There are a lot more single threaded supply chain factories that you'd think.
When they start falling apart, it all starts falling apart. We got a dry run of this in covid with chips. One small part of chip making, think some substrate, was in short supply, and shut down the automakers
And even the Hurricane that hit NC, took out one of the single factories making high end quartz for chips.
Chip making is one of the most concentrated industries in the world, and in no way representative the whole. Even then, a huge amount of the chipmaking industry aside from the bleeding edge is parallelized.
Let me ask you a question. How much efficiency do you think would be saved with zero population growth and zero innovation?
What percent of the world do you think works in Chip making? It is tiny.
During Covid the lack of even a few types of parts, derailed huge projects.
So you could have a project going in worth millions, with thousands of parts. But the whole thing gets delayed because of a single 100$ part that could not be sourced.
It really seemed stark how the global supply chain could just start crumbling. And I was extrapolating to people, if we aren't staffing, and those parts aren't being made, then the whole thing starts to collapse.
That is an entirely separate problem. You are mistaking the topic and risks of globalization and supply concentration with scale.
Needing a widget from China doesn't mean that it needs to come from a mega factory in China and can't be produced in a smaller one. All of China shutting down doesn't prove it can't be done smaller
Then the only problem is time frame, rate of change.
Can the global supply chain, re-configure itself to only run factories where there is still enough population to staff.
It would take years to move factories to concentrate where there is still people.
And I'd say most disaster scenarios happen a lot faster. Then it's Mad Max again. But guess, even in Mad Max there was an oil refinery, they had a factory, and some cars running. But didn't look sustainable.
Sure, transition is a very real problem. If 90% of people died overnight, there would mayhem and most of the remainder would starve.
The fact that 10% population is viable doesn't mean all paths from A to B are valid. Some are catastrophic. That's the current challenge with birthrates. Even slow decreases over decades is a huge financial and productive problem.
Like falling out of an airplane. Ground level is perfectly safe. It is the transition that kills you.
When they start falling apart, it all starts falling apart. We got a dry run of this in covid with chips. One small part of chip making, think some substrate, was in short supply, and shut down the automakers
And even the Hurricane that hit NC, took out one of the single factories making high end quartz for chips.