Janus is the Roman god of beginnings and endings, comings and goings, and time. As we enter January 2011, we sense that time is speeding up. Perhaps this feeling is a sign of age, but likely it is related to the increased connectivity of our lives. The word “surge” has, well, surged to popularity in recent years. The most notable impetus has been the “surges” in Iraq and Afghanistan, which may or may not live up to their label as temporary spikes in troop deployment, rather than long term increases.

The surges that are the subject of this column are not ones we initiate. Rather, they are ones to which we must respond. Some surges are quite predictable. Every summer there is a surge in long-distance driving and families go on vacation. Every December there is a surge of business at the mall, when people buy holiday presents.

Some surges are semi-predictable. In the Washington, D.C. area, we can predict that there will be at least one consequential snowstorm each winter, although we don’t know when it will occur or what its intensity would be. Yet, local motorists are absolutely amazed when the snow falls and sticks in moderate quantities. When three or four inches are forecast, people leave work early, and clean the supermarket shelves of bread and milk on their way home. The season’s opener last week was a two-inch snowfall that closed some schools and curtailed the day at many others. When we do have a four-inch snowfall, schools are closed for two days—maybe three. Hundreds of school busses make three runs each morning and afternoon on narrow roads in hilly terrain, and there’s lots of other traffic. We can’t maintain that deployment when it snows.

In New York, it took most of a week for side streets to be made passable after the post-Christmas blizzard. Apartment dwellers have no off-street parking, and both sides of narrow streets are lined with cars. There’s little clearance for larger vehicles under normal circumstances, and its almost impossible for snowplows to get through when large snows and heavy winds prevail.

Air travel faces surges, too. Holiday travel is one example, but so is the need to deal with extra people at the airport because a flight has been delayed or cancelled. It used to be that airlines had aircraft and crews available to fill in when mechanical problems or bad weather held things up. It also used to be the case that later scheduled flights had empty seats that could accommodate displaced travelers.

Telephoning the airline might not help, since calls might not be answered at all, or one might have to wait on hold for hours, since “all of our agents are busy assisting other customers.” Airlines smooth terminal and call center workflows by leaving passengers cooling their heels. Passengers on planes awaiting takeoff cool their heels too, since runway capacity at many major airports is over-saturated in good weather.

Another form of surge takes the form of unexpected stress being placed on elements of structures or equipment when flaws in other elements that help support the load cause them to fail, or because of unexpected hard use. The classic Volkswagen Beetle was built to take much more punishment than normal use would require, as was the telephone wired in your home by Ma Bell’s installers. Traditionally, engineers and architects built in ample margins for these situations. In AT&T’s case, the expense of building super-sturdy phones was added into the rate base, so that state regulators would allow it to raise charges to consumers.

If the solution to all of these unexpected surges is extra capacity, its antithesis is “lean and mean” production and staffing. The Beetle was “overbuilt.” Airline passengers won’t pay extra if hubs have backup planes ready to go, or for customer service policies that readily provide stranded passengers with hotel vouchers or seats on competitors’ flights. The airlines want load factors approaching one hundred percent, with the result that few, if any, seats are available on later flights. Stranded passengers might have to wait for days but don’t seem to price this into their travel arrangements.

Surges often result from the gradual elimination of spare capacity. Holding supply constant in the face of steadily increasing demand means that shocks previously absorbed with ease now result in breakdowns. Regulatory hassles are a leading cause of this phenomenon. It’s been decades since an oil refinery was built in California, and previously routine disruptions now result in spikes in prices and cutbacks in driving. Local protests often result in cancellation of infrastructure projects of regional or international import. Additional runways at most major airports now precluded, so that morning fog or an afternoon thunderstorm at a hub airport can result in immense backups.

Partial deregulation also results in surges battering inadequate supply chains. If the generation of electricity is deregulated and the transmission of electricity is not, power lines cannot wheel the increased supply from one part of the country to another. State regulation of the siting of transmission towers often means that benefits from new transmission corridors to out-of-state consumers are not considered in the authorization process. Advocates for solar- and wind-power often ignore problems in getting power from remote locations where it’s sunny and windy to cities where it’s neither.

Commercial operators also discount the importance of surges when they aren’t explicitly compensated or required to prepare for them. No one explicitly paid the operator of Heathrow Airport, in London, to maintain equipment to move the occasional heavy snow. Recently a five-inch snowfall closed the world’s largest international airport for five days.

Lean-and-mean techniques don’t factor in breakdowns and imperfections. Ultra-streamlined planes can fly faster on a given quantity of fuel, but “hot” planes are less forgiving of unusual stresses or pilot error. New algorithms now permit computers to speed-read news reports and to trade upon them in the stock market, without intervention by human financial analysts. But cascading computer trading has caused wild gyrations in stock prices. There are always tradeoffs.

In a short recent article in The Economist, Nassim Taleb, of “black swan” fame, declared, “connectivity and operational leverage are making cultural and economic events cascade faster and deeper. Anything fragile today will be broken by [2036].” He warned that complex national governments and large corporations would largely be functionally supplanted by prudent city-states and family businesses. In other words, traditional caution derided as “overbuilding” might be back in style.

The economist Ronald Coase, who turned 100 on December 29, won the Nobel Prize in Economics largely for his work on the theory of when firms expand internally and when they contract with suppliers. The decision about whether to hire or outsource in a given case is determined by relative costs. Taleb implicitly suggests, however, that increasing surges will challenge complex structures within firms themselves and with their suppliers. As a result, both firms and governments will become smaller and less willing to engage in complex relationships with others.

The public policy implications of surges is mixed. On one hand, it augurs against complex government initiatives, like increased control of the health care system. On the other, it militates in favor of increased regulation of hired managers use of complex and super-fast financial trading.

If Taleb is correct, our economic ride might be slower, but we’ll be less likely to crash.