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Musings Report 2024-18 5-4-24 Leverage Points: What We Control, What We Don't Control
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Leverage Points: What We Control, What We Don't Control
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In my "begging bowl" post, I referred to Donella Meadows' famous paper, Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System. It's one of those essays that is worth re-reading every year, as each reading generates new (or renewed) insights.
If you haven't read it recently, here are some excerpts that give a taste of the entirety:
"Counterintuitive. That’s Forrester’s word to describe complex systems. Leverage points are not intuitive. Or if they are, we intuitively use them backward, systematically worsening whatever problems we are trying to solve.
The systems analysts I know have come up with no quick or easy formulas for finding leverage points. When we study a system, we usually learn where leverage points are. But a new system we’ve never encountered? Well, our counterintuitions aren’t that well developed. Give us a few months or years and we’ll figure it out. And we know from bitter experience that, because of counterintuitiveness, when we do discover the system’s leverage points, hardly anybody will believe us.
PLACES TO INTERVENE IN A SYSTEM
(in increasing order of effectiveness)
12. Constants, parameters, numbers (such as subsidies, taxes, standards).
11. The sizes of buffers and other stabilizing stocks, relative to their flows.
10. The structure of material stocks and flows (such as transport networks, population age structures).
9. The lengths of delays, relative to the rate of system change.
8. The strength of negative (i.e. corrective) feedback loops, relative to the impacts they are trying to correct against.
7. The gain around driving positive feedback loops.
6. The structure of information flows (who does and does not have access to information).
5. The rules of the system (such as incentives, punishments, constraints).
4. The power to add, change, evolve, or self-organize system structure.
3. The goals of the system.
2. The mindset or paradigm out of which the system--its goals, structure, rules, delays, parameters--arises.
1. The power to transcend paradigms.
Missing feedback is one of the most common causes of system malfunction.
A negative feedback loop is self-correcting; a positive feedback loop is self-reinforcing.
Positive feedback loops are sources of growth, explosion, erosion, and collapse in systems.
Real-world systems can turn chaotic, however, if something in them can grow or decline very fast.
A NEW LOOP delivers feedback to a place where it wasn’t going before.
Self-organization is basically a matter of an evolutionary raw material — a highly variable stock of information from which to select possible patterns — and a means for experimentation, for selecting and testing new patterns.
When you understand the power of system self-organization, you begin to understand why biologists worship biodiversity even more than economists worship technology.
The intervention point here is obvious, but unpopular. Encouraging variability and experimentation and diversity means 'losing control.'
Democracy worked better before the advent of the brainwashing power of centralized mass communications.
If rich people can buy government and weaken, rather than strengthen those of measures, the government, instead of balancing 'success to the successful' loops, becomes just another instrument to reinforce them!
There is a systematic tendency on the part of human beings to avoid accountability for their own decisions. That’s why there are so many missing feedback loops — and why this kind of leverage point is so often popular with the masses, unpopular with the powers that be, and effective, if you can get the powers that be to permit it to happen (or go around them and make it happen anyway).
The shared idea in the minds of society, the great big unstated assumptions -- unstated because unnecessary to state; everyone already knows them -- constitute that society’s paradigm, or deepest set of beliefs about how the world works.
Systems folks would say you change paradigms by modeling a system, which takes you outside the system and forces you to see it whole. We say that because our own paradigms have been changed that way.
There is yet one leverage point that is even higher than changing a paradigm. That is to keep oneself unattached in the arena of paradigms, to stay flexible, to realize that NO paradigm is 'true,' that every one, including the one that sweetly shapes your own worldview, is a tremendously limited understanding of an immense and amazing universe that is far beyond human comprehension."
The starting point in all this for me is: what do we control, and what don't we control?
Few (if any) systems (inputs and processes) are completely within our control. But the inputs of a few systems are completely within our control, for example, what food we put in our mouths, what fitness routines we pursue, and what we do with our surplus time and income.
Let's consider our health as a system. We directly control the inputs--food, water, exercise--but not the processes of digestion, immune response, etc., though there are a multitude of feedbacks between our diet, fitness and mental state and the body's complex processes and microbiome. The output--our health--is the result of the inputs we control and processes we influence but don't fully control.
