Infrastructure Redundancy

Very interesting article by Jonathan Rauch over at Reason. I always look forward to his articles whenever they appear in a forum I can access. This one is about the infrastructure that makes the financial system possible, and what has been done to disaster-proof it. The modern world is a welter of overlapping systems of unbelievable complexity. Since many of them evolved instead of being designed, failure modes and cascade effects are often completely ignored. It's nice to see serious thinking about the issue when it comes to something this important.

You should also, if you get the chance, read his excellent book Kindly Inquisitors. I will one day get around to reading some of his other books.