Market forces tend to reward efficiency rather than resilience through redundancy. But super-efficient systems can be fragile ones too. So dude has a point. But seems like a mistake to say that its the only relevant factor.
What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?
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Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?
#32Or maybe attempting to shut down large swaths of world economy for an indefinite amount of time wasn’t such a good idea? In the timescale of months to years all business becomes “essential”. Sure shut it down for “just two weeks” but a year or more? What did people think would happen?
A fallacy that might be at work here is comparing the shutdowns that actually occurred with a counterfactual world where business activity remained essentially unchanged. We'll never know for sure, but I doubt that's the correct comparison. Even without government-mandated shutdowns, many areas--especially major urban cores--would still have experienced massive shocks as people voluntarily shifted to working from hom…
People working from home increased demand for microphones, web cameras, office chairs.
Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?
#33He's right to point out that the obsession with RoE is a big part of the problem.
He's wrong to suggest that the billionaire class and founders will solve the problem if we only trust them and let them keep their money. Founders have just as much incentive to optimize the excess out of the system, they just call it "disruptive innovation" by which they mean tweaking how the system works so that they can squeeze out profit for themselves.
I think economists call it rent-seeking.
Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?
#34Hm, seems like a monocausal 'explanation' of a complex problem - or let's say a mere opinion with little background information. Given the 'hundred year crisis', I think we have fared relatively well from a purely economic point of view... So, yes, some problems may exist but I think we have witnessed a surprisingly resilient system, given how optimized everything is and how unprecedented the issue is. I don't know i…
I think we have fared relatively well from a purely economic point of view.
There's no reason to think this is over yet. We might just be getting started.
Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?
#35Or maybe attempting to shut down large swaths of world economy for an indefinite amount of time wasn’t such a good idea? In the timescale of months to years all business becomes “essential”. Sure shut it down for “just two weeks” but a year or more? What did people think would happen?
>What did people think would happen? We thought that if we didn't do that we'd run a very real risk of the entire healthcare system collapsing. We were trying to "flatten the curve" so that hospitals could deal with an ongoing roar instead of being hit with a massive explosion.
>We were trying to "flatten the curve"
Not were, are.
The entire lockdown/restriction/mask mandate set of policies has been based on managing hospital capacity. State and local governments are still using hospital capacity to decide when to lift or reimpose restrictions.
The wave of explainers we got last year about flattening the curve were wrong about how long it would take, but the fundamental strategy and the reasoning behind it never actually changed.
Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?
#36Or maybe attempting to shut down large swaths of world economy for an indefinite amount of time wasn’t such a good idea? In the timescale of months to years all business becomes “essential”. Sure shut it down for “just two weeks” but a year or more? What did people think would happen?
The TX Winter Storm and Big Freeze did more damage to the TX economy than the shutdowns. Try again.
That’s not a good argument. 1: damage done by shutdowns is still going on so we don’t even know the full cost. 2: the winter storm is not self inflicted. 3: I am not sure you are right that said winter storm did more damage. Would like a source though.
Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of people alive and not dead
Sweden
What about Sweden?
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?
#38Queue dynamics.
Late entrants to a backed up queue take exponentially longer to service.
Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?
#39While this answers the question of why we couldn't respond to the bottlenecks, I guess I'm still missing the piece of what caused them in the first place. Like sure, "this silly little global pandemic thing" but it's not really an enlightening answer without more detail as to what the pandemic caused that shocked the system.
Since a bottleneck implies a vessel with fluid passing through, I'll stay with that analogy. There's actually no bottleneck; the pipe is basically the same size as ever. (Actually just slightly smaller because of capacity that was destroyed, rather than taken temporarily offline, during the slowdown.[0]) But the pipe in the first place was only exactly as big as it needed to be, because of the "maximizing ROE" stuff he mentions early in the thread. So when the fluid volume suddenly expands (slingshot effect following the slowdown), the whole system becomes a bottleneck.
[0] Capacity destruction: "Nobody's buying our stuff, we can't afford to keep this one ship/plant/facility/machine running anymore or we'll go out of business." But since every other player in their industry who might've bought it is in the same boat, maybe they're forced to sell to a scrapper, who promptly disassembles the ship/plant/facility/machine. I got my house this way. It was a rental property owned by a company that could no longer afford to keep it, so I bought it, took it off the rental market, and thereby slightly reduced rental capacity in this town. Compare this to an airline temporarily parking a slew of their planes in a densely-packed parking pattern at an un-busy airfield near a nice runway.
Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?
#40Or maybe attempting to shut down large swaths of world economy for an indefinite amount of time wasn’t such a good idea? In the timescale of months to years all business becomes “essential”. Sure shut it down for “just two weeks” but a year or more? What did people think would happen?
Have you forgotten the state of Italy and New York (among others) at the start and middle of 2020? There were literal trucks full of dead bodies in the streets because they couldn't be buried fast enough. How do you envision the time between march 2020 and the point where herd immunity through vaccines / infection would have been sufficient would have gone without a lockdown? I'll take a lack of a few non-essential l…
I'm not familiar with Italy, but NY was sending elderly patients back to nursing homes when they had covid.
https://apnews.com/article/new-york-andrew-cuomo-us-news-cor...