After finding last week’s reading a bit slow, things picked up considerably with this week’s reading: resilience, self-organisation and hierarchy.
This week’s reading felt VERY Wilber (and hence Metamodernist). Self-organisation/emergentism is all the rage in these subcultures, as is hierarchy.
Thoughts on Resilience
The standout for me in this chapter was not the hierarchy and self-organisation, which I’ve read and thought about a lot in the past, but the resilience. The part that stopped me in my tracks a little:
“Just-in-time deliveries of products to retailers or parts to manufacturers have reduced inventory instabilities and brought down costs in many industries. The just-in-time model also has made the production system more vulnerable, however, to perturbations in fuel supply, traffic flow, computer breakdown, labor availability, and other possible glitches.” (p.77)
The tradeoff between resilience and productivity hadn’t struck me before. The first thing that came to mind was the fragility of the global supply chain exposed by Covid, which saw food shortages in Africa amid a plague of locusts without the pesticides and capacity to deal with it. No doubt this is one reason why protectionism and tariffs have been making a comeback: it’s not just about onshoring jobs but about making supply chains less fragile — especially amid the geopolitical winter brewing.
I’ve been reading a lot of economics lately, and it’s peculiar to see this return to Mercantilism after decades/centuries characterised by Liberalism and Socialism. Another thought: the Classical school of economic Liberalism (Adam Smith and his intellectual descendants — especially the Austrians) is really a case of increasing productivity and decreasing resilience. Economic liberalism prioritises productivity above all else. What would an economic model that emphasises resilience look like?
Economic thoughts aside, this also got me thinking about my relationship with YouTube. I’ve seen so many YouTubers at the top of the game burning out because of the nature of the platform. Their relationship with the beast is one of incredible productivity, but with a paucity of resilience. From YouTube’s perspective, it is resilient: there are always more aspiring content creators out there; the individual YouTubers are expendable. But from the creator’s point of view, this concept of resilience is pronounced.
Over the past couple of years, since my YouTube career hit a wobble (in fairness, that’s because I kneecapped its growth when it conflicted with my integrity) I’ve been contemplating my relationship with the algorithmic beast. It’s no way to live.
That being said, I love making things. YouTube is an amazing outlet for creative expression. But the thing is, if you want to succeed there financially, you have to compromise with the machine. And if you do that, you are, to use Meadows’ analogy, narrowing your plateau of resilience in the name of productivity. It gave me a conceptual lens to look at this ongoing renegotiation through which is always a treat.
Anyway, just a series of thoughts prompted by this distinction. I hadn’t thought of this conflictual relationship between productivity and resilience in systems before. It’s a powerful lens.
Chapter 4
Events, behaviours and structure were the themes of this chapter.
Events are “the outputs, moment by moment, from the black box of the system” — the things you see on the six o’clock news: bombings, battles, disasters, stock market booms and river floods.
Behaviours are patterns of events, e.g. the stock market has been trending upwards for ten years, the temperature of the planet has been trending upwards for 150 years, the variance of the river is increasing with more floods during heavy rains and lower flows during droughts.
Then you have the structure, which is what the diagrams we’ve been looking at the past couple of weeks are mapping:
It’s the “interlocking stocks, flows and feedback loops” of the system. This structure “determines what behaviours are latent in the system.”
After this, there was some discussion of boundaries, limits and bounded rationality. I think this is a section I need to reread again. I didn’t quite grasp the limits concept, which is progress because going in, I thought I did.
Bounded rationality grabbed me more because it’s a common talking point in modern economics and something I’m very familiar with from studying the tragedy of the commons.
Anyway, compared to last week, these chapters were heaped with concepts which I love. I’ll be rereading these at some point for sure. It is giving me a hankering to read Wilber’s Sex, Ecology, Spirituality again, though, which is systems thinking on spiritual steroids (with all the positive and negative connotations of that phrase).
Next week’s reading: “FIVE: System Traps . . . and Opportunities” (pp.111-144)
“What would an economic model that emphasizes resilience look like?” - such a fun question