How do we change our health? The "obvious" way is to adhere to a new diet. But as Meadows pointed out, the "obvious" leverage point is not the actual leverage point: diets don't work, except if they are supported by a change of our understanding of ourselves, our relationship to food and fitness, and our awareness of a new paradigm. This awareness is supported by joining a group of others seeking to change the paradigm of their health.
Diets by themselves don't work because we experience them as a form of deprivation and discipline. As Meadows explains, we don't change our diet and fitness until we come to a new understanding, a new paradigm, and recognize that what we thought was natural and rewarding--eating salty, sweet, fatty snacks and foods because they generated an endorphin rush of pleasure and good feelings--was not actually good for us, and there is another way of feeling good that was not self-destructive.
The same can be said of fitness: changing the paradigm from deprivation, suffering and discipline to the pleasures of walking, swimming, etc. and the enjoyment of natural exercise and health.
The rigidity of the entire paradigm of diets--don't eat nightshade-family plants, or eat lots of red meat, or carbohydrates are bad, etc. etc.--speak not to the flexibility Meadows describes as an essential part of viewing belief systems as paradigms, but to the inflexibility that strips systems of adaptability.
Diets and food arouse a wide range of emotions bordering on the irrational. Setting all that aside, we can conclude that simply eating only real food--no processed foods--is a solid foundation for better health. It doesn't have to be rigid or complicated. The same can be said of fitness: extremes of effort and fitness are glorified in our culture, but very simple routines achieve 80% of the benefits of exercise with modest effort.
The larger paradigm is that our minds and bodies were selected to optimize a hunter-gatherer lifestyle with a bit of tending plants and animals (that became agriculture/animal husbandry) around 200,000 years ago. While there have been epigenetic modifications in various populations, in general we're optimized to walk / run, live in cooperative families and groups, compete for status within the group, consume a varied, omnivorous diet rich in fiber and foods softened / modified with fire.
Within these basic parameters, a tremendous variety of diets and social structures are enabled. But straying far from these optimized, selected traits gets us in trouble, as we're not designed to digest low-fiber, industrialized-highly processed "food" which bears little resemblance to unprocessed real food.
We see the same issue with other solutions based on "obvious" leverage points and the idea that gaining control is better than the messy, quasi-chaotic processes of variability and adaption.
For example, in the financial realm the leverage points are 1) lowering interest rates to near-zero to promote more borrowing and spending, i.e. "growth," and 2) inject trillions of dollars, yen, yuan, euros, etc. into the financial system to stimulate an asset bubble that generates "the wealth effect," which stimulates more borrowing and spending, i.e. "growth."
These policies were expedient, short-term "fixes" based on the paradigm of "growth" and "control." Like doses of opium initially injected to reduce pain, these "fixes" are inherently addictive, as the economy becomes dependent on near-zero interest rates and steadily higher doses of financial opium to maintain the same "high" of "growth."
But this "growth" isn't the result of organic i.e. self-organized expansion based on messy adaptations; this "growth" is artificial, centrally controlled stimulus. Once this stimulus is reduced or withdrawn, the financial system enters withdrawal and the risk of collapse increases.
Centralized authority naturally seeks control as the "solution" to all problems, as this is what I call the ontological imperative of centralized organizations/states. Expanding control is the "obvious" leverage point, but it undermines the system by undermining variability and adaptability.
Expedient decision-making that seeks short-term gains / reduction in pain without regard for long-term consequences is the default setting of leaders in every era. An understanding of systems dynamics helps us understand how expedient decision-making favors "obvious" leverage points which are ultimately destructive.
Rather than change the system by modifying the paradigm, "obvious" leverage points like diets and dropping interest rates to zero are attempts to bypass feedback loops both positive (self-reinforcing) and negative (self-corrective).
Taking a medication to modify appetite and cravings reduces caloric intake, eventually leading to weight loss, but this is not a restoration of actual health. Health requires not just an artificial reduction in appetite but a diet of real food and fitness. As soon as the patient stops taking the medication, they regain the weight they lost because they didn't change their understanding of themselves, the incentives in our system to produce and market processed foods, the role of real food and fitness, and the nature of diets as ineffective leverage points.
In a similar fashion, inducing higher borrowing and spending and inflating asset bubbles don't restore a healthy, adaptive economy. Those expedient exploitations of "obvious" leverage points undermine the economy rather than strengthen it. Just as addictions to unhealthy foods preclude real health, addictions to cheap credit and stimulus preclude a healthy economy.
