Seminar 4: The Future
The old Scientific World View told us that everything was already determined. There was nothing we could do about it. At the time of the Big Bang, God set the world in motion and then left it to follow its inevitable course, determined by the immutable laws of nature. The new Ecological world view tells us that God is the Word, the ultimate source of belonging and value. It tells us that the future is not a matter of chance, but a matter of choice. The future is determined by the decisions we make and the systems we build.
This seminar will look at the some of the key systems we have built: markets, technology and social systems.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Looking At The Social Framework
Looking At The External Social Framework - Macro-Systems
THE SEA CHANGE
Seminar 4: The Future
The problems that we face at the beginning of the 21st Century are numerous:
The ecosystem: Using up our resources is fairly easy to understand. But interfering in the operations of the ecosystem, and disturbing the balance of nature is very difficult to understand.
Health: The illnesses that are beginning to fill our hospitals, are more and more the chronic degenerative diseases, and the diseases of environmental pollution. These are the diseases that western medicine is not very good at handling. They are usually related to problems in the gene pool, or problems of life style, or problems in the way we treat our food and air and water.
Technology: We are dealing with powerful technologies, and we do not understand the consequences. The environmental aspects of technology are just one aspect. The other aspect is the slow destruction of the quality of human life.
Government: We face a major crisis in government. In the old democracies there is a greater and greater sense of disillusionment with our representatives. Cynicism and despair abound.
The Economy: We create more than enough food to feed the world and yet millions starve. Every year the wealth of the world is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. And our economic structures pay no attention to the looming ecological problems.
The Corporation: Have we created Frankenstein's monster? It claims to be a person. Legally it is treated like a person. But it has no soul.
The Community: The concept of belonging to a community is being replaced by the idea of a time limited contract. This is the anarchist vision, where there are no communities only contracts. As a result the services and supports that maintain communities are systematically destroyed.
The Family: The society of equal contractors in a competitive market is not friendly to children. They are despised for being what they are, dependents.
The Self: The loss of a sense of self is one of the less visible but most disturbing problems of the modern world.
All of these problems share the same basic characteristics. They are rooted in the old atomistic, individualistic, quantitative view of the world. The problems that I focused on are two: how do we reform our ailing institutions, and how do we heal our individuals.
HOW CAN WE DEAL WITH THE PROBLEMS OF INDIVIDUALS
The first step is to look at the models, values and options that the person has. By looking at what a person's situation is, how that person sees the world, what their priorities are and what they perceive their options to be, we can make conscious the unconscious limits of their behaviour and create the possibility of change.
The second step is to change the way we look at problems. We are dominated by the process of individual-blame. We look at a social or institutional problem and see it in terms of individual blame. Who is at fault? Who did this? This is almost never helpful. The idea of social convergence allows us to see individuals within the context of the systems of which they are a part.
People will have models, values and options that are shaped by the social convergence of the information networks that they are part of.
CONSIDER THE QUESTION OF EMOTIONAL CONTROL
Our perceptions are found in our ideas. We examine the world around us and we develop ideas about it. When we evaluate those ideas we generate feelings about them.
There are a number of ways that we can deal with feelings that we don't want: fear, anxiety, panic, anger, bitterness, depression, sadness, guilt, blame, etc.
The first is the hardware solution. If you have a problem with crank calls on your telephone, you can simply disable the medium, i.e. cut the telephone line. The medium for the messages that we call feelings or emotions is chemical. We can change our feelings by changing brain chemistry. "Take a valium." as the common expression has it. The U.S. Drug Czar estimates that approximately 5 percent of the U.S. population has a problem with addiction to illegal drugs. If he was to expand his view to consider legal drugs such as alcohol, and prescription drugs such as valium, ritilan, etc. he would find that the drug problem is epidemic. The standard medical response to depression is to prescribe drugs. Most drugs are some form of anesthetic. They reduce the intensity of negative feelings.
