I like to think of economies (and nation-states) as loosely coupled monolithic legacy systems. Due to poor developer practices and lack of architecture, parts of these systems have poorly written functions that hog 99% of the resources. You would not try to patch or update such a poorly designed system because there is no way to correct all the myriad built-up legacy back-doors, bugs, privilege escalation vulnerabilities, etc. The systems have been completely corrupted and cannot be recovered. W...