The streets of New York City are nothing if not a web of choke points. New York urban planner Sam Schwartz likes to point out that although about 1 million cars enter and leave Manhattan every day, only about 8,000 are in use in Midtown at any one moment. It takes just a few hundred extra cars to gridlock the 8,000, and the 8,000 in turn bring the 1 million to a halt. Astronauts, too, talk about "single-point failures," the one small breakdown in a massively sophisticated spacecraft that can cause the machine to fail. Engineers are pretty good at anticipating these things, and create backup systems that allow, say, a frozen guidance computer to be fixed with a little troubleshooting and software fiddling. A few millimeters of frayed wire in an Apollo 13 oxygen tank, however, were not so easily worked around.
What's the big deal? It's the little things
The same kind of lucky -- or unlucky -- breaks have brought Barack Obama and John McCain to the threshold of the Oval Office. If Jeb Bush had run a stronger race for Florida governor in 1994, would he have been better positioned than his big brother to become president in 2000? Would that have resulted in less damage to the GOP brand and teed up his party for a win in 2008? If any one of the single-point failures that doomed Al Gore in 2000 (from butterfly ballots to hanging chads to a one-vote loss in the Supreme Court) had not occurred, would Sen. Joe Lieberman, Gore's running mate, be the Democratic nominee today?
History proceeds in a hard march indifferent to what-if games, but simplexity researchers pay them close mind. Candidates who become too smitten with the power and adulation that swirls around them may want to remind themselves of such things as well. It is great men and women who determine world events -- but now and again, it's sandwiches too.
