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How to Change a System

enablingchange.com.au

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From Donella Meadows [1]:

PLACES TO INTERVENE IN A SYSTEM (in increasing order of effectiveness)

9. Constants, parameters, numbers (subsidies, taxes, standards).

8. Regulating negative feedback loops.

7. Driving positive feedback loops.

6. Material flows and nodes of material intersection.

5. Information flows.

4. The rules of the system (incentives, punishments, constraints).

3. The distribution of power over the rules of the system.

2. The goals of the system.

1. The mindset or paradigm out of which the system — its goals, power structure, rules, its culture — arises.

Regarding point 2: What is the goal of the current system?

[1] https://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-t...

For all of you who are genuinely interested in Meadows' system theory here's the first two of a running cybershow series [0,1] talking about levearage points in a modern context.

[0] https://cybershow.uk/episodes.php?id=21 [1] https://cybershow.uk/episodes.php?id=19

If we go with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha..., then the goal of the current system is to create wealth inequality.

is the purpose of chemotherapy to make people lose their hair?

It usually cures cancer. The current government concentrates wealth in the hands of the few. Less than 1% of the population owns nearly 50% of the wealth.

Ok. But should "purpose" be redefined as "outcome", as the parent comment suggests?

My thought is no, and that's why "purpose" and "outcome" aren't synonyms in the english language

Wealth inequality here is growth of the richest few. That's why the economy by some measures is doing great - the rich are getting richer.

I don't see where you are getting the word purpose from. I assume you mean goal. If you want to place any outcome in the place of the major or most important outcome, then I arbitrarily declare our government's goal is to move paperclips, as that is an outcome.

I need to study that list of logical fallacies, because obviously curing cancer is the purpose of chemo, and suggesting otherwise is ridiculous.

I would say that the main objective of the current system is to grow. We measure this with the GDP. This growth is necessary for the current system to survive, to pay our debts or keep our jobs, but is also incompatible with reducing carbon emissions [1]

If we could imagine new objectives we can change the paradigm. For instance we could try to have a carbon dividend as a complement to jobs creation [2].

[1] https://eeb.org/library/decoupling-debunked/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_fee_and_dividend

It's nice when you are in power to fix a system. It's much more challenging to fix a system which is hostile to you. Moreover, it's even harder when you are part of the system, which is hostile to you. Highly recommended to try.

In those systems you have to start from the bottom (weakest) influences. It will burn you out quick.

Yes, if you act in a dumb way, you will burn out.

Even those who were at top cannot change a big massive system easily. I saw examples of that. Every change need some amount of energy. Big changes needs massive amounts of energy.

Often, it's easier to regrow a new system from scratch than to change old one.

To change a system, the changer must be more powerful that the system (happens sometimes, but not my case) OR be smart and ride a situation. Usually, system opposes any change, because risk out-weighs benefits. Very rarely, except in desperate situation, system will accept a shock therapy. So, for a system to accept a change, risks must be reduced. When risks are low and benefits are clear, resistance to change is low too.

This is pretty much all I think about anymore. It's so easy to understand both from a secular and religious standpoint that helping the bottom helps everyone. But since the trickle-down economics era started in the 1980s, pretty much all of the economic gains have gone to the top. Wealth inequality has reached such a brutal level that I would argue that the American Dream ended sometime between 2001 and 2008. Everything since has been rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

Now rents and home prices are so high vs incomes that most Americans never get out from under the yoke, they just work until they die. And politicians openly call for malarky like raising the retirement age, rather than working towards actually solving problems.

So assuming we can all agree on how bad things have gotten (we can't/won't heh), the solution becomes pretty obvious:

We need to shift from profit to residual income and recurring resources.

For example, a learning center in my city offers free electric car charging which I used just yesterday. Most places would charge a fee per kWh. But it's conceivable that a solar battery station could be mass-produced for under $5,000. It could be priced a nominal amount to pay itself off, perhaps $1/kWh, put out 5 kWh per day, and pay itself off in about 1000 days or 3 years. Then provide free charging to everyone for perhaps 20-30 more years. Then it becomes in everyone's best interest to own a station, so amortization loans/grants would become available where basically anyone can get a near-0% interest, $5,000 loan and get a station immediately, speeding rollout. The cost of true innovation approaches free, that's why we're trained not to see it.

