In a previous essay, I proposed a rather radical theory that the reason neither political party can answer the question of how much is enough is that we are undergoing the end of one era and the dawn of another. The methods of the old era no longer work, but we still have yet to make the huge shift in mental models that would open us to new methods.

Interestingly, some of this openness is coming from women, people of color and Indigenous Peoples who are not wedded to traditional answers or ways of looking at things. In a story about the sturgeon recovery project on the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota, Winona LaDuke articulates what lies at the heart of this new way of thinking:

“River connectivity” is a phrase that is lived by the lake sturgeon of Central North America. Ancient beings whose presence graced the stories, songs, and memories of countless generations of people, they were banished by greed…Today, with the dreams and hands of fisheries biologists, tribal members and some luck, they are returning to the rivers and lakes of the forest country just west of the Great Lakes, returning in their own glory. Bi azhi-giiwewag omaa: “they are returning here.” And as they return, they teach us all a lesson‑ the lesson of river connectivity, and our own relationships with each other. That lesson, I believe is that we can begin the process of undoing some of what we have done to each other, and that we are all ultimately connected.

Note the phrase, “that we are all ultimately interconnected.” That lies behind this new perspective. In the previous essay, I likened our situation to that of a juggler who has too many plates in the air. All of us have tried to juggle at one point or other in our lives, but usually we fail because we just can’t keep track of whatever we are trying to juggle.

Someone who teaches juggling once told me this is because we try to focus on one plate at a time, the one we are trying to catch, ignoring the others.  Really good jugglers, she said, see all the plates at once. In short, they recognize the plates are interconnected in the sense you have to keep track of all of them. In a way, that is what LaDuke is saying.

The late Donella Meadows, who won a MacArthur Fellowship for her work applying System Dynamics to various global and environmental problems, quotes an ancient Sufi teaching:

You think because you understand one you must understand two, because one and one makes two. But you must also understand and.

That “and” is the same as LaDuke’s interrelatedness. In another article Meadows explained how such a perspective might shed light on the farm problem:

Farmers are caught in a vicious cycle. At any given price, for milk or grain or whatever, the most obvious way a farmer can earn more money is to produce more. So some of them do. But, since most of us are already drinking all the milk and eating all the grain we can, a larger supply means a lower price. Now, since the price is lower, every farmer has to produce more just to keep the same income. So every farmer tries to do that and some succeed, increasing production still more, dropping prices still further, forcing every farmer to produce still more.

The perspective Meadows and others are advancing suggests that the only way we can understand and deal with contemporary issues such as “how much is enough” is through an systemic perspective based on seeing the interrelationships between things.

For fifteen years, Dana Meadows wrote a column called “Global Citizen” that introduced people to this new way of thinking and its applicability to various issues. In a column on “How to Talk About Changing a System,” she wrote about the economic models used to generate support for the GATT Treaty:

The models are jiggered, they are incomplete, they are based on outmoded economics, they are consistently wrong, but the same reporters who jump on small uncertainties in environmental models never question economic models.

At the center of Meadows’ thinking lies the concept of feedbacks. By definition a system consists of interrelated feedbacks. Your thermostat is the main feedback mechanism for your heating system. You set it to a certain point and it regulates the temperature based on its internal thermometer. If we had to do that ourselves without a thermostat, constantly turning on and off the heater, we would err badly because we would wait until we could feel the cold–which would be too late.

We would rush to turn the furnace up but we would have to make a judgment about how much and how long to turn it on without any feedback to help us make that decision other than our own bodies. We would not be too much different than cave people in front of a fire. In the process we would probably burn more fuel than we need to and our heating bills would be astronomical because we would constantly be over-correcting or under-correcting.  That is why most modern thermostats also contain a little device called an anticipator, that is designed to minimize it from making overcorrections.

Twenty years ago Meadows wrote about feedbacks from a policy perspective. I quote her at length because most of these problems are still with us, and, as we shall see, feedbacks lie at the key of resolving the problem of how much is enough:

The throwaway society is missing many important feedbacks. Postage rates for junk mail don’t include the cost to communities of disposing of that mail. Packaging prices don’t reflect their disposal costs either. Prices of fuels don’t include the real cost in human and environmental health of burning them. Fixing these distortions is not interference with the market system; it’s improving the feedback of the market system.

Once you catch onto the notion of feedback, you start seeing lots of places where it doesn’t exist, but should. Health insurance rates that aren’t geared to lifestyle, for example. Government bailouts of bankrupt corporations. Government cleanup of corporate waste. Government exempting itself from its own affirmative action or pollution laws. (Why is it that government comes so readily to mind, when one is thinking of mechanisms that muffle or delay or remove feedback?)

Feedback would be improved if there were a statue in every community that disintegrates rapidly whenever it’s washed with acid rain. Or if there were large lurid pictures in every place where cigarettes are sold, showing what smoking does to lungs. The sign in Times Square that shows the national debt escalating every minute should be mounted on a wall in the Oval Office and on the front steps of the Capitol Building — and in every voting booth. There should be stoplights on irrigation wells that turn red when the groundwater level is going down, yellow when the water is holding even, and green when it’s recharging. We should all have water heaters in our bathrooms like the ones common in Europe with dials that show the gas bill rising as the hot water runs.

