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Main article: System modeling
If political philosophy is a good required course for building a new society, then an even better one might be system dynamics, sometimes referred to generally as systems thinking. Our discussions of optimization and Pareto fronts presuppose a society well versed in this subject. Systems thinking was pioneered by the computer engineer Jay Wright Forrester at MIT. He turned his attention to social and global models later in his career. He was a proponent of using computational system models to inform social policy as opposed to traditional political debate.
Systems thinking is a big subject and we won’t cover it all here. But there are two notable points that should be kept in mind.
First, systems are counterintuitive. Feedback loops can remain hidden and tend to have unintended consequences. In fact, understanding the internal dynamics of the system is more important than trying to discover its exogenous inputs. For this to be possible, however, we need a model of some sophistication.
Second, systems have certain leverage points which can cause them to modify their behavior. A high leverage point is an input that causes a large change in the system. Knowing which way to push is important and policymakers are frequently pushing the wrong way to get a system to change because they simply don’t understand what they’re dealing with. One example of this is Forrester’s world model which tries to gain an understanding of major global problems like poverty, environmental destruction, resource depletion, unemployment, etc. His high leverage point was restricting growth which would lead to a systemic solution to all these problems. Meanwhile, world leaders are focused on more growth to solve these same problems (https://www.donellameadows.org/wp-content/userfiles/Leverage_Points.pdf).
Forrester’s work on systems led to the book, The Limits of Growth, published in 1972 (by Donella Meadows). It also led to the Club of Rome, an organization devoted to sustainable growth. The book’s predictions, that our current growth will lead to disaster later this century has proven to be remarkably prescient, given the year (and computational technology) it was published. It has gone through lengthy periods of having been written off, only to have been confirmed by modern and much more sophisticated analyses of a similar nature.
A community of systems thinkers will have the ability to reduce political rancor and focus its energies on creating good system models. It is inevitable that members will debate the details of the model. But once members have agreed to a public set of principles and have formed a community, systems thinking should reduce the political heat.
Another aspect of systems thinking comes from John Gall, who wrote Systemantics in 1975. The book is a tongue-in-cheek look at the failure of large systems, laid out as a series of “laws” and presented as the new science of “Systemantics”. Nevertheless, the book received praise from serious systems students. The most well-known part of his treatise is the following, now known as Gall’s Law:
“A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that works.”
This statement comes with a corollary:
“A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.”
Gall was mainly talking about social systems although he didn’t explicitly restrict himself that way. Communities would be wise to keep his advice in mind as social systems are constructed. They might start with some basic public principles, as put forth by Rawls, and lay out a simple system of ratings based on those. For example, we might make a statement of personal rights & freedom and a duty to contribute (both economically and to the ratings system) and leave it at that. A community, if this works, can then iterate and create more refined rules.