I’m studying J. Doyne Farmer’s current ebook, Making Sense of Chaos, for a dialogue I’ll be concerned in subsequent week. On web page 53, Farmer makes a great level, writing:
Although we regularly discuss with items of the manufacturing community as provide chains, this can be a dangerous metaphor: The manufacturing community is filled with branches and is extra like a tangled net than a sequence. (italics in unique)
It’s good to see somebody who’s not even an economist making that financial level. Right here’s Don Boudreaux making it in some element in “The Economy is Not a Series of Supply Chains,” American Institute of Financial Analysis, April 13, 2020:
A Net Isn’t a Chain
The primary actuality is that, in our trendy financial system practically each productive enterprise is related to each different productive enterprise. This connectedness is the phenomenon alluded to by the time period “supply chain.” This time period, nonetheless, is extremely deceptive. At the moment’s financial system is just not a sequence of provide chains working aspect by aspect with one another, every largely distinct from, and impartial of, the others. If it had been, there would certainly be little problem in pulling in a number of such chains into the home financial system in order that it totally resides there, from starting to finish.
As an alternative of a group of distinct provide chains, our trendy financial system is a single globe-spanning net of interconnectedness. Inside this net each output is the product of numerous inputs and every type of enter sometimes is used to provide numerous completely different sorts of outputs. This net of interconnectedness – the complexity of which is past human comprehension – is indispensable for our trendy mass prosperity. But its existence – its ‘everything-is-connected-in-some-way-to-everything-else’ actuality – signifies that there are not any goal and clear traces separating “critical supplies” from “uncritical” ones.
Additional obliterating the existence of any such goal and clear traces is financial change – each change that’s inseparable from a market financial system’s artistic destruction (for instance, the invention of the meeting line), in addition to change that’s imposed on humanity by nature (for instance, the depletion of an iron-ore mine). Such change at each second rearranges – often barely, however typically dramatically – the actual connections that every node of the huge financial net has with innumerable different nodes.
Postscript:
Russ Roberts lately interviewed Farmer on his ebook for EconTalk. Arnold Kling lately reviewed the Farmer ebook right here.
