Episode 33
Transcript:
Donella Meadows:
Okay. Today, I'd like to talk about the system dynamics method, in particular, the philosophical aspects of that method, not the mathematical, to tell you what I regard as the essence of system dynamics as a philosophy for learning about complex systems. It's kind of like describing the lenses in your eyes which you never see, you only see through. Modeling philosophies are very much that way. I use the underlying assumptions of my method without much thinking about them just as a physicist doesn't think too much about the very basis of physics or the mathematician doesn't really question two plus two equals four.
System dynamics is called dynamics because it deals with how systems change over time. It's interested in systems as a whole more than in the characteristics of individual elements in the system. Now I'm going to talk about four of what I think are the most important aspects of how system dynamics does that today, and those four aspects are causal linkages, feedback loops, rates and levels, and structural behavioral relationships.
Peter Joseph:
It's kind of like describing the lenses in your eyes which you never see, you only see through. An excellent articulation by the late great systems thinker, Donella Meadows. Good afternoon, good evening, good morning, everybody. This is Peter Joseph and welcome to Revolution Now!. December 7th 2021, episode 33.
Donella Meadows who's been featured here before was a prominent researcher, an educator in system dynamics, and I think everyone should read her book called Thinking in Systems: A Primer published in 2008. This understanding of the nature of systems, the endogenous nature of systems, is the activist framework by which this podcast is grounded once again. For those that may be new, the position here is that resolution to today's major social and environmental problems can only come through system-based analysis, meaning not only understanding how component parts of a system work, but more importantly, how those parts merge to create what's called system level behavior, behavior unpredicted by the sum of parts due to the vast complexity inherent not to mention influences existing on different scales such as the infinitely encompassing environment also known as panarchy.
It's about relationships between things, not just things, because in reality, there are no individual things. This is why from a sociological perspective, our society is producing negative outcomes that no one actually intends once again. A society's culture could have an impeccable moral compass, but if placed within a certain mutually accepted social structure that has certain incentives and procedures, complex system dynamics create outcomes of our collective behavior that no one intends: poverty, pollution, biodiversity loss. Why? Because we're all playing the same game and that game is not neutral. The exception would be the moral compass to actually realize that the system itself is fundamentally flawed, destructive, and immoral, seeking to remove it. That is the true moral incentive I like to impart, something I hope that can be built upon in this process of public persuasion. It's not out of the question for people to be educated enough to realize that they are part of a machine that is destructive, destructive to the habitat and each other.
We are all complicit, not necessarily violent and I hope that thinking can motivate transition but that's for another conversation in general. Over the years, I've gotten into a lot of arguments on the subject of morality and ethics versus the incentivized behaviors codified within system structure by which people inevitably become agents or cogs. And the bottom line is that while people can do their best to be moral, responsible, ethical as they play this market game, abuse of human beings and the rest of the natural world will persist and dominate because it's built in to the structure. And I know I've talked about this before, but it's a very core issue to reiterate and a fundamental misunderstanding out there when we think about social change.
As Donella Meadows writes, "the number one really important systems insight is that system behavior comes out of the system, it's interrelationships, its goals, not the elements, the people or the actors in it. And that immediately has a profound effect on the way systems people talk because they rarely blame people for things, they blame systems. So the fact that people act in certain perverse ways that produce results that no one wants is not usually the fault of the people in our way of thinking. They're the rational behavior of the people within the system. And the question is, what's wrong with the system not what's wrong with the people in it."
Needless to say, this perspective is a radical departure from traditional methodology used today to understand society. In the end, morality and ethics have to be built into the system, designed into the very nature of how we organize our society, not an afterthought or moral imposition. Love will not save the world. If I hear one more droning expression about how internal personal change is the source of it all, I'm going to blow my brains out. That was a side effect of a 1960's failed Western revolution. Activists tried very hard to institute governmental and economic change during this time, and while some progress was made in the area of civil rights, of course, it still failed to change the structure of the system itself. So many people recoiled into this idea of personal transformation through self-help, meditation, therapy, retreats and all of this self-healing and realization. With the fundamental premise being if you change yourself, somehow you'll change everything and while that's a half truth, it gets deeply overemphasized and exaggerated in this self-help community but that's not how behavioral dynamics work.
