As promised, I would like to introduce you to the work of systems thinker and theorist Donella Meadows. Meadows wrote the book Thinking in Systems: A Primer, which was posthumously released in 2008 (edited by Diana Wright). As a result of the widespread popularity of Meadow’s book, the title was changed to Thinking in Systems: International Bestseller, which it was. Pulling from the About the Author section of Thinking in Systems, we learn that Meadows was trained in chemistry and biophysics. Interestingly, Meadows spent most of her time in the area of environmental science. “From 1972 until her death in 2001, Meadows taught in the Environmental Studies Program of Dartmouth College.” In my opinion, Meadows may well be one of the early Earth Systems Scientists. Further, “She founded the Sustainability Institute in 1996 to apply systems thinking and organizational learning to economic, environmental, and social challenges.” I should mention that my old alma mater, UT Dallas, recently changed the name of the Geosciences Department to Sustainable Earth Systems Science. Clearly Meadows was an early contributor to this emerging field. I was sorry to read about her early passing. Boy could we use her help today. Fortunately we can find help in the form of the many books and articles she has left us.
I’m bringing in Meadows’ work because in my previous posts I talked about positive and negative feedback loops. In her book, Meadows provides an example of both at the national level. As it turns out, I am familiar with the example of negative feedback Meadows describes as I will explain. Let us now look at Population Growth—A Tale of Two Countries.
To get things rolling, Meadows introduces us to the systems idea of what she calls policy resistance. “Such resistance to change arises when goals of subsystems are different and inconsistent with each other,” writes Meadows. As an example, Meadows points out that after many so-called “war on drugs,” the typical counterproductive result is “drugs are as prevalent as ever.” Meadows made this observation almost two decades before the fentanyl epidemic that now surrounds us. As another example, Meadows talks about the high cost of health care in the U.S., again, back in the late 1990s mind you. “No single policy yet has been able to bring down health care costs in the United States,” Meadows alerts.
Meadows’ message is clear: if policymakers do not take into consideration systems dynamics and systems structures, policy decisions could have significant blowback. I use the word “blowback” intentionally because it’s the main title to Chalmers Johnson’s 2000 book entitled Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire. Johnson is a political scientist who is now professor emeritus of the University of California, San Diego. In what can only be called a scary form of prognostication, Johnson talked about not “if” but “when” there will be blowback directed at the U.S. policy of maintaining military bases all over the world. This may be hard to believe but before 9/11 he actually talked about how an attack on the U.S. would not be high tech, but in fact will be low tech and could take the form of fuel-ladened commercial aircraft. Let’s look at the two examples Meadows talks about.
“In 1967, The Romanian government decided that Romania needed more people and that the way to get them was to make abortions for women under age forty-five illegal,” writes Meadows. I’m familiar with this part of Romanian history because the attachment style category of “disorganized attachment” primarily came from studies of children literally dumped at Romanian orphanages. Meadows points out that, yes, initially there was an increase in population growth. But then policy resistance on the part of the Romanian people kicked in and ultimately led to disastrous results. Population growth returned to pre-policy levels as the result of women electing to undergo “dangerous, illegal abortions.” This is the same situation we are now facing here in the U.S. “In addition, many of the unwanted children that had been born when abortions were illegal,” Meadows reveals, “were abandoned to orphanages.”
Attachment researcher Charlie (Charles) Zenah, MD, who teaches at the Tulane School of Medicine, studied Romanian orphans during this timeframe. I’ve had the pleasure of hearing Dr. Zenah talk, and the stories he told were simply shocking. The fourth attachment style of “disorganized” was added because what Dr. Zenah witnessed were toddlers who could not engage in any coordinated attachment response. The orphans, packed into cribs like cattle, were so deprived of early attachment safety and security that brain functioning was greatly compromised. Hopefully the reader can recognize that because of policy resistance, the Romanian government set up a negative feedback loop that produced disastrous results.
What’s the solution to this type of negative feedback? Meadows simply says to “let go.” Meadows writes, “Let the resources and energy spent on both enforcing and resisting be used for more constructive purposes.” Here’s her bottom line: “If you calm down, those who are pulling against you will calm down too.” To prove her point Meadows gives us this example: “This is what happened in 1933 when Prohibition ended in the United States; the alcohol-driven chaos largely ended.” Here’s a quote by Meadows well worth considering:
The most effective way of dealing with policy resistance is to find a way of aligning the various goals of the subsystems, usually by providing an overarching goal that allows all actors to break out of their bounded rationality.
Martin Luther King did this brilliantly in his I Have a Dream speech. He had a dream for all of us, that included all of us. That dream propelled the civil rights movement of the 1960s in the U.S. Let us turn to an example of positive feedback with more optimistic results: Sweden’s population policy back in the 1930s.
Meadows starts off this example by telling us that “During the 1930s, Sweden’s birth rate dropped precipitously, and, like the governments of Romania and Hungary, the Swedish government assessed its goals and those of the population and decided that there was a basis of agreement, not on the size of the family, but on the quality of child care.” Meadows sums up this policy in a way that could have formed the foundation of a public awareness campaign: “Every child should be wanted and nurtured. No child should be in material need.” What an absolutely stark contrast to the Romanian policy talked about above. Because the Swedish policy was overarching and focused on the message of “every child should be wanted,” it included the following interventions (some of which seem counterproductive, but were not):
- Widespread sex education
- Easier divorce laws
- Free obstetrical care
- Support for families in need
- Greatly increased investment in education
- Greatly increased investment in health care
These interventions worked. Meadows sums up the results thus: “Since then, the Swedish birth rate has gone up and down several times without causing panic in either direction, because the nation is focused on a far more important [overarching] goal than the number of Swedes.”
Hopefully this gives you a sense for negative and positive feedback at the level of national policy. I think the key takeaway is for policymakers to take the time to find common ground and design policy that reflects and supports that common ground. Sadly, here in the U.S. politicians are so divided on issues, like abortion, health care, and child care, that the possibility of finding common ground is almost nil. What we are left with is policy resistance that ultimately leads to negative feedbacks and unintended consequences, like women having to travel hundreds of miles to neighboring states for reproductive care. Let me end with this thought.
I have every confidence that if Donella Meadows were alive today, she would agree that two of the most pressing systems-oriented problems facing the world have to be global warming and climate change. And I think she would agree if there ever was a time when we needed an overarching goal with respect to these two pressing issues, it is now. Without that overarching vision, that dream, we can safely expect negative feedback loops like those now in evidence in the automotive industry (which I talked about in my post Ahhh, Houston, We Have a Dilemma). So, as the 2024 presidential election ramps up, keep an eye out for overarching policy reforms that everyone can get behind. It could happen. But there again, I’m a bit of a dreamer.
Speaking of divisive issues that lack an overarching goal, in my next post entitled The Dismemberment & Disfigurement of Identity Formation, I’ll try to shed some light on the very contentious topic of the DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) movement. See you there.
