I'm not sure if economic development actually makes economies more fragile and prone to collapse - if a very undeveloped economy collapses, do we not notice it because we label it something else, e.g. famine or civil unrest?
The theory goes that less developed economies almost by definition have wasteful redundancies and lack of hyper-specialization.
As we've seen with the Green Revolution and the last few centuries, the freeholding small farmer is highly inefficient - they produce far less food with far more human input than our farming system. But! The small farmers are highly resilient: if a bomb takes out one Afghani village, the others are unaffected. On the other hand, if a bomb takes out a country's only refinery or port, all its farms are soon going to grind to a halt b...
This is our monthly thread for collecting these little gems and pearls of wisdom, rationality-related quotes you've seen recently, or had stored in your quotesfile for ages, and which might be handy to link to in one of our discussions.