The name is a reference to the Challenger disaster, which was caused by a failure of actual sealing O-rings, but the theory itself is abstract.

Basically, it's modeling complex production chains where the quality of the "weakest link" is the limiting factor of the quality of the whole process.

crispyambulance 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

OK, but isn’t the key take-away from the Challenger disaster all about the consequence of organizational dysfunction and fear of speaking up?

It wasn’t really a “design flaw” or “weak link” as much as it was management disregarding the warnings of engineering staff. The cold temperature limitation was known in advance by the Morton Thiokol engineers but their management refused to relay the warnings of engineering to NASA and NASA was under pressure to fly. IMHO this was a failure of multiple, mostly organizational, systems rather than “one weak link”.

Did the economists mis-name their own theory?

	▲	sidewndr46 6 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Likely yes, because NASA and other agencies were able to portray the incident as an O-ring failure. It was in fact just that management was indifferent to the risk to the astronauts on board. The only individual who accurately reported on the disaster was Feynman.
	▲	jjk166 4 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		The o-ring was still the weak link, a small part that decision makers assumed was insignificant whose failure caused the complete destruction of a massive system and tragic deaths. The organizational failures are just why the weak link wasn't addressed. We can say with hindsight that things should have been better communicated and the warnings should have been heeded, but the fact is they were dealing with a complex system where the risk was sufficiently non-obvious that they could disregard the warnings.

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observationist 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

So a multivariate Laffer curve?

	▲	laffOr 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		Completely unrelated. Laffer curve is total tax returns as a function of tax rate (usually used to show that at some point T = t*Y(t), where t is the rate and Y is the taxe base, dT/dt < 0). This is about how Y works, not as a function of t but of, well, everything else.