In a nondescript building somewhere at Sandia National Laboratories a super computer is humming.  It makes calculations so incredibly fast it can simulate trillions of economic transactions in seconds.  What’s more, its software contains smart algorithms that learn from their own experience.  They don’t wait for new data, and new analyses in order to make tentative new approximations of what could be.  They adapt and create their own.  This model is able to calculate, analyze, evaluate, simulate, adjust, and repeat its actions—all with lighting speed.   It is smarter and faster at what it does than are humans, thus it “enables” its developers to answer questions heretofore impossible to answer.  Questions like “What would be the economic consequences if terrorists were to bomb Wall Street, Hoover Dam, and San Francisco’s financial district all at the same time?”

N-ABLE is part of the National Infrastructure Simulation and Analysis Center (NISAC), a modeling, simulation, and analysis program within the Department of Homeland Security.  In the past few years, N-ABLE has been used in NISAC to analyze the impacts of:

• electric-power and rail-transportation disruptions on the U.S. chlorine supply chain,
• hurricanes on large-scale domestic and global chemical supply chains,
• terrorist acts on commodity futures markets,
• changes in U.S. border security technologies on U.S. firms that import and export commodities in global supply chains,
• a pandemic influenza on the U.S. agriculture and food supply chains,
• pandemic-related household stress on wholesale-to-retail food supply chains, and
• cost-optimized military-parts global supply chains on war-time equipment uptime.

Other uses for N-ABLE would be to locate appropriate resources and move them efficiently to where they would be needed in a disaster.  But it could also be used to find the optimal allocation of resources to bring the economy up to peak efficiency; to reduce unemployment; find the appropriate mix of taxes needed to meet national objectives where everyone pays his or her fair share.  Many changes for the better could be realized by re-directing capital, by speeding up development of energy sources, and by identifying and funding more efficient ways of  achieving national objectives.

It could also be used to simulate the consequences of legislative proposals.   And since it can produce simulations with lightning speed, it could be used almost immediately after a proposal is put forward.   Legislators are so notoriously ignorant of economic issues, their costs and consequences, that I can visualize N-ABLE being connected in such a way as to make a mockery of many of them right after they make them. 

N-ABLE is more than an idea whose time has come.  It is a reality that has arrived just in the nick of time.  It needs to be expanded or shared by the Federal Reserve Board, the Congressional Budget Office, the Defense Department, and by universities throughout the land to warn of impending dangers, how to solve them, and how to make better use of what we have to achieve a lot more of what we need.