Reality is far less romantic. Reality is far more crude. You have to account the larger order condition by which an element or person is ultimately vulnerable. And by the way, this isn't to dismiss the importance of self-care and therapy and all those things we do to basically try and heal ourselves from the endless trauma cultivated generation after generation through socioeconomic forces due to the system, especially for those with low socioeconomic status. But, of course, the shadow incentive prevails once again for the self-help community is a very profitable arena. Healing all the psychological and emotional damage that we have suffered due to our artificially scarce competitive and deeply exploitive neofeudalist system that keeps the majority of the world's population in destitution. It's as if the system consciously creates more problems in order to service them, isn't it? Never fix things, just service them to keep market share, revenue, economic growth, and all of that. Therefore, a large cross-section of damaged, unhealthy mentally ill people is actually a good thing for our economy, but I won't go down that road today.
Anyway, just to reiterate, the only way that love is going to save the world is to inspire and rejuvenate people to realize that the system structure they are enduring is not one of love or compassion, it is one of competitive, exploitative darkness and antagonism. That is where the loving revelation comes into play and everything else is just fluffy feel-good noise, noise that, in fact, serves the longevity of the activist industrial complex.
Now, going back to the original audio opening, tangents aside, at the end of the excerpt, Donella Meadows touches upon four things worth briefly addressing before we move on to the core of today's podcast which is continuing to debunk pro capitalist myths and propaganda. Those four things, related to the philosophy of system dynamics were causal linkages, feedback loops, levels and rates, and structural behavioral relationships.
Now, as I've said before, I'm working on a presentation and have been for some time which will overlap with my new film presenting an activist network and think tank that will attempt to create and apply new economic infrastructure for a post capitalist society starting at a small scale and these abstract ideas and the mental model around it will be included more so in these works. So I don't want to belabor this too much today because actually it's a lot easier to have a visual reference when it comes to talking about these things. But let's touch upon them briefly and there's a few things within them I want to a highlight as we go.
So the first thing Meadows mentions are causal linkages. This is fundamental. A causal linkage is simply an identifiable element in the system that, by way of its own change, changes something else connected to it. Cause and effect. A person born on the planet is going to change the state of population. In the same way, if a person dies, it will change the state of the population. We all understand this in a basic Newtonian way but in real life, causality is often masked by correlation and it's important to understand the difference between correlation and causation because the wider your perspective on complex real life dynamics, the more you have to work with correlations and probability to infer causality. Causation is a clear, direct influence between elements with correlation being about potential influences in a kind of environment of associations that points to a particular causal circumstance or condition.
Put another way, correlations are things that repeatedly seem to go together in observation. If one thing occurs, you tend to see these other things as well for some reason. And the more you see these associated things, the more a causal linkage becomes implied and from there you're faced with the generally complicated reductionist task of figuring out how the actual causal dynamics linked together in a functional, useful way. Put more abstractly in the realm of causation, A will cause B. In the realm of correlation, A and B tend to appear together for reasons not entirely clear, at least on that level of observation and this is the mess we find ourselves when we think about sociology through the lens of system dynamics. And it's also why it's so difficult to talk about it because it's so counterintuitive. It's not visceral in any way, generally.
For example, if we're thinking about socioeconomic status and asymmetrical income and wealth distribution as has been talked about before at great length, as a core sociological precondition, you will find certain phenomena correlated with poverty. Endless studies have been done showing how people existing in relative economic deprivation tend to have poorer health, lower academic achievement, lower IQs, a higher propensity for certain types of crime and many, many other links. Is poverty the cause of these things? Well, not directly and not universally. Rather, it's what we call a precondition once again. Poverty is a precondition that links to a series of statistically probable negative outcomes as empirically observed in the same way one can have a biological health precondition or pre-morbidity that may or may not result in some type of disease.
We don't know who's going to get the disease, but the probabilities are there based on the preconditions of the persons. So in a way, all of this is embraced by the epidemiological lens and when you see notable correlations, you then have to break them down analytically trying to infer actual causal linkages as best you can which is extremely complicated at times and sometimes even impossible because of the level of complexity.
