Smearing supply chains across the world and chasing them to the lowest labor costs and into very specialized locations produces a supply chain that while extremely efficient has zero surge capacity for unusual circumstances, is brittle and liable to lock up at a moment’s notice, and requires far too many state actors to not be at cross purposes.
NOTHING in biology is optimized for efficiency. Everything is robust at the expense of efficiency. Everything too efficient yet brittle died off long ago. A potato manages 0.5% conversion of sunlight to starch, nowhere near the theoretical yield of its photochemistry. But if you move it from shade to sun, it doesn’t burn up its electron transport chain (which is harder than you’d think for photochemistry!), and if you move it from sun to shade it gets by without starving. If a virus chews up your lungs, you have fat stores to draw on rather than only functional tissue and the capacity to get by on lower lung capacity until the crisis is dealt with and regeneration can happen.
Nothing that has stood the test of time is nearly so centralized and brittle and over optimized as the current global civilization. Regardless of the end effects, things that last will go away from that direction.
EDIT: This does not only apply to international supply chains. Over optimization and over centralization and giganticism of players of the food supply chain has resulted in a system within the US in which is untenable unless everything goes right. Closing restaurants has resulted in farms that only sell to specialized suppliers being unable to get their product into domestic supply lines leading to absurd waste and a few crowded nodes in the meatpacking industry represent both absurdly effective viral breeding grounds and critical points that are threatening to take down large fractions of the domestic meat supply. Other examples abound.
EDIT: One could make the counterargument about how everything on Earth functions as part of an ecology rather than being fully self-sufficient, but ecologies are systems with huge numbers of interacting parts that are interchangeable, not small numbers of super specialized but independent actors. Symbiosis exists but results in loss of individuation once it gets severe enough...
YES.
Smearing supply chains across the world and chasing them to the lowest labor costs and into very specialized locations produces a supply chain that while extremely efficient has zero surge capacity for unusual circumstances, is brittle and liable to lock up at a moment’s notice, and requires far too many state actors to not be at cross purposes.
NOTHING in biology is optimized for efficiency. Everything is robust at the expense of efficiency. Everything too efficient yet brittle died off long ago. A potato manages 0.5% conversion of sunlight to starch, nowhere near the theoretical yield of its photochemistry. But if you move it from shade to sun, it doesn’t burn up its electron transport chain (which is harder than you’d think for photochemistry!), and if you move it from sun to shade it gets by without starving. If a virus chews up your lungs, you have fat stores to draw on rather than only functional tissue and the capacity to get by on lower lung capacity until the crisis is dealt with and regeneration can happen.
Nothing that has stood the test of time is nearly so centralized and brittle and over optimized as the current global civilization. Regardless of the end effects, things that last will go away from that direction.
EDIT: This does not only apply to international supply chains. Over optimization and over centralization and giganticism of players of the food supply chain has resulted in a system within the US in which is untenable unless everything goes right. Closing restaurants has resulted in farms that only sell to specialized suppliers being unable to get their product into domestic supply lines leading to absurd waste and a few crowded nodes in the meatpacking industry represent both absurdly effective viral breeding grounds and critical points that are threatening to take down large fractions of the domestic meat supply. Other examples abound.
EDIT: One could make the counterargument about how everything on Earth functions as part of an ecology rather than being fully self-sufficient, but ecologies are systems with huge numbers of interacting parts that are interchangeable, not small numbers of super specialized but independent actors. Symbiosis exists but results in loss of individuation once it gets severe enough...