Big tech companies can be more useful than many small ones — until something goes wrong.

I’m willing to bet that, until this morning, most people had never heard of CrowdStrike, an Austin-based cybersecurity firm. Only after the company pushed a bad update onto Windows computers, creating the biggest IT disaster in history, did most of us realize how much our lives depend on it. Or how difficult it might be to fix the problem.

It’s natural to ask how the heck this could have happened, and how we can make sure it never does again. But another question needs to come first: How much might we be willing to sacrifice to protect against the risk?

At the moment, this might seem absurd. To people stranded by canceled flights or missing doctor’s appointments, it’s worth spending almost anything to avert the chaos that has beset airlines, hospitals, first responders and other critical services. But this is like saying it’s worth insuring your car to the absolute maximum — after you’ve gotten into a big accident. Many car owners decide not to buy the most generous possible coverage because that coverage also carries higher premiums.

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So, too, with maximally insuring against meltdowns like the CrowdStrike mess, because doing so would require paying a price in economic efficiency. So we have to decide what trade-offs we’re willing to make.

Averting this particular disaster might not have cost a ton of money, to be clear. But CrowdStrike is only one of approximately one zillion points of possible failure in our thoroughly networked and globalized economy. Over the past fifty years, the market’s relentless drive for efficiency and reach has made such mass failure nodes more numerous, more potentially catastrophic and harder to see before they fail — while also giving us instant access to all the world’s culture and most of its information, plus more, cheaper and better goods and services, and a global economy that every year lifts tens of millions more people out of poverty.

I came of age in the 1990s, when this transformation was still in its comparatively early days. The internet was just beginning, and global trade was shifting manufacturing from the United States to countries that had cost advantages (such as China and Mexico) and countries that had special technical expertise (such as Germany and Japan).

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At the same time, Americans were importing foreign techniques........

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