Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better
I've found "efficiency as the opposite of stability" a very powerful concept to think about - even though it's fairly simple, it seems to be almost a fundamental law.Whether it's about the economy at large, your own household, a supply chain, what have you - as soon as you optimize for efficiency by removing friction, you take all the slack/damping out of the system and become instantly more liable to catastrophic failure if some of your basic conditions change. Efficiency gives you a speed bonus, at the cost of increased risk / less resilience to unforeseen events.Stewart Brand's concept of "Pace Layering" comes to mind for how to deal with this at a systemic level - https://jods.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/issue3-brand/release/2