The game Bananagrams may be a good metaphor for patterns of sustainable specialization and trade. In the game, each player is dealt a bunch of tiles with letters on them, like Scrabble tiles. You play as in Scrabble, but without a board and with each player playing his or her tiles alone. You form words free-form, but they must all connect, as in Scrabble. The object is to use all of your tiles. The rules are such that as the game proceeds, you are often forced to draw a new tile before you have used all of your tiles.

Sometimes, you have most of your tiles connected, with very few “unemployed” tiles, and when you get a new tile you can quickly “employ” it, meaning that you can add it to your existing set of words. That situation would represent a high-employment economy with patterns of sustainable specialization and trade.

However, sometimes you get a new tile, or a few of them, and you realize that you cannot make use of these tiles without breaking up several of your current words and starting over. You might be down to just one or two “unemployed” tiles, but breaking up some of your words gives you many “unemployed” tiles. That situation represents an economy where patterns of specialization and trade have become unsustainable. Getting back to a high-employment situation takes time and trial-and-error, just as in Bananagrams it takes time to recover when you find that your current word pattern won’t let you use all your tiles and you need to break up some of your words and create new words.