Just-enough reliability?

The more you aim for just-enough reliability, the more specific and narrow are the criteria of “just how good is just-good-enough” (“you must respond within x minutes of a call. . .”). Goal displacement is risked where, e.g., meeting government regulatory compliance equates to ensuring the infrastructure’s continuous and safe provision of its critical service. In so doing, safe and continuous service reliability eventually falls to the side when system operators feel compelled to be fast enough with just enough, knowing this is never enough all the time.

If we want anything more by way of highly reliable service provision, then that is left to us, not so much as consumers or citizens, but as amateurs who are now be their own reliability managers. So goes the economists’ wet dream of just-enough reliability. Gone are the days when anyone felt comfortable with discussions that include, “Elementary economics demonstrates that. . .”