If say, low socioeconomic status links to a reduction in IQ, we can then generally assume based on existing empirical statistics that this probabilistic pattern will continue, motivating us to remove low socioeconomic status, obviously. However, the exact kind of stress, the exact causality, experiences, dynamics that literally caused one's mind to degrade in such a way is still muddy even though in this particular example it's not that difficult to ascertain, generally, because we know that people in poverty are more exposed to toxic chemicals, worse food, pollution, abuse at times, et cetera, hence debilitating stress which we know links to mental problems.
And as many who are familiar with this podcast know, low socioeconomic status is a kind of structural violence because there are so many negative correlations to it. But when you read about, say, the fact that there's a big discrepancy in life expectancy between the upper and lower class with obviously the lower class suffering and dying prematurely by comparison, you don't really know how they're going to die. You just know that the conditions are going to create that for a certain predictable number of people. So I think I've run that into the ground enough. Moving on.
The second thing Donella Meadows mentions are feedback loops and we've talked about this a little bit before, but I think repetition is important here and I want to provide some additional examples. Feedback loops are observed dynamics modeled from causal linkages in the form of abstracted system observation. Now, I apologize for the nature of that sentence, but I'm trying to be accurate. In a feedback loop. One element of a system changes which causes change in another element it's linked to, and that resulting change then returns to influence the original element in a circular fashion. In other words, outputs of a system are routed back to be inputs of a system in a constant cycle. For those familiar with common computer generated fractal geometry, should know that the equations used do exactly that. It's called an iteration. The resulting answer of the equation is also a variable within the equation itself. Meaning, every time a new result occurs, that result replaces a variable in the equation creating another new result, creating an infinite cycle of mathematical evolution hence the exquisite, infinite, zoomable imagery you see in fractal geometry because of the self-similarity.
But more crudely, if you've ever seen organic video fractals which are also rather fascinating where you take a live camera and you point it at the screen that the camera is outputting, making that output of a live camera an input in, once again, an infinite loop, you are then witnessing the same basic idea. Video feedback. Same goes, of course, for audio feedback. When you're in a concert or something, you hear that awful high pitch sound coming from the microphone as someone tries to speak, the output becomes the input and it causes an accelerated rise in frequency and tension in this positive feedback loop environment which brings us to the two types of feedback loops: positive and negative. Positive, meaning, the system is constantly amplifying the same cycles which leads to exponential behavior such as a bank account that's constantly accruing interest income in the account and that interest income becomes new money in that account, of course, which then grows even more additional interest, growing infinitely, at least in theory.
The more money in the account, the more interest income, the more money grows and so on. What needs to be understood is that positive feedback loops are destructive and unstable because, left unabated, they are always exponential... At least destructive in the sense of the physical world. Obviously, we would love to have exponential growth in things like knowledge or technological efficiency or Moore's law and so forth. Then we have negative feedback loops also called balancing feedback loops. These are the good feedback loops, if you will, where dynamics move a system toward equilibrium, toward a goal. Negative feedback loops creates stability in a system. For example, the predator/prey relationship in our general ecosystem.
If you were to upset a stable environment, removing a predator from the region, allowing the respected prey to reproduce without inhibition, reproduction could go exponential and cause all sorts of problems. The predator is hence part of a balancing feedback loop to reduce the rate of the prey's population growth seeking equilibrium. Hence, obviously, the core reason we're so concerned about biodiversity disruption and loss on this planet is because we're upsetting delicate feedback loops that have been established for millions if not billions of years creating the habitat stability we need to survive - that we literally evolved out of and we're fucking that up. It's so bad, in fact, that some theorists think that there really isn't even much hope anymore when it comes to climate destabilization at least in terms of achieving certain idealized goals talked about at COP26 and so on.