We could repeat this societal investment process with automatic dishwashers, Roombas, Gardyn/Rise hydroponic indoor gardens, that in-home pick and place OK-Robot that was on HN the other day, electric scooters/cars, and eventually vans and tiny homes. Everyone could transition from monthly bills to an automated lifestyle where most basic needs are provided by robots or UBI within a social contract akin to solarpunk. This is essentially FIRE or F-U money, but where primary expenses are provided scalably at an individual level so they can't be taken away by concentrated wealth.

The reality I came from prevented all of this. When I was in my early 20s, fresh out of watching Fight Club and 8 Mile and The Fast and the Furious, the US had just voted for GW Bush instead of Al Gore in an effort to astroturf Peak Oil out of the public eye. We invested trillions of dollars into McMansions and SUVs to fight a War on Terror for 20 years and offshore 100,000 US factories, doubling down on globalization policies like NAFTA. When I mentioned even the most primitive cost-saving alternatives like solar thermal hot water heaters and heat pumps, I was met with scorn. That lasted until 2013 when Obama's reelection gave enough confidence to the auto industry that stuff like the Nissan Leaf and Tesla (maybe model S?) ushered in MVP electric vehicles. Which was great, but keep in mind that lithium-ion batteries were invented in the 1990s. We could have had a moonshot to get them to today's densities by 2000 and saved about 15-25 years.

So in a very real sense, the private sector delayed the rollout of sustainable solutions for decades, especially considering that a similar moonshot could have happened for solar panels and keystone tech like blue LEDs, mRNA/CRISPR, basically all of the "ubiquitous" tools we take for granted today.

I bring that up because Gen X remembers being ostracized for trying to make things better, and we have no loyalties towards worshipping ignorance. We're in the midst of the Fourth Turning, and when anyone younger than us takes the reins of government, it will be a watershed moment for sustainability. I think the rise in authoritarianism and proxy wars is about derailing progress long enough that minority rule can maintain control through sabotage until the New World Order can be cemented. So the most important things we can do are resist doublethink and not pay into systems of control. Which basically means looking at stuff like austerity with a critical eye to see how it stifles innovation and props up the status quo, under the guise of saving money which only flows to the top anyway.

“Hunger, poverty, environmental degradation, economic instability, unemployment, chronic disease, drug addiction, and war, for example, persist in spite of the analytical ability and technical brilliance that have been directed toward eradicating them. No one deliberately creates those problems, no one wants them to persist, but they persist nonetheless. That is because they are intrinsically systems problems – undesirable behaviors characteristic of the system structures that produce them.” – Donella Meadows, Thinking in Systems, a Primer

Oh no no, it already started with a flawed premise. There are big players that deliberately created many of those problems and that have much to profit with their persistence. You want to talk about change, please go ahead. Just don’t be blind to those who are responsible for the problems and the motivations behind them.

I can see where you might be coming from but I would argue Meadows is still correct and higher resolution.

Do provide a concrete example so I can unpack it.

Shock doctrine. Disaster capitalism. Economic hitman

none of what you just said would be a plausible explanation for the persistence of poverty, economic instability, environmental degradation, drug addiction, chronic disease, etc etc

I'd bet even the authors of the 2 books you've hinted at wouldn't even make that claim. I'm sure they would see many of the problems listed as systems-level issues

One more example how medical company profited from addictive painkillers for profit (OxyContin) :

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/30/the-family-tha...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Painkiller_(TV_series)

"There are big players that deliberately created many of those problems"

Could you specify which ones? I'm curious who's profiting from hunger, poverty, economic instability, and unemployment -- and thereby perpetuating it (sounds like major speculation).

Maybe war gets propagated by nations military industries (though that's probably only sometimes true). The remaining problems listed (environmental damage, drug addiction, chronic disease) seems like second order consequences of other pursuits, not problems perpetuated for their own sake.

Whether they're first or second order consequences might seem like a semantics debate, but it's what distinguishes your model (problems are deliberate) from Donella Meadows model (externalities, collective action, structural issues, etc). And both models suggest very different solutions (police bad actors versus change structures/incentives)

I'm gonna play the devil's advocate, but it's not as crazy as it sounds. Like some other commenter noted, the "shock doctrine" for example is a very widely documented/theorized phenomenon and not a conspiracy theory.

