A rambling search for an underlying principle

[Lamplighter]

My parents were raised on small farms growing vegetables to meet the family needs, selling tobacco, cotton, and a few eggs locally for hard cash.
They met, married and moved to Detroit to work for General Motors. WW II ended and along came the Interstate Highway, and K-POW, the world changed.

My first computer in 1975 cost $3k, had 8K of memory and at each startup the DOS system software had to be loaded from a 3 inch floppy disc.
IBM was the opposite culture with the "big computer in the sky". Along came ethernet, the internet, and K-POW, the world changed.

Many businesses were small, set up as sole proprietorships and partnerships and small corporations that supported our nation's workforce.
Along came the multinational, mega-corporations, and K-POW, the world changed.

So now, we have episodes of contaminations of the entire nation's food chain (e.g., meat, eggs, spinach)
or a single oil spill threatens "just-in-time" inventories and manufacturing, and the polarizing politics brings economic hardships of immense proportions.
Along comes a US Supreme Court decision giving all businesses complete freedom of speech, and K-POW, the world will change.

So what... maybe it all works it's way out in the long run.
But I keep feeling there's a need for better thinking up front.

Isn't there an alternative or an underlying principle hidden in all this "learning by disaster" ?