Because we've already set in motion, severe disturbances that have longstanding chain reactions which create novel feedback loops of a positive bias, meaning destructive bias, further capitulating environmental collapse even if we stopped all greenhouse gas emissions right now but that's for another conversation. A more mechanistic example of a negative feedback loop is the common thermostat, of course. It kicks on once the air temperature passes a certain threshold, then kicks off once it passes another threshold in the other direction, hence balancing. And, of course, your body does this all day long with an infinite number of feedback loop mechanisms. You go out into the heat, you will start to sweat where your body is trying to return to homeostasis and so forth. Ultimately, feedback loops literally define the dynamics of literally everything we see in the natural world.
Now, the most critical thing to understand about what's happening in our social system is we have an economic foundation composed of feedback dynamics, both technical and cultural, that appear to inevitably lead on the whole to destructive positive feedback loop behavior. It's built right in. In other words, the system wants to go exponential and blow up. That is what the design is doing and it's currently doing this in two ways. First, the ecocidal behavior pushing cyclical consumption and infinite economic growth on a finite planet with the structure literally requiring consumption to operate, meaning it's not there to serve the needs of the population, it's there to expect needs, demands and wants from the population in order to keep people employed.
The system operates in literally the opposite manner than a true economy would when it comes to sustainability or simply being economical in literal terms. While secondly, the system is constantly generating destabilizing socioeconomic inequality or increased class differential. If we did not have basic social safety nets and challenges to the wealthy through taxation, attempting to curtail say consolidations through monopoly and cartel, et cetera, even though all of that is really quite minimal in effect, as I will touch upon in a moment, the world's population would experience a disparity to the effect of 1% of the population owning 99% of all wealth and income while the 99% share only 1% of the wealth and income.
That is the trajectory, that is a function, and while that may seem a bit hyperbolic in the stats I just listed, it's gestural- it's really not that far from the truth when you look at how the system functions. It's not just a cute catchphrase to say "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer." That is exactly what the system is programmed to do and all of this has gotten so much worse as technology has progressed. As talked about before, efficiency improving technology within the confines of capitalism is actually a terrible thing on many levels because we are only speeding up our own ecological demise while also increasing dangerous socioeconomic stratification. You know all that wonderful automation that we should be using to free humanity from monotonous labor, drawing wealth from that freedom and efficiency created? It's simply being used to cut costs, displace human labor, and generate even more money for the ownership class, increasing stratification and that's just one mechanism, mind you.
I won't even go into the entire financialization, Wall Street phenomenon which is also one giant engine of class war in favor of the rich. So those two converging phenomena create a perfect storm for the collapse of civilization as we know it. If you programmed all of this information into a computer and you ran the program over time, you would see a complete collapse of the civilization represented in that computer. Moving on. The third thing she brings up are levels and rates also known as stock and flow in system theory parlance. And by the way, it helps to have visual aids with this kind of thing. But since this is a non-visual podcast, I hope I can get the gist across. Causal loop diagrams they're called along with stock and flow diagrams are very common tools if anyone wants to start looking into this kind of practice.
So rates and levels are common core attributes of feedback loops and are ubiquitous in nature. In analysis, a level is what people look at to make decisions, the current state of some something. If you have a drinking glass that has a little water in it, you may recognize that level and make a decision to go and get some more water to add to the glass with the rate of flow being the influence changing itself and it's easy to see the feedback loop process therein. You go to the faucet, you adjust it to add new water to the glass, it does so over time at a given rate of flow, giving your eyes and mind feedback as to when to eventually turn off the faucet when you reach the level you want before it overflows. I know that all seems like complete common sense, but when you think about that, you start to realize the kind of system process of feedback in a way that you take for granted in your day-to-day life. Same kind of logic for inventories, of course: inventory stock comes in, it goes out, there's all sorts of feedback mechanisms by way of supply and demand and so forth.
More could be said on the issue but I'm going to leave it at that. Now, causal linkages, feedback loops and stock and flow analysis are not limited to basic observations as mentioned. It's when you start to apply this thinking to things like market externalities, human behavior, climate destabilization, resource overshoot, and so forth you begin to see the utility and power of this kind of method. Even more, while it may seem like common technical sense, when it comes to understanding our social system and its resulting behaviors, particularly it's negative outcomes witnessing the political and social responses to these woes, you realize that this type of approach isn't even remotely being recognized or utilized. If it were, for example, the entire criminal justice system would be reformed because the manner by which causality is ascertained is almost completely reduced to a freewill human autonomy, superstitious perspective without recognizing the systemic social forces that affect people's lives and behavior linking all sorts of sociological phenomenon such as the role of the economy.
