A. I think a good starting point for talking about resilience was what happened during Covid (in the UK, where I am - in other places in the world, your mileage may vary) from 2020 on.
1. Working from home / home delivery
2. contactless payment
3. MRNA / Vaccines
B. We can look at resilience to shocks (like pandemics) in Financial Sector - the 2008 sub-prime mortgage triggered fiasco led to huge economic damage around the world - while some of the mitgations put in place worke,d a common response was for governments to implement cuts ("austerity") - some of this was based in incorred models, driven also by dogma (economics == the dismal science).
1. Reinhart, Rogoff... and Herndon: The student who caught out the profs
2. some countries (notably Iceland) held the bankers liable
3. the world also got into blame games (e.g EU troika versus Greece)
General: Neither of these two shocks led to people revisiting their original partly sound (but abandoned) plans for such extreme events - so the UK had a detailed government plan for responding to pandemics, but had mothballed it - most of it would have mitigated details, but nowhere would it have included things that actually happened structurally that helped more in the medium and long run. Similarly, operating rules for lenders to make sure they retained enough capital to weather storms were weked over time. They still havn't really gone back, and the culture of "growth at all costs" now shows up in the insane exposure that is heading for $2T investment in a couple of AI companies with very little long term model of what happens when they fail to deliver something that looks like a viable business plan, or a sustainable compute platform.
C. This gives me little hope we have a solid plan to cope with climate & eco-system impoverishment. While the UK has great expertise on weather prediction, and plausibly ok plans for replacing most our energy sources with renewables at an increasing rate, we're unbearaly slow on retro-fitting houses for extreme weather events (last summer here temperatures in 40C range, this winter, possibly looking at -20C).
In gerneral, across all these wicked problems, there's an organisational failure, rather than inability to find viable technical solutions. We need a direct path from one to the other. We need accountability for people who make poor decisions.
References
Finding critical regions and region-disjoint paths in a network.
No comments:
Post a Comment