I think it's more like, the current economy needs X barrels to function. Because the people who control the oil fields have been lax in maintenance, they're now

I think it's more like, the current economy needs X barrels to function. Because the people who control the oil fields have been lax in maintenance, they're now producing X - 50,000 barrels. They could produce much greater than X, but the current system is crufty and broken. It's the opposite of a bootstrapping problem. Consider running microservices. you need logging, monitoring, continuous deployment, all kinds of very specialized stuff. Now, your resources decline dramatically, and your paging system doesn't work anymore. You've grown beyond the point that it can be handled manually, what do you do? Software is kind of a goofy example, because those kinds of problems can be fixed fairly quickly. A better example might be AWS increases it's prices x100, and there are no alternatives. It's going to take a while to buy servers, internet access, find a place for them to live, and move everything over. In the real world, equipment is expensive. If you let the billion dollar pipeline (or whatever) decay, you can't just whip up another pipeline on Wednesday. It takes months or years to restore that service.