I harp on the prospect of a trade war for a host of reasons. For one thing, like the invasion of Iraq or the deregulation of financial markets that helped to set us up for the Great Recession, few people appreciate just how devastating this can be. A trade war has the potential to be as devastating as the Great Recession.

Expert economists worry about the magnitude of this. As someone who regularly works with product development teams in this and other countries, I think even they underestimate it.

A chip maker I worked with this year at a facility in Scotland represents the sort of trade reality that  a simple number like "China represents 4.4% of our trade" does not capture.

This chip company makes chips for cars - everything from the chips that help to control your air conditioner to chips used in self-driving cars. Chips in cars have become ubiquitous and every new car uses more than 100 chips. So what I'm about to describe could be multiplied by 100.

First, a single chip is designed with inputs from design and marketing people from Austin, TX, Germany, Scotland, China, India and Malaysia. Perhaps other sites I was not aware of.

Second, when the chip is physically made it literally travels around the globe in its production process. Value is added in Singapore, Austin, Tianjin, and then Kuala Lumpur.

Third, once the chip is made it still isn't a final product. For that it has to be integrated into a car. The cars it will be incorporated into are assembled in places like Bavaria, Detroit, Seoul, and Puebla.

Fourth, the cars these chips are incorporated into are not made at just one place. A tiny chip that is put into a car comes from half a dozen places. The same is true of the fuel injector, the axle, the pistons, the seat belts, etc. Final assembly just represents a final step in a series of complicated assembly steps for raw materials, intermediate products and final units that are then assembled into a car. Some variation of what I described for the single chip has occurred with most every discrete component in that car.

If you say that 4% of our trade is with China, that may naively refer to the fact that 4% of our products come from there. And that might accurately capture it but I suspect that reality is more like 8% of the value in 60% of our products have some input from China. What I believe the average person wildly underestimates and even expert economists probably somewhat underestimate is the massive complexity in product development and manufacturing and the extent to which any one finished product sitting in your garage, hand or kitchen has design inputs or parts that come from dozens of countries. One of the simplest examples of surprising complexity often used in introductory economics classes is the No. 2 pencil: at one point the lead for the graphite, the rubber for the erasure, and the wood for the pencil came from three different continents.

A trade war would disrupt millions or billions of complex product and design flows that result in the thousands or millions of products that we can buy here in the US. Even disrupting 4% of our GDP would be devastating but a ban on trade from China is likely to impact more than 4% of our GDP. (And of course China is not the only country that trades with North Korea.) If we ban trade with, say, a less developed nation like Cuba an estimate of our trade with them would probably be roughly accurate. Cuba is exporting cigars rather than complex technology made with inputs from knowledge workers scattered all around the globe. But if we ban trade with a country like China that has a complex trading pattern, the ripple effect is incredibly difficult to calculate and could quickly grow beyond casual, initial estimates.

We can only hope that Trump will be less effectual at implementing trade disruption than he was with the Repeal and Replace of Trumpcare. And given that most of Congress is less deluded about how independent we can be of other countries than Trump is, it is unlikely that a trade war will break out. That said, the probability is not zero and the probability is higher than it should be simply because so few people realize how complex are the trading patterns that define even some of our simplest products. It's good that people were outraged at Trump's comments after Charlottesville, but his ignorance there isn't going to cost millions of jobs. A trade war easily could.

This last year has given us some momentous news: eco-disaster with the Gulf Oil spill, devastating earthquakes in Haiti Chile, and Japan, threat of nuclear meltdown, riots in the Middle East, and sluggish recovery from a financial crisis.  Economic, ecological, urban, energy, and political systems have all been pushed beyond their presumed limits.

It might be that global news and the Internet have simply brought events that decades ago would have been marginalized in the back pages of our newspapers to the forefront of our attention, resulting in a sense of perpetual apocalypse. Or it could be that the modern world has been overshadowed by a flock of Black Swans.

Nassim Taleb's bestselling book, The Black Swan, tells the story of how experience only predicts the future as long as systems are stable. Of course, the defining events shift the system boundaries rather than stay within them. (Taleb tells the story of the turkey convinced that he's loved and cared for and that his owners want the best for him until the day before Thanksgiving when ALL of his experience is suddenly made meaningless and his world view is shattered. The events of 9-11 and the Great Recession, of course, are events that change what is predictable.)

Our modern world may just be so dependent on interdependent, ultimately fragile systems that a parade of news like we've seen in the past year is inevitable. Even if the probability of any one system collapsing or causing destruction is only .1%, we live in a world so populated by these systems that the probability of ONE system reaching a tipping must be close to 100%. Somewhere, a political system will have reached a tipping point and a people will be thrown into violent clashes and social turmoil. An energy system will either become expensive, unstable, or blow up. And the list goes on.

This is a time of perpetual apocalypse for a simple reason: we depend upon systems that we still understand only dimly and can predict and manage with even less confidence.

Isn't it time to invest massive amounts of research money into the development of better models for understanding and managing these systems? The world will not become less complex, but only more so. If we have to live with Black Swans, perhaps we can at least get them to fly in formation.

This is a messy and complex world. One might be inclined to think that in a debate about such a world the advantage would go to a person able to deal with and talk about such complexity (and by that I mean Joe Biden). This might not be true.

If your audience is easily confused by complexity, the simpler answers are more likely to gain their approval. People don't judge words by their accuracy - they judge them by how comprehensible they are.

The conventional wisdom is that the vague generalities, ignorance, and simple worldview of Sarah Palin is going to give her a distinct disadvantage tonight. I'm not so sure. Such simplifications and vague reassurances might be just what many voters are looking for.

My prediction? Palin will come across as vague and simplistic as the pundits are predicting, but it won't hurt her in the polls.