Preface: Contains major spoilers for Bridgerton season 1, discussion of nonconsensual sex, and minor spoilers of Pride and Prejudice and Downton Abbey.
Continue reading “The Challenge of Imperfection”Month: February 2021
bookmark_borderDesign is inevitable
Any human system where what one person does can affect another is designed. That does not mean it is designed well, intentionally, or holistically but it is, inevitably, designed. So better to try to design well, intentionally, and holistically than to avoid the responsibility.
I’m defining design in human systems as the creation of norms and rules which designate reaction in response to patterns of behavior. In that sense, every human relationship is designed, not by a divine watchmaker but by the system of norms and rules, implicit and explicit, that those relationships are embedded in.
Design is, intentionally, a loaded term in this context. I suspect that something like “evolved” would get less push back. But human systems, to a degree not true of ecological systems (although not altogether false of ecological systems) are systems that are consciously and intentionally manipulated by their agents, resulting in something that I think is deserving of the term design. Humans have the ability to notice the consequences of our choices and in response we can change our own choices and, critically, try to change the choices of others.
An important aside: holistic is not the same as totalizing. Holistic means to look at how the parts interact and try to anticipate and account for the rippling effects of individual design choices. Totalizing means trying to control the way that design choices propagate through a system. Ecologically inspired design thinking is holistic. High modern command and control design thinking is totalizing. Although the words have some similarity in their implication of completeness, they are largely opposites.
bookmark_borderMonetary System Tweaks
A thing I’m thinking about (inspired by Doughnut Economics): In the US, we think of money as being made by the Treasury Department. We worry, rightly, about increasing the money supply arbitrarily by just printing more. Unbounded monetary creation has inflationary tendencies. (Whether or not we currently strike the right balance is irrelevant to the rest of this discussion.)
Banks cannot create money, officially at least. However, they can issue loans in excess of the reserves they hold, so they kind of can create money. I don’t have the data to compute it, but the financial crisis of 2008 supports a claim that this system has created excess financial resources beyond the official money that backs it.
This money can only be used for certain types of spending. Three major things this loan money is spent on are houses, financial assets, and college loans. (Another major, interestingly different category is business loans.) Housing, the stock market, and college cost are all areas where we see constant growth that exceeds general inflation. In the first two, we’ve framed that as a good thing indicating economic health. However, all three share the same underlying mechanism of relying on the excess loan based money supply as an input into their growth.
I’m not drawing any particular conclusion here. Maybe these things are good for our economy overall. I have my suspicions that they are more short term extractive growth than long term value producing growth, but that’s my hunch.
Rather, my purpose here is to illustrate that policy and mechanisms make a substantial difference in outcomes. I don’t know if our economic situation would look better or worse if, for example, all loans had to be backed by currency held by the issuing institution. However, it would certainly look different in interesting and impactful ways.
bookmark_borderBe well
Maybe some folks here will find something useful in this (slightly edited) message I sent to my team.
We’re one month into the new year. We had a break. And for many of us–me included–things still feel blah.
Maybe we’re used to coming back to work more refreshed after the break. Maybe, despite our acknowledgment that a digit change isn’t magic, we didn’t expect things to keep being so hard after the new year.
And even with the vaccines rolling out–or perhaps, especially with the vaccines rolling out–we can see that the road back to a world where we can get together is not going to be short. We miss seeing our coworkers. Even more, we miss our friends and our families.
This is hard. A near year of chronic background stress is a challenge for all of us, more so for some of us depending on our personal circumstances.
So, I want to let you know that I’m thinking of all of you. Please continue to take care of yourselves. And if you ever want to talk about anything, work related or not, please let me know. I am here for you.