Modularity, Reconfigurability and Institutional Robustness: A post-COVID19 model
COVID-19 crisis has revealed the vulnerabilities of our interdependent and globalized economies, where highly specialized and focused manufacturing industries are distributed across the world and supply chains that are managed through numerous tenuous links, where the resultant structure is only as strong as its weakest link. At this time of emergency, incentives to reconfigure businesses to produce essential items did not work as efficiently as we generally credit private enterprises: governments had to step in with war-time powers to compel businesses; broken supply chains had to be restored through intergovernmental airlifts. We are rudely awakened to limitations of private enterprises for rising to the challenges of a globalized emergency, and a renewed appreciation of efficient governance is in order.
How might such governance be organized?
There are two previous models where nationalism provided the impetus: wartime efforts in the west and in the east. The US and UK used war powers acts to first subdue and to ultimately kindle the awesome power of private industries manufacturing automobiles and railways to make tanks, battleships, fighter planes and bombs; the Soviet dictatorship did the same, perhaps even more effectively, to convert lumbering shipyards and steam engine manufacturing factories to make tanks and rifles. The problem was that at the end of the war both had to keep the war-time factories working for a while so as to feed the nations—so we and the Soviets had our Korean war and our Vietnam.
Is there a less destructive way out of war-time diversion of resources? Or must we always be burdened by our momentum? Is there a way that minimizes the retooling for reconfiguration of industries to enter and then to leave the war-economy, be it due to human conflict or a future pandemic?
A recent concept in evolutionary biology is ‘modularity’—a term borrowed from engineering and systems science. Like Lego blocks, are there basic building blocks of gene circuits that are reconfigured by evolution to produce the bewildering diversity in nature? Moreover, such modularity is thought to provide evolutionary robustness—the niche vacated by the extinction of a species is quickly replaced by organisms that evolve through reconfigured genetic modules. Modules reconfigured perform novel functions that their previous ensembles didn’t. There are lessons here to be learned.
What we need is an abstraction, a conceptualization of modularity of manufacturing industries, and of supply chain Lego pieces. A high-level government agency would need to examine each industry to identify the modularity and reconfiguration strategies for natural (pandemic, earthquake, global-warming) or man-made (foreign or civil war) catastrophes. They will be the intelligence gatherers, systems modelers, and will develop scenario-specific contingency plans based on data and model. 