The argument that the problem is in the medium is a valid argument. The problem may be in the medium. There may be a genetic flaw that inhibits the proper functioning of the brain chemistry. Or there could be a developmental problem that prevented the proper development of the brain chemistry function. At the present time we do not know enough about either genetics or the functioning of brain chemistry to be able to identify such a flaw.
The second approach is to look at the software. The software solution is to do something about the situation, and if that is not possible do something about the way you model it or evaluate it.
The first question is: Is this an options problem? Does the person just need more options for dealing with this painful situation? Hopefully the difference between an adult and a child is that the adult has a broader range of options for dealing with life. Often the problems that look insoluble to children, can be solved by learning new skills. For example: assertiveness training. For example: There is the story of the man that saw his son struggling to move a large rock in the garden. The father said, "You're not using all your resources on that problem." The son replied, "Yes, I am. I am pushing as hard as I can." The father said, "There's one resource you haven't used yet. You haven't asked me to help you."
Addiction is fundamentally an option problem, that becomes a values problem. The drug is one option for dealing with emotional pain. It soon becomes the predominant option. Once it has become the dominant option, addicts centre their life around the drug. The drug becomes their highest value.
Looking at other options is one of the first places we look. All of us have had the experience of suffering through the helpful suggestions of others. Most people are only too willing to give helpful suggestions for things you might try.
Very often the problem is not in the situation itself, or the situation may not be amenable to change. In that case the pain may be in the way we perceive or evaluate it.
Reframing is the process by which we look at a situation in a different way. We use a different frame of reference.
Examining our value priorities is a way to look at what it is that we consider important. We forget so easily what it is we really want. The story of the Midas touch is the classic in this genre. King Midas felt that money would be the answer to all his problems. He was given the magic power to make everything he touched turn to gold. Then his young daughter ran up to him, and when he touched her, she turned to gold. He realized that there were things in his life that were much more important than gold. The general advice to not sweat the small stuff, or to not take life so seriously, is usually advice to rethink our value priorities.
One software solution at a meta-level is simply to dissociate. The doctor operating on a patent does not associate with the patient. One of my most startling experiences of this was when the Chief Surgeon at the University Hospital was talking to a class I was in about standard kinds of medical operations. The thought crossed my mind, 'That could be me up there.' Almost immediately I felt the shock and I fainted. The Chief Surgeon never makes that connection. If he started to do that, he would be unable to operate. Instead he dissociates. Sometimes this is called being objective.
One of Seligman's discoveries about depressives was that they personalize adversities. They see it as about them personally. One of the solutions is to not take things personally. One of the things about politics is that you have to come to accept the fact that people are saying mean things about you. They do this publicly which is bad enough. But they also do it behind your back, which is maddening. To survive in politics you have to dissociate, or as we say, 'Don't take it personally.'
Buddhism is a religion that is primarily concerned with the practice of dissociation. The practice of non-attachment is essentially a practice of dissociation.
LOOKING AT THE SOCIAL FRAMEWORK
Each of these aspects of our mental functioning exists within a social framework. We look at various options as unthinkable within a certain social context.
Say we look at the functioning of a politician, and say that the problem she has is with a bad set of value priorities. Winning has become the most important thing. As a result values such as honesty and fidelity to principle are subordinated. If you have to lie to get elected, then you lie. If you have to compromise your principles, then you compromise your principles.
The first impulse is to say, what a terrible person. Why doesn't she smarten up and fly right. How can she sell her soul, for something as trivial as political power?
But then you have to look at the communications network of which she is a part. Consider the electorate. Do you have a cynical and disillusioned electorate that says 'They're all the same. They all lie.' What do the media say? The only concern of the media is who is going to win. Look at the other parties. Do they stand for honesty and principle or do they lie and compromise whenever it is the popular thing. Look at the Caucus. The main concern of the caucus is getting re-elected. Look at the party. The main focus of the leadership debate was which candidate can win for us. Is there at any point a support group that allows for an honest and principled approach to politics? Is that group strong enough to withstand the accumulated pressure for convergence of all the other parts of the social network?
