What If We Designed Systems to Work for People, Not Just Profits?
Reminder, next month we're reading A System for Writing by Bob Doto. You can find future books here. If you have suggestions I'd love to hear about them.

Systems need balance and buffer, but both of these things can be tricky to keep around in the face of a
https://curtismchale.ca/2025/02/16/what-if-we-designed-systems-to-work-for-people-not-just-profits/
#BookClub #FinancialSecurity #GovernmentSubsidy #SystemsThinknig

What If We Designed Systems to Work for People, Not Just Profits?

Reminder, next month we’re reading A System for Writing by Bob Doto. You can find future books here. If you have suggestions I’d love to hear about them.

Systems need balance and buffer, but both of these things can be tricky to keep around in the face of a system that appears to be working. When you’re earning a decent amount of money and money keeps coming in and your job feels stable, it’s easy to spend most of your money. The fountain of dollars coming in seems to have no end so why bother conserving and creating a buffer?

As we learned earlier in the book, a strong resilient system is hard to see because it keeps working despite things trying to get out of balance1. But when you loose your job due to a recession and then interests rates rise so your mortgage payment increases, you suddenly realize that your lack of savings means you have no buffer to weather the life you had setup around yourself. Times were good so you stripped away savings for a vacation because you could simply build it back up, until you suddenly couldn’t.

We saw this example play out for many in the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis. Things were going fine until suddenly they weren’t and the buffer’s people had, if they had any buffer at all, wasn’t big enough to balance out their financial system. People lost their houses and any savings they had in the face of a collapsing system.

Most people understand the addictive properties of alcohol, nicotine, caffeine, sugar, and heroin. Not everyone recognizes that addiction can appear in larger systems and in other guises — such as the dependence of industry on government subsidy, the reliance of farmers on fertilizers, the addiction of Western economies to cheap oil or weapons manufacturers to government contracts. Pg 131

But the system worked for banks, who were bailed out who then gave billions in bonuses to those same executives that built a brittle system.

While reading this book I’ve continued to come back to trying to understand how we build systems that are resilient not just for big business, but for consumers and people. What can we change about the supports put in place for a future housing crisis that will ensure money saves the homes people live in, at the expense of the bonuses of already rich executives?

Dark PR suggests that we cut off subsidies to businesses for industries we want to reduce reliance on. That would mean reducing or eliminating the subsidies to the fossil fuel industry which would make gas more expensive and help drive consumers to other modes of transportation that would use less fuel.

Meadows makes a strong suggestion that we should locate the consequences for a decision with those that make the decision2. This would mean that a city needs to put their water intake system next to their water treatment discharge facitilty. This would incentivize them to treat their water well, because they’re going to have to drink it.

When a business is looking to cut 15% of payroll, those at the top should be willing to take a 15% pay cut first, then look at the rest of the workforce. This locates the responsibility of their decision to reduce pay directly on them in a reduction in their pay.

But unless we’re going to adopt radical democracy as suggested in Democracy at Work I have a hard time seeing businesses going for this idea.

How about you? What have your takeaways been? Next week we wrap up Thinking in Systems and I’d love any links to things you’ve written about regarding the book.

#financialSecurity #governmentSubsidy #systemsThinknig

The Hidden Addictions of Our Economic Systems

Not everyone recognizes that addiction can appear in larger systems and in other guises — such as the dependence of industry on government subsidy, the reliance of farmers on fertilizers, the addiction of Western economies to cheap oil or weapons manufacturers to government contracts. Thinking in Systems Pg 131

We want our systems to be resilient, to not break at the first sign of strain. These types of systems have many feedback loops that balance each other out1, sometimes restraining the actions of another part of the system and sometimes enhancing these actions so that two parts of a system can restrain a third part. This is hard to see though because when a system is resilient it just keeps working with only minor bumps that affect few. As with many things a system works to right itself in the face of erosion then it suddenly collapses as the resilient feedback loops can no longer hold the strain and fail all at once.

Resilience is at odds with Productivity

For a system to be resilient it almost always needs to be complex, with many parts interacting to bring equilibrium to the whole. You can see this in the quest for capitalism to capture and monetize creativity2. If something is too creative, it’s bad…but mostly because it can’t be monetized by the wider system. In the creative realm wild and crazy things are often precursors to new movements that a generation later are tamed enough to be heralded as a turning point in the art world.

It’s can be hard for humans to break out of this quest for productivity and the boundaries that places on what we accept. We are attached to our boundaries3 and have a hard time seeing actions and others outside those boundaries as similar to us. We call people new to our country immigrants as a way of turning them into others that aren’t part of our ingroup of citizens, which makes it easier to treat them in ways we would never want to be treated ourselves.

Economics built on addiction

Meadows talked lots about how our unchecked growth is a bad thing in every realm but business4. Wild growth in the human body is often cancer. In the wider world it’s often an invasive species which overwhelms all the checks built up over generations of evolution that should keep everything in balance.

Our current system of economics lets companies grow in part by allowing them to push their costs onto the commons, our public service systems5. Gig workers can be paid extremely low wages because we have social services that can step in and provide the food they can’t afford via food banks or food stamps.

Past companies could continue to grow and make profits because they dumped their toxic by products into water supplies. This forced cities to deal with the sick people and degrading environment while the companies reaped profits and made billionaires by stealing money from the public.

This was a main theme in Dark PR as well. Ennis points out many places that we subsidize industries to our own detriment. We support the oil and gas industry6 so that consumers have lower prices, at the expense of an environmental bill future generations will have to pay. We even see some of the affects now with record heat waves, tornados, and wild fires. These are signs of system collapse, but we still keep the subsidies up.

Where do you see systems overwhelmed?

I can think of many other places I see system collapse. I if most of you scrolled through your local news site you’d find a bunch as well. So, where do you see system collapse and what are you going to do about it?

#economics #systemsThinknig

The Hidden Addictions of Our Economic Systems
Not everyone recognizes that addiction can appear in larger systems and in other guises — such as the dependence of industry on government subsidy, the reliance of farmers on fertilizers, the addiction of Western economies to cheap oil or weapons manufacturers to government contracts. Thinking in Systems Pg 131

We want o
https://curtismchale.ca/2025/02/09/the-hidden-addictions-of-our-economic-systems/
#BookClub #economics #SystemsThinknig