The problem with resolving how much is enough is that nobody has the proper feedbacks. One major reason is that how much is enough is not a static problem. Like the thermostat example cited above, we are constantly over correcting or undercorrecting. The classic systemic governmental response is not unlike the situation in which you no longer have a thermostat. You wait until it gets cold enough that you want to put on a sweater, then you turn up the thermostat and you leave it on until you start to feel warm.

The problem is that meanwhile outside conditions may be changing. You feel cold in the morning when you wake so you turn up the heat, but at the same time the sun is streaming through the windows doing its thing, so the house gets too warm. By then the sun is going down and the house is cooling faster than it did an hour ago so suddenly your overcorrection becomes an under correction.  All this because you do not have the feedback that the thermometer and anticipator in a thermostat provide.

That essentially is the story of America’s social problems over the last half century. We wait until we “feel” them then we turn up the heat. We may over correct for the problem. Right now governmental feedbacks are a mixture of the primitive, the nonexistent and the obsolete. Take education, for example. We rely on test scores to tell us how schools are doing, but each class is different, so “performance” for a district may vary widely.

In my home state of Minnesota they used to publish a list of high performing and low performing schools. Inevitably at the top of these lists would be small, rural districts. Even more startling, one year a district would be at the top of the high performing list and a year or two later at the top of the in trouble list. Nothing had changed in the school: the teachers and administrators were the same, they were using the same curricula and resources.

Was the school at fault? Of course not. Curiously the people in those communities some times could not see the parallel right in from of them in athletic performance. One year those same schools would have a great football or basketball team, often because a particularly athletic family or two happened to have children spaced close together. Essentially the same thing could happen with academics.

Until No Child Left Behind, the small town’s knowledge of local families would provide enough feedback for them to cope with these changes, but now state and federal authorities have entered new feedbacks and the whole system has changed. How do you explain to some bureaucrat in Washington your school’s performance changed because the Jones family and their cousins graduated?

So what about inner city schools, where performance has stayed low, sometimes for years? Let’s look at a few of the feedbacks at work contributing to that situation. First, unlike the rural school which knows its students and their families–sometimes for two and even more generations, inner city schools often do not really know their students, parents or environments, so a critical feedback loop does not exist.

If the school gets “labeled” some other feedbacks soon begin to make the situation worse. Parents of high performing students may pull out of the school because they see test scores are low for the whole school, but their child may still be doing fine. The change in students may set in motion another feedback where teachers with the most seniority and experience use their seniority to transfer to another school.  So the school slips further downhill.

But why haven’t additional foundation dollars helped inner city schools? Foundations are well-meaning, but most of the time they bring in set, new programs they impose on the school. Often these programs DO change things, but then the foundation in essence turns off the thermostat. The grant runs out or the foundation sees the school has improved and moves on.

What about federal programs such as Title I and free and reduced lunch? Here the feedbacks are primitive at best. For example, free lunch programs ask the parents to sign up for them. Some parents don’t because they fear the stigma, others don’t because they fear the scrutiny, some don’t because they can’t fill out the forms, and some don’t because they don’t know about them.

If you have never lived in poverty you have no idea how many forms you must fill out, people you must interview with, appointments that need to be made, documentation that needs to be put together. I found the process of applying for disability, demeaning, time-consuming, difficult, and biased (the attorney I ended up hiring told me the people here are notorious for sending people to a certain doctor who never grants disability. In my case he examined and x-rayed the wrong part of my body).  To return to the thermostat analogy, its as if someone else down the block in another house called you over to their house and then gave you instructions that strictly dictated when you could turn the thermostat up or down.

Right now the equilibrium in the system is tilted towards these rigid feedbacks. What I mean by that is that people’s lives change from day to day, month to month. We all know that. I just got hit by an unexpectedly hefty bar bill for my son’s wedding plus an expected letter from my HMO telling me they were denying a claim they had approved two years ago and suddenly I owe them tons more money.  This has thrown our financial situation off kilter.

Now imagine you are living on considerably less income than I am. The systemic fluctuations are bound to be greater. You may land a temporary job and make a bit of money for a few days or even a few weeks. You have to report that. Then next month you may get a health care bill like I did. The nature of the feedbacks in the system is such that it never has an accurate picture of that person’s situation and the inevitable delays only make it worse. As Meadows noted, delays are a critical element in system behavior.

So the government gets the report you made some extra money, takes a month or more to process it and just when you get hit with that health care charge the feds tell you they are cutting you off welfare or lowering your payments. What do you think the feedback would be from the people involved? Some might just quit looking for work because it hurts them, others might lie about receiving extra money, other might just get either discouraged or angry.

In all of those scenarios the feedbacks for how much is enough no longer work. Forms, tables, amounts set by some bureaucrat in some windowless cubicle do not provide the needed feedback. In fact they stifle it. No better example exists of this than the mess that is American health care. In an attempt to reign in costs, the system in essence added another feedback level (and BTW imitating the already-broken welfare system)–the bureaucrats with their charts who decide who will get what treatment and how much the insurer will pay for it.