Each of these organizational frameworks will shape the models, values and options of the individuals who are part of them. A specific role definition comes into play as well. The Papa is expected to be strong, rich, etc. The Mama is expected to be sensitive, supportive, etc. The Christian is expected to be . . . The accountant is expected to be . . . The Canadian is expected to be . . .
The demands of all these roles are not necessarily complementary. One of the commonest themes of much 20th Century literature was the conflict between work roles and family roles. The dedicated worker was expected to sacrifice family concerns for the business.
There are also the problems of dysfunctional organizations. Many families and organizations engage in crazy making behaviour. Bateson developed his famous "double bind" theory of schizophrenia from his perception of the power of families to make people crazy. The double bind is incongruence. The words say one thing, but the behaviour says another. Much of modern management theory involves teaching people to be incongruent. They know how they are supposed to feel and say they feel that way, but their behavour says the opposite. And the more you teach managers how they are supposed to do it, the worse they get.
CORPORATE HEALING
The question that originally got me interested in systems theory was the problem of the dysfunctional institutions to which I belonged. I am an ordained minister of the United Church of Canada, and for the last thirty years I have watched my Church in steady decline: membership figures falling; churches closing. I am a politician of the NDP persuasion. For the last thirty years, I have watched my party move steadily to the right, until it is virtually indistinguishable from its right-wing competitors. I have watched my country declining. Moving from a country that was developing an industrial base, to one that was primarily dependent on the export of raw materials to the U.S. I have watched my species steadily and systematically poisoning the ecosystem on which we all depend.
In order to function at all, a corporation needs a method of common decision making. This does not have to be a formal, centralized, conscious process, but there has to be a process. The first question is How do decisions get made?
The healing of a corporation begins at the level of values. It begins with passion. It begins with the desire to make a difference. These are all aspects of our value system. As long as there is a method of common decision making, an organization can withstand a wide variety of values, and a wide variety of models. But the more unity there is on the core values, the more power there is behind the action.
The second thing that promotes healing is a clear model of reality. The closer the organization is to dealing with reality, the more likely it is to be effective.
The third thing that the corporation needs is innovation. It needs to be able to develop new methods, new resources, new techniques, and new more accurate ways of understanding what is going on.
LOOKING AT THE INTERNAL SOCIAL FRAMEWORK- SUBSYSTEMS - Roles and Rules
When looking at sub-systems, we are looking at organisms that are in themselves systems, but fulfill a significant function or role for the main system.
There is usually a decision making system that has certain roles, and operates according to certain rules. A family has a mother, a father, the eldest male child, the middle child, the youngest child, the grandmother, the grandfather, the aunts and uncles and cousins. An organization has a chairman, a secretary, a treasurer, regular meetings and rules of order. The chairman is responsible for the process of decision making. The secretary is responsible for communications. The treasurer is responsible for resources. There are a vast variety of sub-committees and officers depending on the focus of the organization. Some organizations have special interest caucuses.
In most organizations the decision system is clear and rule based. But the core values, the methods for gaining information, and the options for action are much more vague. Sometimes this is to allow for flexibility, but sometimes it is just lack of organizational skill.
Do these subsystems put serious constraints on the organization's ability to focus on its values, to know what is happening and to develop effective resources?
DECISION MAKING AND COMPETITION
All decision making is competitive. There is always a choice. A choice requires at least two options. Once there are supporters of either option there is a competition. This is some times called a power struggle. In any group the fundamental question is "Who is to be master?" Power is the ability to make a decision for the group.
Cooperation is two fold. The first level is simply working together. Once the decision is made then everyone works together to see that it is accomplished. The second level is accommodating a variety of view points into the final decision. Team work has a similar ambiguity. For the people making the decisions, it often means obedience. For those excluded from the decision making, it means being included in decision making.
