Efficiency vs Resilience

It's situations such as the current coronavirus pandemic that show how fragile our society, indeed our entire civilisation is and how we strive to make it even more fragile through the twin drivers of specialsation and efficiency.

Any system which is tuned to within an inch of its life, for one specific purpose, inherently becomes more susceptible and sensitive to external shock - the racing car, the thoroughbred horse, any system whereby the bits that don't serve the prime directive are removed. It's like building an inverted pyramid and expecting to be able to continue building it vertically when it rests on a very narrow and unstable base.

Rampant, neo-liberal capitalism, with its unceasing search for efficiency to gain competitive advantage, actually sows the seeds of its own destruction. The whole system becomes interlocked to such an extent that a failure in just one, seemingly insignificant part, can bring the whole edifice crumbing about our knees - a massive game of Jenga, where the more pieces you remove, the more the remaining pieces become critical and reliant on each other.

Systems that tolerate inefficiency - the mongrel dog, the cobbled together car, the omnivore, the person who grows his own veg - are far more resilient. It is often said that we are nine meals away from starvation, yet our food system is totally reliant on just in time methods of distribution. Upset the apple cart and we end up with anarchy in a very short space of time.

Nature, in and of its own, strives for Darwinistic efficiency and specialisation to the extent that entire species are in constant danger of being wiped out by the shock of either climate change or man's encroachment on their natural habitat. Some species are capable of adaptation, but they are the minority.

This thin, fragile smear on the surface of our planet, which we call life and take for granted, is unique within our solar system, and quite feasibly (although not necessarily), the entire universe. We must make it resilient to sudden shocks. Similarly, we must tolerate inefficiencies within our society in order to make it more resilient to shock. More focus on the greater good, rather than being self-centred and ruthlessly efficient. A balance between efficiency and resilience is needed - built in redundancy at the cost of efficiency. Competitive pressures, however, do not favour this; greater co-operation at the expense of competitive advantage does.

The obvious inferences here are the pandemic, climate change and Brexit - systemic shocks from which it may be difficult to extricate ourselves without massive, negative implications for many. That said, a massive shock to an economic or social system facilitates a very few with an opportunity to make massive financial gains from the wreckage, further destabilising the system in the pursuit of profit through efficiency gains...