If society really understood and cared about aberrant behaviors such as violent crime, property crime, and so forth, our focus would be on systemic sociological forces that are generating the behavior, not on how to institute blame and punish people. So that's one small example. Furthermore, a deeper understanding of this kind of thinking also allows us to better seek out leverage points once again, meaning places within a given system that can be manipulated and utilized and harnessed for transitional purposes moving ideally into a more sustainable and humane structure. And finally, the fourth and final thing she mentions are structural behavioral relationships of a system which is the most holistic perspective of system behavior. What does the system do? This is why I continually use the word structuralism as a tongue in cheek way to describe this philosophy as related to socioeconomic observation and change. And the bottom line is simple as discussed before.
Systems have particular behavioral gravitations; they are not neutral and the most critical task at hand from a communicative standpoint is spreading the gospel that the foundation of our survival on this planet, the system of economy that we employ - expresses itself in such a way, endogenously, that can and will only lead to ecological and social disaster if left unabated, which is provable by this kind of system level analysis. And when I say left unabated, I'm not merely inspiring people to run to their congressperson and ask for more legislation or demand more institutional activity to collar this or that behavior coming from economic agents because that's obviously not enough. The great fallacy is that the institution of state government serves as a negative feedback balancing influence that has the capacity to keep all the destructive elements of the positive feedback loop generating economy at bay.
I think it was Milton Friedman that said, government should be merely the referee of the market game, not an interference. The unfortunate reality is that that very market game incentivizes and ultimately allows for special commercial interests to pay off that referee as a system level mechanism of competitive advantage and why it would be any other way is actually counterintuitive. Let's be consistent once again. In the American political disaster, you have people like Bernie Sanders which are trying to put together very basic common sense policy to stifle and reverse all of the inequality and environmental destruction coming from commercial power. And how successful has he been? Even with all the years and years of emphasis. Inequality isn't some new thing that we've been talking about. Every single year, it gets worse, worse and worse, it's front page headlines in some cases along with the ecological disaster.
So the knowledge and awareness of all this is there. This isn't hidden, but how successful has Sanders been? And by the way, this isn't a criticism of him whatsoever. It's an acknowledgement of the fact that government is invariably divided between being a tool for commercial competitive advantage along with, in total contradiction, of course, being a tool to try and do the right thing to stifle, reduce, and compensate for negative consequences of capitalism as most people in a working democracy would want, right? No one wants everything to be on fire, nobody wants their children poisoned, nobody wants to be poor in a shack while billionaires run amok. And hence, this is the traditional role that people think about in terms of government and, of course, gravitate towards it thinking it is ultimately the solution. The problem is the whole thing is already completely compromised.
In fact, I'll conclude by saying that if you were to model this dynamic between state and commercial power, the government versus the free market in that fake duality, the market will always win. It is winning and it always will as long as the structure remains because there's no real division between these two entities. Government, as we know, is an outgrowth of the commercial capitalist structure, the capitalist structure is in control not politicians or, more accurately -- the system is in control.
So I'm going to stop there for today. I'm sorry, I didn't get to the next question. We will plow through those questions next time. By the way, I'm considering rebranding the visuals on the Revolution Now! Podcast. My cartoonish burning earth seems a little bit trite at this point. I think I could probably do something a little bit more visually interesting. So if anyone out there has a knack for logo creation and would like to submit something, don't spend too much time, but if you have any ideas and you want to donate some graphic design, I would appreciate it because I'm juggling too much.
So feel free to email any ideas if you care to and this program is brought to you by my Patreon. I will be back very soon to continue this exploration. At some point, I'm probably going to have to sideline the podcast as I get deeper into the projects that I'm working on, but I'm going to try my best to keep this thing going as consistently as I can. And I apologize for the general inconsistency at times with my Wednesday deadlines which I seem to miss almost all the time but I'm doing my best. All right, folks, take care out there and have a safe holiday whatever the hell that means to you. Bye bye.