DECISION MAKING BY AGGREGATION OR DELEGATION
Aristotle identified three basic decision structures for constitutions. The decision can be based on a process of delegation or aggregation or some combination of both. In a system of delegation, there is one person who makes the decision on behalf of the group. This is the process of monarchy. Whenever the group decision is delegated to one person that person is said to be "empowered." The alternative is to develop a decision by aggregation. This is democracy. Each person gets a vote. The votes are totaled and that is the group decision. This can be done both formally and informally. There are any number of combinations of these two. One is the oligarchy or aristocracy, where a small group is delegated power. Another method is where a group decides to delegate to one person. In representative systems the group delegates to a group. The more levels there are in the decision system the more complex this can get. Every system has a huge number of decisions.
If you look at the American presidential system, there are a set of rules that say:
American citizens over the age of 18 have right to vote. (Are delegated basic voting power)
The voters by State elect the members of the Electoral College.
The members of the Electoral College elect the President.
The President delegates part of his authority to the Cabinet
The Cabinet member delegates part of his authority to his staff.
The staff, within the decision making area delegated and within the rules established by the Constitution, the Supreme Court, the Congress, and the President, makes decisions on behalf of the United States of America.
Note that the system is hierarchical. There is no avoiding hierarchical structures. There is always a distinction between the individual as individual, and the individual as part of the system. Within the system the individual plays a role defined by the system.
Note that the authority that is delegated up the system tends to be more discretionary. The President, once elected, is not subject to the voters. The authority that is delegated down the system tends to be heavily restricted and focused on very narrow items. The authority at the bottom is often only the authority to say that a specific instance does or does not fit the rules.
LOOKING AT THE EXTERNAL SOCIAL FRAMEWORK - MACRO-SYSTEMS
All systems fit into larger systems, or macro-systems, and play a role, or perform a function in them. Thus a firm exists within a market, a church within a tradition, a government within a country, a country within a bioregion.
Is the organization constrained by its role within the larger system? A business operates within a market. Therefore it plays the role of customer, supplier and competitor.
A church is a source of value in the larger society. Therefore it plays the role of liturgist, witness, prophet, educator, sanctuary. These roles limit some of the actions of the church.
There is a profound ambivalence about predicting the future. One of the things that we want out of a scientific hypothesis is the ability to predict future events. Thus if you have a bell jar with air in it and you compress the air, you will increase the pressure. If you hit a billiard ball in exactly the right spot, you can predict where it will go.
At the same time we are profoundly suspicious of predictions. A common expression is that "The only thing we know for sure about the future is that it will be a surprise." Chaos theory is concerned with the problem that even physical systems are unpredictable. Even a small change in the initial conditions can have dramatic effects on the results.
David Hume is an interesting example of this ambivalence. He looked at the idea of causation from a philosophical point of view and came to the conclusion that causation was the logical fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc. Simply because one thing comes before another does not therefore imply that the first thing causes the second. Hume concludes his argument by saying that in his experience people are so predictable in their behaviour that there must be cause and effect.
Most arguments about causality come from experiments that demonstrate that one thing comes before another. Thus a normal experiment will have two variables, the independent variable and the dependent variable. The experimenter changes the independent variable and then checks to see what has happened to the dependent variable. If the change in the independent variable is followed by a regular and predictable change in the dependent variable, then the experimenter feels that he has shown a causal relationship. But he has not.
Traditional science avoided this problem by the use of formulae. Thus F=ma, force is equal to mass times acceleration. Since this formula was held to be a universal law of nature, any change in one variable in the equation would create a corresponding change in the other variables. In imitation of this the biological and social sciences attempted to come up with similar formulae.
The organic paradigm defines causation as transmission. There are two kinds of transmission: the transmission of energy and the transmission of information. Thus, when the pool cue hits the billiard ball, energy is transmitted from the cue to the ball. Thus the pool cue can be said to cause the movement of the ball. Similarly with the transmission of information, when the bell rings information is transmitted to the dog and the dog salivates. The information can be said to cause the dog to salivate. But we are aware from our study of systems that the dog's response is the response of a system and that there is a lengthy and complex process between the sound of the bell and the dog salivating, and that the process is historically contingent and subject to entropy.