> hunger

There's a huge agro-food industry that profits from hunger. Its profits depend on subsistence farming being impossible or illegal so that's what they do: outlaw peasant seeds (like in France), buy all land from the owners until the population can't feed itself and needs the supermarket to survive, arrange for economic structures that allow for massive foreign subsidies (eg. EU CAP) to compete with the few local farmers left...

> poverty, economic instability, and unemployment

Temp work is another major industry that can only flourish when better employment conditions are not available to the workers. For those who don't find work and/or caught in the judicial system for some reason, the prison industrial complex will make profit on their incarceration. Once incarcerated, some companies will employ prisoners without working rights and protections in quasi-slavery conditions, making a ton more money than if they needed proper salaries and safety conditions. To give an example, here in France prison labor is usually < 1€/hour compared to ~10€/hour minimum wage.

> drug addiction

European settlers in America used alcohol as a weapon against natives. Later, during the cold war, the CIA organized for crack cocaine to destroy black neighborhoods social tissue, while financing the "contras" fascist militias.

We could go on. I'm not saying reforming incentives is wrong, it's certainly part of the solution. But it would be very naive to think that alone is enough to change society because nobody would want to harm others. Fascists very much exist and very much want to harm others, not necessarily out of a profit motive but also sometimes out of pure hatred.

Fair enough. It'd be impossible for me to argue that there aren't bad actors doing very bad things But to what extent are problems due to (a) bad actors, versus (b) structure issues, resource scarcity, trade-offs, collective action problems, etc

And even if we suppose bad actors are 100% responsible for the world's problems, the systems-level analysis (if I understand it correctly) would still suggest that the solution is "structural" (cut off all the leverage points that allow bad actors to manipulate institutions)

Say, in the case of the opioid crisis (which most of us agree was caused in large part from a bad actor), do we abolish pharmaceutical companies, or do we abolish the structural pathways (marketing, lobbying) that let them do bad things?

I lean towards the latter, but don't know if it's any more feasible than the former

I can give you couple example.

Private prisons profit directly from incarceration rates (crime)

Sugar factories profit from selling unhealthy food.

Private prisons only profit because people commit crimes. So the question becomes: How to make people commit less crimes?

Sugar factories are only able to sell because people are willing to buy. So the question becomes: How to make people less willing to consume unhealthy food?

When you have multibillion marketing machine convincing you that "Fruit" loops are healthy breakfast, there is not much you can do to educate people otherwise. Do you think if there were legal unregulated heroin factories, there would be peoples fault that they are buying/consuming highly promoted heroin?

Regarding incarceration, when there is initiative to give prison time, instead of providing help (in case of light drug use) you get more people in prison.

Of course you can always say that it's up to people to make a final decision, but we arguing here that there are powerful interests groups that trying to influence the outcome of everyday decisions that lead us to before mentioned outcomes.

While I won't touch the sugar claim, private prison companies tend to think of themselves as real estate investors. They try to get desperate rural governments to give them land for pennies on the dollar.

They make empirically false claims for what the local economic impact is going to be by being obtuse.

I know this because I was involved with meetings with one trying to move into my home town.

I got them to admit the first in public meeting but they punted on the second.

And if you think there's a direct connection between crimes and prison terms, you are just under informed.

There are lots of people in prison who have long paid for their crimes but are still there because they are victims of their time (Cash)

Keeping people in prison is incentivized for private prisons.

so one solution (especially in the case of private prisons) would be to disband the bad actors

But do you see the value that comes from thinking about this as a structural problem? Until we completely cut off the pathway that gives private interest groups access to the levers of criminal law, bad actors will keep emerging

> Private prisons only profit because people commit crimes. So the question becomes: How to make people commit less crimes?

Examine where this intuition comes from. Firstly, the problem is not "too many people are committing crimes", it's "prisons are profiting from people committing crimes", which creates a perverse incentive. Secondly, as a result of this perverse incentive, judges and lawmakers are incentivized to write and enforce laws such that the business model of incarceration is maintained. So the question of "How to make people commit less crimes?" is misaimed; the problem isn't with the people committing the crimes, it's with the people defining what is and is not a crime.

