[Top19]

You make a good point.

Sometimes trying to prepare for a crisis that might never come is the worst strategy.

Supposedly, this is what makes democracies stronger than authoritarian governments. Democracies argue endlessly, never taking action until a crisis, and then pulling off the impossible.

Authoritarian governments will try some crazy engineering solution for a problem they really don’t have (like irrigating Kazakhstan), and then 15 years later 90% of the Aral Sea is gone.

In other cases, preparing for Y2K, although it didn’t come, was actually extremely useful in responding to the attacks of 9/11. A lot of protocol that was used that day was originally going to be deployed 18 months earlier during New Years, December 31st, 1999.