Thread by @DellAnnaLuca

BANDAIDS

Lockdowns, treatments, vaccines are bandaids.

They're useful, they're needed, they might help heal this disease, but they won't cure the root causes that will keep throwing crises at us.

Financial crises, pandemics, and so on.

(thread, 1/N)

2/ The first easy suspect would be globalization, but the problem is not interconnection. It's the dependency on interconnection.

Some examples:

It's okay to have cheap flights to Wuhan.
It's not okay not to be able or willing to stop them.

3/ Some more examples:

- It's okay to outsource some medicinal production to China. It's not okay to outsource ~all of it.

- It's okay to have a centralized WHO to pool resources. It's not okay to fully depend on it for knowing when the house is on fire.

4/ The second easy suspect is politicians. But there has been not a single politician in any major state who reacted fast and transparently to the pandemic.

We do not need better governments. We need governmental systems which do not rely on having good politicians.

5/ We can built resilient systems with circuit breakers.

First mentioned by @famadeo, AFAIK, they are alternative regulations which kick in during trouble, allowing faster response.

Just like we use elevators but also have staircases for emergencies.

6/ An example of circuit breaker: there is a long process to produce test kits but, during case of emergency, labs with a good reputation (eg. a number of already approved test kits for other pathogens) can produce their own.

This would have prevented the CDC debacle.

7/ Another example of circuit breaker: "flights must go on" but there are built-in rules that require screening for travelers from whatever region the WHO issues a report about & blocks flights if serious.

For example, Taiwan began screening Wuhan travelers since 5th of Jan.

8/ Circuit breakers have two characteristics:

- They are decentralized. The whole point is not to have to wait some agency which has incentives to be slow to react.

- They are built-in the statute or constitution, not to be overwrote when we forget the last crisis.

9/ The second point is the reason why I'm writing this tweet today.

Circuit breakers have to be created while the scar is fresh, and they have to be crystallized in the statute / constitution so that they cannot be removed once the scar is forgotten.

10/ A particular kind of circuit breaker is *unused* redundancy.
For example, stock of masks.

The key word is unused.
If the reserve can be used whenever we please, it will stop being a reserve and will be used up.

11/ Buffers such as redundancies are critical but also dangerous as they absorb small shocks hiding structural problems.

Some buffers must be limited to times of emergencies; only this way they can provide resilience AND let problems surface so that they can be addressed.

12/ The "some" in the previous tweet refers to the fact that some resources have an expiry date and require the stock to rotate, or some resources (human ones, for example) are antifragile and thus decay if not used.

13/ In such cases, it's important to use a first-in-last-out methodology *and* to treat any decrease in buffer level as a red flag to analyze: a structural problem might bel lurking.

14/ To sum it up: we need circuit breakers enshrined in constitutions & statutes, which allow to easily switch from "optimized for growth & efficiency" to "emergency mode" with a "react first, think after" decentralized mindset appropriate for managing tail risks.