Max, I think it is the Peter Principal at work -- people have risen to a level in which they are incompetent.
The software issue you describe is a great example, but it's not mathematical. Studies by IBM have shown that there is a correlation between bugs found in piece of software, and bugs NOT found. That is, the more bugs found, the more bugs that remain to be found (if ever...).
And to elaborate further, David Cutler used to work at Digital Equipment Corp, if I remember correctly, and was (I think) the lead engineer on a project to create a new OS to replace VMS. They kept a daily count of known bugs. Each day the count would diminish; however, the count was large (maybe 5000+), and at some point, the number stopped shrinking and started growing. Eventually, the project was canceled.
I read about this when and his WindowsNT team were trying to complete that new OS, and he mentioned this possibility, because of the overall complexity, that a similar situation could occur with WinNT.
With interventions, there is always a cost. Bail out the auto companies now to save a quarter million jobs, and it could potentially cost us 1 million new jobs between 2010 and 2015 and be a further drag on our economy for years. Eventually if the natural free market mechanism of "the good thrive and the bad fail" is warped so that the bad are kept afloat, the good die and thus the ability to prop up the bad also fails and the end result is "Mr. Gorbachev: Tear down that wall!!" |
