While it is obviously not unrelated to the pandemic chaos, there is a deeper issue. As Nassim Taleb has often pointed out, the same things that make a system "efficient" also can often be viewed as making it fragile. "Just-in-time" means "no buffer". We have, for decades, been doing as much as possible to make all our economic systems as efficient as possible, which is to say with no extra capacity.
Thus, if it had not been the pandemic, it would eventually have been something else. Sooner or later, there is always a shock to the system. If you have made sure that every step in a long complex chain is optimized to have very little slack, the thing you have optimized for is fragility.
Thus, if it had not been the pandemic, it would eventually have been something else. Sooner or later, there is always a shock to the system. If you have made sure that every step in a long complex chain is optimized to have very little slack, the thing you have optimized for is fragility.