Thinking in Systems, Donella H. Meadows

• If we consider that a system causes its own behaviour, we need to consider that politicians don’t cause recessions or booms; oil-exporting nations are not solely responsible for oil prices—consumers are as well; and pathogens do not solely attack you, but you set up conditions for them to flourish within you
• A diverse system with multiple pathways and redundancies is more stable and less vulnerable to external shock than a uniform system with little diversity
• The least obvious part of the system, it’s function or purpose, is often the most crucial determinant of the system’s behaviour
  • To understand life, we need to identify the ultimate cause—life’s purpose: to survive and reproduce!
• Someone trying to fix a system is intuitively attracted to a policy lever that has a strong effect on the system, and well-intentioned fixers often pull the lever in the wrong direction! Think, over-reactions to stock fluctuations. We are often surprised by the counterintuitive behaviour of systems when we start trying to change them
• Economies are full of balancing feedback loops and delays, companies react in lieu of delayed responses, and those reactions produce oscillations of system outputs. This is why economies are cyclical—not because of this president or this company, but because the interconnected system is full of signal delays.
• No physical system can grow forever in a finite environment
• The real choice in the management of a non-renewable resource is whether to get rich very fast or to get less rich but stay that way longer
  • When competing with other systems, the most likely choice made is getting rich very fast, because the competitors who make this choice will confer immediate advantages over those who do not.
• Resilience provides a large plateau upon which a system can play, performing its normal functions in safety and surrounding the system with gentle, elastic walls, that bounce it back if it wanders too close to a dangerous edge
• A system that loses resilience sees its plateau shrink, and whose protective walls become lower and more rigid, restricting the freedom of the system
• When a subsystem’s goals dominate at the expense of the total system’s goals, the resulting behaviour is called suboptimization
• Too much control can also harm a system. If a cell is not free to perform self-maintenance it will die; if stringent rules prevent students or faculty from exploring fields of knowledge freely, education will falter; over-control by governments has led to some of the greatest catastrophes of history
• A highly functioning system requires enough central control to achieve coordination toward the large system goal, and enough autonomy to keep all subsystems flourishing, functioning, and self-organizing
• Hierarchies form so that their originating subsystems can perform their jobs better
• Hierarchies evolve bottom up. The top layers evolve to serve the purposes of the lower layers
• Long term behaviour provides clues to the underlying system structure, and structure is the key to understanding not just what is happening, but why
• We are too fascinated by the events systems generate, and insufficiently skilled at prospecting their history to find the structures from which behaviour and events flow
• If we’re to understand anything, we must simplify. We must invent boundaries for clarity and sanity; but boundaries can produce problems when we forget that we’ve artificially created them. When you draw boundaries too narrowly, the system surprises you
• National boundaries mean nothing when it comes to ozone depletion, greenhouse gases, or ocean dumping
• Think of how many arguments have to do with boundaries—national boundaries, trade boundaries, ethnic boundaries, public vs. private
• Boundaries are of our own making, and they can and should be reconsidered for each new discussion, problem, or purpose
• If a company offers a perfect product or service at an affordable price, it will be swamped with orders until it grows to the point where some limit decreases the perfection of the product or raises its price
• If a city meets the needs of all inhabitants better than other cities, people will flock there until some limit brings down the city’s ability to satisfy peoples’ needs
• Bounded rationality is the idea that we act rationally with the limited data we have available to us, but that our acts can be irrational when considering the decision at a broader scope
• The US and Soviet Union for years exaggerated their reports of each other’s armaments to justify more armaments of their own. Each side was escalating itself to the detriment of their local economies and to the entire globe with the evolution of unimaginably destructive weapons
• Addiction can appear in large systems, such as:
  • The dependence of industry on government subsidy
  • The reliance of farmers on fertilizers
  • The addiction of western economies to cheap oil
  • The addiction of weapons manufacturers to government contracts
• Modern medicine in general has shifted the responsibility of health away from the practices and lifestyle of each individual and onto intervening doctors and medicines
• Addiction is finding a quick and dirty solution to the symptom of the problem (not the root cause), which prevents or distracts one from the longer and harder task of solving the real problem. Addictive policies are insidious, because they are so easy to sell, and so simple to fall for.
• Like a drunk ransacking the house in hopes of unearthing just one more bottle, we will pollute our beaches and invade the last wilderness areas, searching for just one more big deposit of oil
• Seeking the wrong goal is a system trap. For example, attempting to maximize GDP is harmful because it is a poor indicator of overall social well-being. More car accidents, and thus more spending on medical and repair bills, increase GDP. More parents hiring help to bring their children up increases GDP. An expensive second home for a rich family is better for GDP than an inexpensive basic home for a poor family. An efficient light bulb that both reduce electricity cost and lasts a long time makes the GDP go down.
• GDP measures effort rather than achievement, regardless of whether that effort was put to good use or wasted, and regardless of whether the achievement is helpful or harmful; gross production and consumption rather than net/efficiency
• System delays cause oscillations. When I receive delayed information about the state of the system stock, I overshoot or undershoot my goal. A system can’t respond to short-term changes when it has long term delays. This is why massive central-planning systems, such as the Soviet Union or General Motors, necessarily function poorly
• Insistence on a single culture shuts down learning and cuts back resilience, leading to failure over the long term in highly variable environments
• This means encouraging variability and experimentation and diversity, which is scary because it means “losing control”. This is why it’s so hard for people to adopt this highly effective leverage point
• Collect as many explanations as possible and consider them all to be plausible until you find evidence that rules them out. That way you will be emotionally available to see evidence as it truly is, not clouded by entanglement with your own identity
• Honouring information means above all avoiding language pollution—making the cleanest possible use out of language
• What Wendell Berry calls “tyrannese”
  • My impression is that we have seen, for perhaps a hundred and fifty years, a gradual increase in language that is either meaningless or destructive of meaning. And I believe that this increasing unreliability of language parallels the increasing disintegration, over the same period, of persons and communities…
• He goes on to say:
  • In this degenerative accounting, language is almost without the power of designation, because it is used conscientiously to refer to nothing in particular. Attention rests upon percentages, categories, abstract functions. . . . It is not language that the user will very likely be required to stand by or to act on, for it does not define any personal ground for standing or acting. Its only practical utility is to support with “expert opinion” a vast, impersonal technological action already begun. … It is a tyrannical language: tyrannese.
• The first step in respecting language is keeping it as concrete, meaningful, and truthful as possible; part of the job of keeping information streams clear. The second step is to enlarge language to make it consistent with our enlarged understanding of systems
• Our culture is obsessed with numbers, giving us the idea that what we can measure is more important than what we can’t measure. If we motivate, rate, and reward ourselves on our ability to produce quantity, then quantity will be the result. Quantity is not necessarily as important as quality, however (e.g., when we maximize GDP and sacrifice quality of life).
• Be interdisciplinary. Penetrate the jargons of other disciplines, integrate what they tell you, recognize what they can honestly see through their respective lenses, and discard the distortions that come from the narrowness and incompleteness of their lenses—they won’t make it easy for you