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Life keeps getting faster. In all domains — from travel, manufacturing and communication, to financial trading and weapons deployment — humans are nimbler than ever.
The compounding nature of technological progress plays a part. While it took thousands of years to move from the invention of the wheel to steam engines, only 66 years passed between our first powered flight in 1903 and landing on the Moon.
But humans also want to go faster. Vaclav Smil, a distinguished professor emeritus at the University of Manitoba and author of Speed — which I reviewed recently — argues that doing things quickly has been one of our most central pursuits.
He defines speed as the rate of change of any variable, such as GDP growth per year or bits per second, and explained to me how our ancient instinct for speed has translated into how we compete for material and physical survival today:
As a highly mobile mammal that has spent most of its evolution as a hunter-gatherer, we are hard-wired to value speed as a survival strategy — be it to succeed in securing food and shelter or to evade mortal dangers. Later, speed became an indicator of economic might: by 1850 a British cotton mill was 25 times faster than Indian hand-spinning. It also mattered for military and technical superiority: blitzkrieg was the centrepiece of Adolf Hitler’s war strategy in Europe, the US and the Soviets raced to reach space and right now America is running with China for ever-faster computing.
Academic thought has also mapped on to, and reinforced, the impulse for speed. Efficiency is central to economics and often used to justify the push for frictionless markets and just-in-time supply chains.
In turn, as Smil notes, a “time is money” mindset and a culture that celebrates seamlessness and convenience have become pervasive:
‘How long does it take?’ and ‘how fast can it be done?’ are among the most common concerns and preoccupations of the modern age. We often label such phenomena with the cognate adjective (speedy service, reply, return), with its synonyms (fast, rapid, swift), or with other qualifying adjectives (record-breaking, dizzying, unexpected, unprecedented, soaring).
What is often lost in our pursuit of speed, however, is the possibility that friction can be valuable. Guru Madhavan, a systems engineer and author of Wicked Problems: How to Engineer a Better World, reiterated the unsung role of drag and delay in the FT last month. He gave me specific examples of when our treatment of friction as an inefficiency to be eliminated has downsides:
High-frequency trading eliminated transaction costs and settlement delays that once compelled traders to pause. But as the 2010 flash crash exposed, self-reinforcing algorithmic loops erased nearly $1tn in market value in roughly half an hour. Regulators then introduced circuit breakers as artificial pauses to restore the lost hesitation.
Then there’s ride-hailing platforms. They dissolved the role of fixed shifts, queues at stands and localised knowledge. The problem then became surges in demand drawing drivers en masse to hotspots via their apps, producing oversupply, fare collapses, and according to studies, ‘deadheading’ for around 50 per cent of miles. Platforms have since reinstated friction through measures like airport queues, guaranteed hourly rates in certain zones, and heat maps that update on delay rather than instantly.
The same pattern appears in transport. Precision-scheduled railroading and tightly banked airline hubs maximised capacity by eliminating dwell time and spare crews. But that means a weather delay or single-track fault can now cascade system-wide instead of staying local.
Similarly, in light of the Covid-19 pandemic, global conflicts and US President Donald Trump’s tariff agenda, businesses are learning to introduce slack into their once sleek supply chains by, for instance, developing buffers and diversifying suppliers and customers.
And in the February 22 edition of this newsletter, I explained that although digital technology brings us rapid information, it can also weaken our mental muscles by reducing useful cognitive frictions. For instance, forming arguments without chatbot prompts develops original thought. (Likewise, Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow reiterates the value of effortful thought alongside heuristics.)
Even recessions can be “cleansing”, as I argued in the February 8 edition. Downturns can spark creative destruction and stop harmful financial bubbles from forming, enabling faster underlying growth in the long term.
Indeed, Madhavan argues that not all resistance is waste — some of it protects systems from their own speed:
Engineers tend to see friction as a design feature and ask what signal it carries. A shock absorber adds weight and complexity to a vehicle — yet without it, the suspension shakes itself apart. Damping slows response just enough for feedback to register before the error compounds. This distinction between friction that blocks progress and friction that enables self-correction often gets lost in public policy. We are quite good at removing the first type. But we are often blinded to the second.
Speed will remain one of humanity’s great engines of progress. But in our quest for efficiency, we shouldn’t overlook that a little well-placed friction can help keep fast-moving systems on track.
Send your reflections on speed and friction to freelunch@ft.com or on X @tejparikh90.
Food for thought
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Free Lunch on Sunday is edited by Harvey Nriapia
