📚 Thinking in Systems - Week 6

This week’s reading got close to home.

As she worked through her list of 12 leverage points, my head was doing a lot of gyrating: a lot of nods and a lot of shakes. I liked the new layer of depth to the concepts of flows:

“Think about the basic stock-and-flow bathtub from Chapter One. The size of the flows is a matter of numbers and how quickly those numbers can be changed. Maybe the faucet turns hard, so it takes a while to get the water flowing or to turn it off. Maybe the drain is blocked and can allow only a small flow, no matter how open it is. Maybe the faucet can deliver with the force of a fire hose.” (p.147)

I also appreciated the political relevance of her points:

“Putting different hands on the faucets may change the rate at which the faucets turn, but if they’re the same old faucets, plumbed into the same old system, turned according to the same old information and goals and rules, the system behavior isn’t going to change much.” (p.148)

“I said a while back that changing the players in the system is a low-level intervention, as long as the players fit into the same old system. The exception to that rule is at the top, where a single player can have the power to change the system’s goal. I have watched in wonder as—only very occasionally—a new leader in an organization, from Dartmouth College to Nazi Germany, comes in, enunciates a new goal, and swings hundreds or thousands or millions of perfectly intelligent, rational people off in a new direction.” (p.162)

Seems quite relevant as Trump transforms the global economic order, or at least America’s place in it. His policies of tariffs and his concern with trade deficit are a harking back to old old economic paradigm of Mercantilism. China, of course, has a lot of Mercantilist vibes to it, but America seemed to be at the opposite end of the spectrum, until Trump. It is astounding to see how much change one man can bring. He has changed the goals of the system — trade deficit being just one measure. Within the American system, many more of the goals are oriented towards him — pleasing him, increasing his power so he can bring about his agenda. Not since FDR has the executive had such power.

Aside from that political aside, there were a couple more nuggets I would love to muse on for longer:

“To demonstrate the power of rules, I like to ask my students to imagine different ones for a college. Suppose the students graded the teachers, or each other. Suppose there were no degrees: You come to college when you want to learn something, and you leave when you’ve learned it. Suppose tenure were awarded to professors according to their ability to solve real-world problems, rather than to publish academic papers. Suppose a class got graded as a group, instead of as individuals.” (p.158)

That latter suggestion is the one that really got me. I think all sorts of things would go wrong when you scaled that up to the level of a nation, but you can see the seed of a different system in changing education’s metric from the individual to the group. A class would become a business essentially. The A-students would be incentivised to share their study abilities with the failures. There would be social consequences for bad behaviour and slacking off. Inter-class competition within the school and between schools would ramp up. From that one little nugget, I can imagine a whole different educational landscape. This is a plant I’d like to water and write about in more length, but for a throwaway line — wow. Education is at the cusp of a MAJOR overhaul since AI has hollowed out the education system. Such questions as these might be important to ask.

Another aside I would like to dwell longer upon is democracy:

“This great system was invented to put self-correcting feedback between the people and their government. The people, informed about what their elected representatives do, respond by voting those representatives in or out of office. The process depends on the free, full, unbiased flow of information back and forth between electorate and leaders. Billions of dollars are spent to limit and bias and dominate that flow of clear information. Give the people who want to distort market-price signals the power to influence government leaders, allow the distributors of information to be self-interested partners, and none of the necessary balancing feedbacks work well. Both market and democracy erode.” (p.154)

Meadows is of the opinion that democracy’s demise is due to a lack of transparency. I couldn’t disagree more. I think the limits of the Hamiltonian model of democracy have been revealed. In a small nation like 18th-century America, perhaps the people could have informed takes on the state of the nation. But things have gotten far too complex. The intricacies of a globalised world are beyond any generalist citizenry. We need specialisation, and with that we get a byzantine labyrinth of red tape and nomenclature. Perhaps a system with more fractal distributions of power rather than a delegation to an elite class? Again, a line of enquiry calling for exploration.

But these are mere asides when she comes to my main quest and concern, the past few months: paradigm-lessness. The lack of proper orientation, having the “tremendously limited understanding” of my “sweetly shaping” paradigms of yore.

She ranked these paradigmatic shifts as the two pinnacles of systems thinking leverage points. Over the longer term, I agree. But lacking a new paradigm, they might be the least actionable ones. She goes off into spiritual paeans on the non-paradigmatic state, aligning it to “what the Buddhists call enlightenment” (p.164). Here’s her optimistic view of it:

“Surely there is no power, no control, no understanding, not even a reason for being, much less acting, embodied in the notion that there is no certainty in any worldview. But, in fact, everyone who has managed to entertain that idea, for a moment or for a lifetime, has found it to be the basis for radical empowerment. If no paradigm is right, you can choose whatever one will help to achieve your purpose. If you have no idea where to get a purpose, you can listen to the universe.” (p.164)

To that I reply only with a wry Nihilistic recitation of Yeats’s account of such days:

“The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity”

Still, I like her optimism, and it was nice to have someone hold up a mirror to what I’ve been wrestling with myself. And there’s a nice pragmatism to what she’s saying, so maybe I’ll warm more to it in time.