None of these bureaucrats have any experience as physicians or any medical training; their feedback decisions are made solely on the basis of charts, graphs and other tools which read the doctor’s diagnosis and decide what will be done for the patient or whether anything will be done at all.  After years of this every physician worth his or her MD has learned how to “game” the system writing diagnoses in ways that will insure the patient gets the care the doctor thinks they need.  As a result, the information in the system is suspect and a system with suspect information is like a thermostat with a bad thermometer.

Even more ominously in such a system no one bears any responsibility for what happens to the patient which has produced a very scary feedback. The third leading cause of death in the United States is now medical errors. That statistic alone represents a system in which the feedbacks no longer function as they should. Our health care system is like a broken thermostat whose readings and settings are no longer accurate.

So what would Meadows say about our feedbacks? FIFTEEN years ago she wrote about “Addictive Welfare:”

We start with a real problem. The poor can’t afford doctors, for example. Rather than ask why people are so poor or doctors are so expensive, we step in with a kindly government program. We’ll subsidize health care.

That works for awhile. But it suppresses other solutions, especially those that might have been invented by people, communities, local organizations. And the subsidy does nothing to encourage health care providers, with a huge government purse to dip into, to contain costs. Both the providers and the recipients of the program become addicts.

Addiction is a strong word, but an accurate one. We’ve gone for the quick fix that dulls the pain but allows the underlying problems — poverty and bloated health care costs — to get worse. So we spend more money, our drug of choice, to go on disguising symptoms. The money attracts more people into the system and keeps them there longer. It encourages health care providers to make their services lavish, sometimes even corrupt. More and more money is needed, until the system breaks down in unaffordability and blame.

That’s the conservative analysis, and it’s right. But here’s where the liberal analysis is right. It doesn’t help to tell addicts to go cold turkey.

Meadows then goes on to propose something so logical it seems too simple:

The kind of support the down-and-out need is the kind we have always refused them, the kind that would mean engaging with them not as objects of contempt, but as fellow human beings. The only answer to addiction is to build up the self-reliance of the addict. That takes time and understanding, not blame and bile. Not two years and you’re off. Not passing the burden of health care around from government to employers to the poor themselves like a hot potato.

This may seem like a new idea, but it’s actually one we forgot. FDR said much the same thing in his “Forgotten Man” speech:

These unhappy times call for the building of plans that rest upon the forgotten, the unorganized but the indispensable units of economic power, for plans like those of 1917 that build from the bottom up and not from the top down, that put their faith once more in the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.

Roosevelt later laid out the guidelines for his work relief program in a speech to the 74^th Congress that sounds much like Meadows. Drawing from Liberal America’s cornerstone of economic justice, the philosophy underlying his address became the underpinning of virtually all New Deal economic programs.

The Federal Government must and will quit this business of relief . . . Work must be found for all able-bodied, but destitute workers . . . I am not willing that the vitality of our people be further sapped by the giving of cash, of market baskets, of a few hours of weekly work cutting grass, raking leaves or picking up papers in public parks.  We must preserve the bodies of the unemployed from their destruction, but also their self-respect, self-reliance, and courage and determination. (See Sherwood, Robert E., Roosevelt and Hopkins, An Intimate History, New York: Harper and Brothers, 1948, p. 66.

What FDR grasped was that first of all people wanted work and second that they wanted meaningful work, not make work.The most successful New Deal programs were about putting people to work on projects that improved their own communities. Talk about instant feedback and self-respect.

Right now the United States as a system is characterized by three issues which are related, but people refuse to see them that way. First, our public infrastructure and institutions are crumbling around us like that bridge that fell in the river, second our income disparities have become the sharpest since over a century ago, third, the feedback mechanisms we have constructed have outlived their usefulness.

How do you fix this in a systemic way Meadows might improve? First, we put those who need work to work fixing things that need to be fixed–and if they lack the skills to do them we train them. Second we pay for this by remedying the income disparity. What the CEO in the Hamptons does not realize is that he or she is ALREADY paying for our failing infrastructure in increased costs that impact corporate profits. That’s essentially what the executives behind the SCANS Report about American education said two decades ago. Third, we need the kind of feedback mechanisms Meadows herself advocated–ones that involve people directly, ones that are dynamic like the system dynamics models Meadows herself used to analyze policy issues.

It would take a longer piece–probably a book–to go into this in detail, but one thing is clear: two decades after Meadows wrote most of her essays things have become worse not better.

Note:

For those more interested in the Dana Meadows, I suggest you check out the website devoted to her work: The Donnella Meadows Archive.

Tagged with: America • corporations • disability • Donella Meadows • economic justice • education • FDR • feedback • great lakes • history • income • indigenous peoples • lake sturgeon • mental-models • New Deal • new perspective • people-of-color • performance • poverty • stigma • system • system dynamics • the people • the poor • thermostat • traditional answers • welfare • winona laduke