We can predict the future in these two cases: 1) by tracing flows of material from one place to another according to the laws of physics and chemistry, and 2) by tracing the flow of information in control systems. Where the flow of information, (decisions in the system), is automatic and unconscious, we can predict the results, where the decisions require conscious decisions we can develop scenarios for the various options.
There are problems with both of these cases. The problem with tracing flows of material from one place to another is the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. The more accurate the measurement of the position, the less accurate the measurement of the velocity. This is the problem with predicting the weather. All the physical laws concerning the movement of gases are known. But that has not advanced our ability to predicted tomorrow's weather. On the other hand, it has enabled us to predict the path of the planets around the sun. In order to form reasonable predictions the object that we are talking about has to be of such a size that errors in measurement are not significant. In predicting the weather scientists use isobars (lines linking places of the same temperature) to develop objects large enough to predict their movement. "A high pressure area (a body of cold air) is settling over Winnipeg, but a warm front (a body of warm air) appears to be moving up from North Dakota."
The movement in a weather system is at the molecular level and we are trying to generalize about the behaviour of an immense number of individual molecules. To do this we attempt to create boundaries. But these boundaries are fuzzy. At each point where the warm molecules meet the cold molecules heat will pass from the hotter to the cooler, and tend to change the boundary. Predicting the weather requires the use of fuzzy sets.
When dealing with large numbers of individual items we generally use some form of statistical generalization.
Biological systems work on information. Are there non-biological systems that also work on information? Leverage? Feedback? A thermostat is a control system. Are there other control systems in nature that have some sort of purely physical structure?
The problem in organic systems is identifying the locus of control. Where do the decisions get made that control the system? We know that blood sugar levels are controlled by the production of insulin. Cholesterol levels, on the other hand, are controlled by the cells.
The problem with attempting to locate the locus of control is that a control system can be a subsystem of a larger system. Much as in the federal system, some things are controlled at the organism level, some at the physiological level, some at the organ level, and some at the cell level. And to make matters more complicated the inter-play of two subsystems may function as a control system for the larger system.
The attraction of Darwinian Evolution to the old scientists was that it presented the idea of a control system that produced automatic decisions without any clear locus of control. Thus the baby turtles rushing down the beach to the sea are picked off by predators. The baby turtles that make it to the sea will then be faced with other predators. In the end only a few will survive and reproduce. The result would be what Herbert Spencer called the "survival of the fittest." It looks mechanical, but it is not.
In the example of the baby turtles you really have two control systems: the baby turtles and the predators. When these two control systems meet they create a larger control system that includes them both. This is the food chain. One definition of a healthy ecology is one that can sustain a high level predator. They are all part of the larger functioning of the bio-region.
We have looked at some of the developmental and organizational aspects of the human body. The first aspect is that there are specific systems in the body for the control of material processes and there are other systems for the control of information processes. We see that the elements of the body, the cells, are linked by common information, DNA, and by communication processes that lead to convergence and divergence, and differentiated subsystems.
The social body follows the same basic principles of structure that the body follows. It is made up of elements, people, linked by common information, social assumptions, and by communication processes, language, that lead to convergence and divergence, and differentiated subsystems. These subsystems control the flow of material, energy and information.
Ecologists have been very good at looking at the flows of matter and energy. Thus The Natural Step, an ecological strategy for business, has four basic principles:
The Four System Conditions
In order for a society to be sustainable, nature's functions and diversity are not systematically:
1. . . . subject to increasing concentrations of substances extracted from the Earth's crust;
2. . . . subject to increasing concentrations of substances produced by society; or
3. . . . impoverished by overharvesting or other forms of ecosystem manipulation.
And,
4. resources are used fairly and efficiently in order to meet basic human needs worldwide.