I'd say you're right here that private prisons are an example of a "bad actor" causing a major problem, and I'd even go as far as supporting abolishing private prisons (though some crime would still likely exist regardless)

But it still isn't clear that the other major problems mentioned (world hunger, economic instability, environmental damage, chronic disease, war) can be eliminated purely by eliminating bad actors

Sure, but the thrust of the thread here is to refute the blanket assertion that nobody wants these things to exist or actively chooses to create the conditions in which they exist. As you say, not all problems are the result of perverse incentives, but there are enough that are that we should be careful not to over-generalize. And it's not just nitpicking, because this has consequences for the OP; it's one thing to change a system that exists unintentionally, and quite another thing to change a system that exists intentionally.

fair enough; I agree with that

fair points, and in another comment I point to tax service companies lobbying for complicated tax laws in the US. I'm fine admitting that bad actors do bad things

now, to what extend do you think the majority of the world's problems are caused by (a) bad actors, versus (b) structural issues or resource constraints. 100%? 70%? 30%?

What we devote our attention to depends very much on that question (as well as what changes are easy to implement)

I disagree. This is a common trope that ‘bad guys’ deliberately engineer global problems for their own good.

There are bad actors - people who deliberately do or say the wrong thing for malicious purposes. There are also strategists who have learnt how to game the system. The net result appears to be a concerted, planned effort to create the problems we have in the world today, when in reality, they have mostly emerged is a result of complex issues - driven mostly by human behaviour and accidents - and that can’t simply be ‘engineered’.

There are players who are trying to (for example) avoid a move away from oil, but it’s naive to think that the conflict and environmental problems that it causes have a solution that could allow them to be ‘fixed’. There is a cost to everything we do, and there are always winners. Same goes for war, water or poverty.

I think your perspective is that the winners are taking home a disproportionate amount of the winnings - I agree.

Michael Jackson [1] is the another Systems Thinking guru, and argues that ‘wicked problems’ like these can never be solved, and it’s irresponsible to claim otherwise.

Instead, it’s only possible to improve the situation for those involved in it. It takes time, effort, leadership, a change in mindset - and almost always sacrifice - to instigate real change. You can’t just tell the bad guys to do the right thing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Jackson_(systems_scientis...

I'm curious if those pushing the "it's the bad guys keeping everything bad!" model actually believe it, or if it's just a narrative that helps people vent about their political frustrations.

And who knows, their model could be correct. But the unwillingness to consider "tradeoffs" makes me think it's just political angst and not a serious take

I'd take a nuanced half and half approach. I think the majority of who people think are just the generic "bad guys" is largely out of ignorance and/or naivete of surrounding circumstance. But I also do think there are people who are pretty fine with doing some sociopathic things to enrich themselves. The typical example is big pharma. Imagine tomorrow a magic genie offered a big pharma exec a cure to cancer, and he got to pick which form it took:

1) A one time pill that not only cured any existing cancers in a user, but also permanently prevented any further ones. And to make it even better, it also is somehow relatively simple meaning it could be easily cloned and made extremely and globally affordable.

2) A complex (enabling a defacto monopoly on production), lengthy, and expensive treatment program that is 100% effective at curing any 1 type of cancer - that must be repeated per cancer and per individual as they emerge.

I do genuinely think that all big pharma execs would choose #2. They'd probably rationalize it as something like 'Well I'm curing cancer, and now I'll ensure we have the funds to continue working to solve even more illnesses, and everybody wins." So I'm sure in their minds they aren't villains, but that's because humans are just really really good at cognitive dissonance.

fair point, and there are more real-world examples we could list (big tax services lobbying for more complicated tax codes)

I guess the question then is: what major world problems can be fixed by eliminating / preventing bad actors, and what problems require a different solution?

I'm not claiming to know the answer

> Michael Jackson [1] is the another Systems Thinking guru, and argues that ‘wicked problems’ like these can never be solved, and it’s irresponsible to claim otherwise.

Can you point to a more detailed reading about his arguments for this position?

Of JSD [0] (Jackson Systems Design/Development) fmae no less.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson_System_Development

Different one - see my link above

Thank you for your correction.

Michael Christopher Jackson n.1951 and Michael Anthony Jackson n.1936 Both British born. Both prominent in systems design and theory.

I just went through his book from uni (it’s 700 gruelling and somewhat traumatising pages), and I think I misattributed it from Checkland’s Soft Systems Methodology (SSM).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_systems_methodology

Yeah, they forgot regime change: remove leaders who are actively thwarting reform.

https://web.archive.org/web/20240226010607/https://www.enabl...

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