It’s a series of highly efficient machines, each optimized to the point of fragility. Think of the supply chain disruptions during Covid. The cost of shipping is so cheap that it can make sense to ship even simple products back and forth across the ocean several times as they move up the value chain. But if one of those links breaks, the whole house of cards collapses. In generations past, commerce needed huge buffers in the supply chains, and the chains themselves were kept simple. In the days of wooden sailing ships, ships arriving late or not all were common. Before computerized inventory tracking and just in time manufacturing, storing large quantities of intermediary parts was also required. These buffers in the systems represented economic inefficiency, but they also produced resiliency.

America is a series of highly efficient industrial juggernauts built on feet of clay. Any good you buy at the grocery store or big box retailer is going to have a huge logistics supply chain behind it. And that chain will be, in economic terms, highly efficient. It will also be very fragile.