The first two are about the control of matter and energy. They are based on the two laws of thermodynamics. The law of conservation of matter and energy. The earth has all the matter it's going to get. The only source of new energy is the sun. And the law of entropy. Energy is dispersed. Green cells are the only organisms that take the sun's energy and create higher levels of complexity. The increasing levels of materials from the Earth's crust and from society breakdown this organic complexity. They are expressions of entropy.
The third is a formal characterisitic. And thus it is a little bit vaguer. Overharvesting seems like a simple concept, but the experience with the Ocean fisheries, particularly Cod and Salmon, seem to indicate that it is slightly more complex. Similarly with ecosystem manipulation. The major contributor has been dams, and irrigation projects. We don't know enough about ecosystems, to be able to predict all the consequences of our actions. Some of the things we can predict are pretty scary.
The fourth principle is the one that tends to be controversial. Many business men object to the idea of resources being used fairly or for basic human needs. Not that they object in principle to these things, but because they suspect that these are code words for higher taxes and a greater equality of income.
The simplest place to look first in a social system is what Nicholas Negroponte calls "moving atoms." The human body processes certain basic atoms: food and water. The household processes certain atoms in clothes, housing, heating, washing, cleaning, entertainment. Organizations develop to meet those needs - farming, milling, distributing. The more complex the household the more complex the organizations that serve it.
The organizations for moving atoms are interwoven with and controlled by the organization for the movement of information. The government essentially makes laws. This is an information process. The telephone, television, mail, Internet, World Wide Web, movies, language, and education, accounting, managing, commenting, and agitating all develop institutions for transforming and transmitting information.
Just as the single cell became the bioregion, so the hunter-gatherer became the global village. There is a constant increase in the complexity, size and inter-relationship of system levels.
Markets are interesting as a social construct. A market is a place where atoms are moved. But it is also a sophisticated information space. A market is a place where people and organizations in the roles of buyers and sellers meet to exchange information and to make deals. A market forms only when there are sophisticated social rules about property, contract, credit, and the adjudication of disputes. The problem that the Russians face in trying to jump into a market economy is that they do not have the tacit infrastructure of laws and institutions that we take for granted. We go to the store and buy a piece of meat. This would be an extremely hazardous process if we did not have meat inspectors. One of the problems with infrastructure is that naive individualists think that it isn't necessary. The tragedy in Walkerton was a function of a breakdown in the water testing system. A system that everyone in Walkerton took for granted and when Bob Rae and Mike Harris began to get rid of it, no one noticed until it was too late.
The problem with markets is that the economic model of a market is a group of suppliers who will supply at a certain price, and a group of buyers who will buy at a certain price. This is usually plotted as two curves, and where the two curves meet is the equilibrium. The problem with this as a model for marketing is immediately evident. It assumes that all products are commodities. In other words, the buyers do not distinguish between products. In the real market, most businesses are working very hard to distinguish their product from other peoples. Every car manufacturer wants the customer to see their car as a unique set of satisfactions. Similarly it is assumed that the only value is price. In the real market price is only one of a number of values, and shopping is often a process of finding out what those values are. Often the high price is the reason for buying it.
Similarly the assumptions are that the only options are to buy or not and to sell or not. There is also haggling, bundling, substitution, sales, discounts, frequent flyer coupons, etc. An impoverished view of the market produces an impoverished theory of markets.
A marketing view will look at the market as complex, and the customer as complex. There will be issues of perception. How is the product perceived? How is it perceived in relation to the competition? There will be issues of value. What satisfactions does this represent to the buyer? And there will be a careful look at the competition. Where else can they get this? Can they do without? Can they make it themselves? Is there a substitute?
There are certain things that become evident in a market system on this model. The price of a commodity will be driven down. Competing on price will drive down profits. Marx talked about the iron law of wages. In a market system where labour is viewed as a commodity, wages will be driven down to subsistence level.
