Keith,
You are certainly correct:
We are accustomed to thinking of conservation as a Good Thing,
but an effective conservation plan can actually make a system
less able to cope with fluctuations in load.
That reminds me of another economic analogy to a contempoary
internet engineering problem: multihoming's impact on the
rounting table size in relation to the impact of multiple providers
on the efficiency of health care.
With increasing multihoming, the edge-network routing table size
also increases, causing a lack of efficiency in routing which
can have a significant impact on saturated network health. So,
some people work towards the aggregation of routes by careful
renumbering when possible. (RFC 2519)
Similarly, if health care is limited and the destitute poor begin
infecting the otherwise wealthy, then increasing medical costs
will soon become very inefficient, overwhelming beneficial effects
of unregulated free-market competition.
Therefore, it is necessary to aggregate medical care to achieve
the best possible economies of scale. Who is working towards this?
http://www.allies-now.com
Cheers,
James