The systems that enable modern life share a common origin. The water supply, the internet, the international supply chains bringing us cheap goods: each began life as a simple, working system. The first electric grid was no more than a handful of electric lamps hooked up to a water wheel in Godalming, England, in 1881. It then took successive decades of tinkering and iteration by thousands of very smart people to scale these systems to the advanced state we enjoy today. At no point did a single genius map out the final, finished product.
But this lineage of (mostly) working systems is easily forgotten. Instead, we prefer a more flattering story: that complex systems are deliberate creations, the product of careful analysis. And, relatedly, that by performing this analysis – now known as ‘systems thinking’ in the halls of government – we can bring unruly ones to heel. It is an optimistic perspective, casting us as the masters of our systems and our destiny.
The empirical record says otherwise, however. Our recent history is one of governments grappling with complex systems and coming off worse. In the United States, HealthCare.gov was designed to simplify access to health insurance by knitting together 36 state marketplaces and data from eight federal agencies. Its launch was paralyzed by technical failures that locked out millions of users. Australia’s disability reforms, carefully planned for over a decade and expected to save money, led to costs escalating so rapidly that they will soon exceed the pension budget. The UK’s 2014 introduction of Contracts for Difference, intended to speed the renewables rollout by giving generators a guaranteed price, overstrained the grid and is a major contributor to the 15-year queue for new connections. Systems thinking is more popular than ever; modern systems thinkers have analytical tools that their predecessors could only have dreamt of. But the systems keep kicking back.
There is a better way. A long but neglected line of thinkers going back to chemists in the nineteenth century has argued that complex systems are not our passive playthings. Despite friendly names like ‘the health system’, they demand extreme wariness. If broken, a complex system often cannot be fixed. Meanwhile, our successes, when they do come, are invariably the result of starting small. As the systems we have built slip further beyond our collective control, it is these simple working systems that offer us the best path back.
The world model
In 1970, the ‘Club of Rome’, a group of international luminaries with an interest in how the problems of the world were interrelated, invited Jay Wright Forrester to peer into the future of the global economy. An MIT expert on electrical and mechanical engineering, Forrester had cut his teeth on problems like how to keep a Second World War aircraft carrier’s radar pointed steadily at the horizon amid the heavy swell of the Pacific.
The Club of Rome asked an even more intricate question: how would social and economic forces interact in the coming decades? Where were the bottlenecks and feedback mechanisms? Could economic growth continue, or would the world enter a new phase of equilibrium or decline?
Forrester labored hard, producing a mathematical model of enormous sophistication. Across 130 pages of mathematical equations, computer graphical printout, and DYNAMO code,World Dynamics tracks the myriad relationships between natural resources, capital, population, food, and pollution: everything from the ‘capital-investment-in-agriculture-fraction adjustment time’ to the ominous ‘death-rate-from-pollution multiplier’.
A section of Forrester’s World Model. Image WAguirre 2017
World leaders had assumed that economic growth was an unalloyed good. But Forrester’s results showed the opposite. As financial and population growth continued, natural resources would be consumed at an accelerating rate, agricultural land would be paved over, and pollution would reach unmanageable levels. His model laid out dozens of scenarios and in most of them, by 2025, the world would already be in the first throes of an irreversible decline in living standards. By 2070, the crunch would be so painful that industrialized nations might regret their experiment with economic growth altogether. As Forrester put it, ‘[t]he present underdeveloped countries may be in a better condition for surviving forthcoming worldwide environmental and economic pressures than are the advanced countries.’
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