Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System

And it's funny how often we see software teams twiddling at the edges of a system, spending a ton of time on things than don't meaningfully impact the system's overall success. To give a concrete example, I've seen teams with crappy, slow, and unnecessarily expensive system architectures spend a huge amount of time on decisions like "should we use Vue, or React?".

Granted, there will be occasional times when your front-end framework is a make-or-break leverage point. But usually it's not. Maybe the problem is that the teams who are doing this yak shaving aren't authorized to alter the overall system. And so they spend their time arguing about the things they can change. :)

Part of me thinks that many articles and ideas floating around the space are simply over abstractions, like saying the connections between neurons look similar to galaxies, and our universe. It sounds profound, and clearly, there is _some_ pattern there, but then, what does that pattern give us? Is it predictive? Descriptive? Or just simply a pattern with no use outside of increasing 'meaningfulness'.

Saved for later when I have time to read it in detail.

I'm unclear about the claim that less economic growth would be better, though, and the author seems very committed to it. I wasn't able to find the article they reference as explaining how less growth is what we really need (J.W. Forrester, World Dynamics, Portland OR, Productivity Press, 1971), and it comes from almost 50 years ago, which might as well be another economic era altogether.

Does anyone know what the arguments are, what assumptions they require, and whether they still apply today? My understanding is that "less growth is better" is a distinctly minority take amongst modern economists, but the rest of this article seems very intelligently laid out, so I'd like to dig deeper.

I've always thought that for any dial we have, there's always an optimal setting, whether it's tax rates, growth rates, birth rates, etc., and blindly pushing one way or the other (like both political parties tend to do) is not helpful, or at the very least merely indicates different value systems.