"Once the dust settles from the COVID-19 crisis, communities across the world will find their economies shattered... . Restaurants, retailers, theaters, service providers of every stripe, even physician practices will be seeking bankruptcy protection by the millions.  After the trillions in federal assistance run out, we will all be looking for ways to rebuild our economic lives. As we do so, we will need a new set of principles and practices of economic development that do not leave us sitting ducks for the next crisis.

"For an idea of what should come next, I dusted off my copy of Brittle Power:  Energy Strategy for National Security, written by Amory and Hunter Lovins in 1982. That book was mostly about the huge vulnerabilities in the U.S. energy grid, but it was really about economic design."



"Chapter 13, titled “Designing for Resilience,” contains a brilliant distillation of the criteria for creating resilient systems—concepts any good engineer would recognize.  Resilience requires creating a network of relatively independent, self-reliant nodes, so that the failure of one node does not imperil the entire system. Connections between nodes should be optional, not compulsory. Diverse systems are critical because they are less likely to fail all at once or in the same way. These systems should be simple, replicable, and transparent."

Article: Comparative Resilience: Eight Principles for Post-COVID Reconstruction