of eyes that it's a completely unsuitable design for anything except racing on a specially built course, and that the smallest thing is capable of destroying it.
We've built this insane economic system despite the blinding obviousness of calamities like pandemics, wars, storms, unrest, climate change and so on. The "system" will continue to function (very probably), but at what cost and to how many?