The assumption in the "economics" paradigm is that policies that worked or didn't work in 1933 or 1973 are like "laws of Nature"--they will work the same way today. But economies and societies are open systems, and so the nature of economies and societies changes, sometimes radically. Referencing the past doesn't necessarily mean the same policies (or leverage points) will work as intended today.
Just as humans avoid accountability for their own decisions, they also seek short-term fixes to reduce the pain of the moment. All these defaults attract us to "obvious" leverage points that offer the promise of immediate results fixes that may appear to work wonders in the short term but which cripple the system down the road.
Meadows highlights another critically important but overlooked characteristic of systems: feedback loops tend to keep a system in dynamic equilibrium: our weight may fluctuate within a narrow range, recessions in self-organizing economies tend to be shallow, and so on.
But when something breaks or changes too fast for feedback to bring it back into equilibrium, the system can quickly fall into an unrecoverably chaotic state. Equilibrium is lost and cannot be restored by the usual feedbacks. Examples include cardiac arrest and the collapse of speculative asset bubbles.
Short-term, expedient "fixes" suppress feedbacks by forcing / controlling the system out of self-organization / adaptability in order to get the results that leaders seek.
This approach greatly increases the odds that something will break within the system, leading to collapse into a chaotic state.
As I've mentioned in previous Musings (Musings2023 #41), what Ilya Prigogine called islands of coherence can act as attractors that restabilize systems that have fallen into chaotic incoherence.
We don't control economies and societies, so we can't single-handedly create large-scale islands of coherence. But we can consider a paradigm in which our own lives / lifestyles can become an island of coherence in a rising sea of destabilization.
Highlights of the Blog
I'm Looking for 10 Readers Willing to Pony Up a Few Bucks for the Crazy-Valuable Content Here 5/3/24
Labor Rising: Will Class Identity Finally Matter Again? 5/1/24
China and the U.S.: What Matters That's Overlooked 4/29/24
Best Thing That Happened To Me This Week
The Kaimana lychee tree has produced a good crop that's just about ready to enjoy. This tree was an 18-inch high sapling in 2018, so it's about 7 years old. We have 22 trees now (three with edible leaves--one Bay and two Curry Leaf, the other 19 bear fruit), 15 papaya trees and around 50 banana trees, of which 10 have flowered / produced stalks of bananas in various stages of growth. Of these 87 or so trees, only a few generate large yields, so when a good crop comes in, it's a cause for celebration.
From Left Field
NOTE TO NEW READERS: This list is not comprised of articles I agree with or that I judge to be correct or of the highest quality. It is representative of the content I find interesting as reflections of the current zeitgeist. The list is intended to be perused with an open, critical, occasionally amused mind.
Many links are behind paywalls. Most paywalled sites allow a few free articles per month if you register. It's the New Normal.
The billionaire ‘nepo baby’ boom (via Cheryl A.)
Steak Dinners, Sales Reps and Risky Procedures: Inside the Big Business of Clogged Arteries
How planning and infrastructure failed during Maui wildfires (via Tom D.)
Thousands rally in Spain's Canary Islands against mass tourism (via CNF) Tens of thousands of people in Spain's Canary Islands have rallied against a model of mass tourism they say is overwhelming the Atlantic archipelago.
Do We Really Want a Food Cartel?
What are the top 10 most traded currencies in the world? -- USD: 63% of global reserves, 44% of daily volume ($2.9 trillion daily); Chinese RMB: 1% of global reserves, 2% of daily volume ($142 billion daily)...
U.S. Housing Vacancies and Homeownership -- All housing units 145,967,000; Owner Occupied 86,220,000 59%; Renter 44,985,000 31%; Vacant 14,761 10%...
The wealthiest 10% of Americans own 93% of stocks even with market participation at a record high
Technology and Innovation are Overrated--Implications for AI -- gotta love a heretic....
Daniel Schmachtenberger: "Artificial Intelligence and The Superorganism" | The Great Simplification (3:12 hrs)
Nearly 20% of San Francisco Home Sellers Take a Loss on Their Sale, More Than Four Times the National Share
We Finally Know What Drives Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (and Long-Covid) The most convincing breakthrough yet in the key pathomechanisms (patho- means disease) involved.
"We grow in direct proportion to the amount of chaos we can sustain and dissipate." Ilya Prigogine
Thanks for reading--
charles |
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