Technology acts as the extension of the human capability. Thus a car is an extension of the human foot, an hammer is an extension of the human hand. Technology follows the same path as the cell. It begins as a human capacity, becomes a tool, and ends up as a vast world wide network.
One of the simplest and commonest ways of predicting the future is to say that tomorrow will be very much like today. This prediction is usually correct. But it is not of much use in dealing with change. It cannot deal with the gradual changes that build up over time, nor the catastrophic changes that are the exception to the rule.
There are a number of methods people use for predicting the nature of change in the future. One is called trend extrapolation. This is the metaphor from mechanics. Force is equal to mass times acceleration. An object in motion tends to remain in motion. This is an extension of the first premise in that it assumes that a given rate of change will continue unchanged. A number of points are located on a graph with the variable on one axis and time on the other. Then a line connecting the previous points is extended. This gives a projection of the value of that variable for any given time in the future. This is sometimes called straight line projection. When the behaviour of projectiles is being considered, this is a very useful method. When we are talking about a control system, a straight line projection would require a simple growth value in the system. In physical systems growth usually involves a positive feedback loop. An increase in the situation will create an increase in the growth rate. It produces exponential growth. Exponential growth moves towards infinity and therefore is, by definition, unsustainable.
Most growth is unsustainable, it will at some point reach the limits of the system. There may be physical limits or there may be countervailing systems that come into play. It will then either level off, decline or collapse. The collapses are the most obvious and catastrophic events, but the gradual declines can be just as catastrophic in their way, and less obvious. Where the line changes direction is sometimes called a turning point, or inflection point. An exponential curve will usually have a slow build up that looks much like a straight line until it reaches a point where its rate of growth increases dramatically. This point is sometimes called the tipping pont. The exponential curve is sometimes called a spike.
There is a second kind of straight line prediction that is based on control systems. It is usually called "planning." We develop a definition of the future situation that we want to see created and then we draw a line indicating the things that we would have to do to get there. Some observers argue that this is far and away the best way of predicting the future.
The two are usually combined. A projection of current trends is made, and that projection becomes the basis of actions to affect that projection. We see a baseball coming towards it, and we unconsciously plot its future position and move our hands there to catch it.
A slightly more sophisticated version of this is what is called the envelope curve. This was developed by the Hudson Institute in its work predicting technological change. It looks at the change in a given variable with a number of different technologies. Any given technology will have a rising curve of performance that finally levels off. Two or three of these curves could be put on the same graph and a curve drawn that enveloped these individual curves and giving a prediction for the performance of possible future innovations. This is the prediction of the behaviour of a control system. We know that inventors and corporations are working to improve the performance of their technologies. The envelope curve predicts what kind of advance would be necessary to be considered a significant advance, and assumes that the discovery will be made.
Another common method is the observation of cycles. The tides go up and down in a regular cyclical pattern due to the movement of the moon around the earth. The seasons of the year come and go in a regular cyclical pattern due to the movement of the earth around the sun.
The followers of cycles using the same principle that the future will be like the past, and the cycles that existed in the past can be extended into the future. There is still the extension of the line into the future. It is just a more sophisticated line. It has this attraction, that unlike straight line growth, it is sustainable.
In a system it corresponds to a negative feedback loop. A negative feedback loop attempts to keep one value constant. Thus if you chart the temperature levels in a room controlled by a thermostat, you will see that the temperature has a cycle. The room increases in temperature until it reaches a point where the thermostat turns the furnace off. The room then cools off until the thermostat turns the furnace on again.
One cycle commonly quoted is the inventory cycle of business. Inventories are built up and then depleted in a cyclical manner. Thus orders to manufacturers will exhibit a cyclical process as well. The store owner by attempting to keep his inventory at a constant level will produce a cyclical pattern. This is usually seen as a four or five year cycle. For an interesting game around this consider the Beer Game developed by Jay Forrester and outlined in Peter Senge's The Fifth Discipline. One of the more interesting speculations is that there is a fifty year Kondratieff long wave. The theory behind this is that a set of technological innovations will give rise to a spurt of investment that expands capacity. But once the capacity is established the growth slows and the economy stagnates until another set of innovations comes along.
