{"id":58680,"date":"2021-07-20T07:51:17","date_gmt":"2021-07-20T12:51:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=58680"},"modified":"2021-07-20T07:51:17","modified_gmt":"2021-07-20T12:51:17","slug":"how-breakdown-cascades-into-collapse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=58680","title":{"rendered":"How Breakdown Cascades Into Collapse"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3 class=\"post-title\"><a href=\"https:\/\/charleshughsmith.blogspot.com\/2021\/07\/how-breakdown-cascades-into-collapse.html\">How Breakdown Cascades Into Collapse<\/a><\/h3>\n<div id=\"post-7547839682891817250\" class=\"post-body\">\n<p><i>Maintaining the illusion of confidence, permanence and stability serves the interests of those benefiting from the bubbles and those who prefer the safety of the herd, even as the herd thunders toward the precipice.<\/i><\/p>\n<p><b>The misconception that collapse is an\u00a0<i>all or nothing phenomenon<\/i>\u00a0is common:<\/b>\u00a0Either the system rights itself with a bit of money-printing and rah-rah or it collapses into post-industrial ruin and gangs are battling over the last stash of canned beans.<\/p>\n<p><b>Neither scenario considers the fragility and resilience of the socio-economic system as a whole.<\/b>\u00a0It is both far more fragile than the believers in the permanence of the\u00a0<i>waste is growth<\/i>\u00a0model grasp and more resilient than the\u00a0<i>complete collapse<\/i>\u00a0prognosticators grasp.<\/p>\n<p><b>The recent relatively mild logjams in global supply chains of essentials are mere glimpses of precariously fragile delivery-supply systems.<\/b>\u00a0These can be understood as bottlenecks that only insiders see, or as unstable nodes through which all the economy&#8217;s connections run. Put another way, the economy&#8217;s as a network appears decentralized and robust, but this illusion vanishes when we consider how the entire economy rests on a few unstable nodes.<\/p>\n<p><b>One such node is the delivery of gasoline and fuels.<\/b>\u00a0It&#8217;s such an efficient and reliable system that 99.9% of us take it for granted: there will always be plenty of gasoline at every station, the tanks of jet fuel will always be topped off, and so on.<\/p>\n<p>The 0.1% know that this system, once disrupted, would knock over dominoes all through the economy.<\/p>\n<p><b>Hyper-efficiency and hyper-globalization has reduced the number of producers of essentials to the point that disruptions cannot be overcome with redundant sources.<\/b> We see this everywhere in the global economy: a handful of plants and companies (sometimes a single source of essential components) process or manufacture essential components in much larger systems.<\/p>\n<p>\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>How Breakdown Cascades Into Collapse Maintaining the illusion of confidence, permanence and stability serves the interests of those benefiting from the bubbles and those who prefer the safety of the herd, even as the herd thunders toward the precipice. The misconception that collapse is an\u00a0all or nothing phenomenon\u00a0is common:\u00a0Either the system rights itself with a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[6094,24078,153,154,5326,587],"class_list":["post-58680","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-breakdown","tag-charles-hugh-smith-2","tag-complex-systems","tag-complexity","tag-fragility","tag-of-two-minds"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58680","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=58680"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58680\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":58681,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58680\/revisions\/58681"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=58680"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=58680"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=58680"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}