The use of trend line extrapolation and cyclical extrapolation tends to be surprise free. But history has major discontinuities: earthquakes, floods, war, famine, pestilence, stock market crashes. One of the techniques developed by the planning group at Shell was to scan the environment for possibly catastrophic changes, and then look for signals that would indicate that this might happen, and develop contingency plans. They were thus able to predict the Arab oil embargo of the seventies and the collapse of the Soviet Union and develop contingency plans.
MODELS
The most famous world model is that developed by Jay Forrester for the Club of Rome the became the basis for the book Limits to Growth. The full model attempts to look at the relationships between population, arable land, non-renewable resources, agricultural capital, industrial capital and pollution. The model is basically quite simple, and operates at a fairly high level of generality.
There is generally a two step process in designing a model. The first is defining the focus, or focii. As noted the Forrester model focuses on six variables. Most models tend to focus on one. It is relatively easy to take one variable, do a time series and create a graph.
Content analysis for example takes a set of newspapers and then measures the amount of space devoted to specific topics. Topics that are getting more space, it defines as trends. With a limited amount of space, newspapers are constantly asking, what's news? What's worth talking about? Newspapers act as a community definition of what is the latest trend.
People following the stock market will track the Dow Jones Industrial Average. People tracking the economy will look at GDP, unemployment, wages, interest rates, and housing starts. There are a few statistics that are tracked.
The second step is to put these variables in context. What are the systems that are controlling these variables? This is the hard part.
Take the simplest subsystem of the Forrester model - the depletion of non-renewable resources.
The diagram is fairly simple. The box represents the stock of non-renewable resources. The gate represents the rate at which they are used up. This system is connected to population,
industrial output per capita, the persistent pollution generated by industrial output, and industrial output.
The rate of usage is determined by the population, the per capita resource usage multiplier, and the resource usage factor.
The amount of non-renewable resources is divided by the initial amount of resources to get the fraction remaining, from this the fraction of capacity allocated to obtaining more resources is subtracted, and the result is a factor in the level of industrial output.
The industrial output per capita, times the per capita usage multiplier is a factor in the persistent pollution generated by industrial production.
In short population demands cause resources to get used up by the industrial production process and pollution is produced.
This is a feedback system because the resource determine how much industrial output is produced and the amount of industrial output produced determines the rate at which resources are used.
The problem with the Forrester system becomes immediately apparent. Where does he get the numbers for the per capita resource usage multiplier, and the resource usage factor? These have to be estimates based on past history. These "coefficients" as he calls them are being used to elide the relationship between resource usage in the world system and its subsystems. In other words, it is an aggregate model, not a holistic model.
The second problem is that there is no locus of control. Resource usage is a series of decisions made by a variety of actors: governments, corporations, households, technologists, workers, etc. These are structured in layers.
There is one basic unit of consumption and population growth - the family.
Families exist within a context of specific institutions.
Institutions exist with a context of social and government regulation
The society exists within the constraints of the ecosystem.
Each level is dependent on the health of the next higher level. The individual is dependent upon the health of the family. The family is dependent on the health of institutions. Institutions are dependent on the health of the society. Society is dependent on the health of the ecosystem. Communication operates between levels. Individuals communicate with families, and with institutions and with societies and with the ecosystem. The problem we face is social myopia. Individuals who cannot see the importance of the systems of which they are a part become dangerous to the stability of the systems. Institutions that cannot see the importance of the systems of which they are a part become dangerous to the stability of the system.
Where is the locus of control with resource usage? At the level of the household the values are expressed in a family life style. At the institutional level resource usage is defined by the institutional policy on resource use, growth, profitability, environmental concern. At the social level resource use is governed by legislation and resource policy. At the ecological level resource use if governed by sustainability.