[I returned to the theme of this article in August. Check out Resilient Change and especially Entangled and Uncertain.]
A coincidence struck me over the weekend. I’m still recovering, but wanted to share some initial thoughts.
On Friday the latest edition of The Digest pointed me to The Social Biome, a new book by Andy J. Merolla and Jeffrey A. Hall. The book proposes thinking about humans’ relational life as existing within social biomes, “complex ecosystems of moments of interaction with others” that collectively form our identities and beliefs, so that our choices “about how we interact and who we interact with—and whether we interact at all—matter more than we might know.”
Given my focus on ecosystemic thinking, this obviously caught my attention. I haven’t read the book, but I found an older article on the authors’ research. A quote from Robin Dunbar, emeritus professor of evolutionary psychology at the University of Oxford, caught my eye:
Most psychologists tend to think of the social world as being strictly dyadic …in other words, based on pair relationships. “It’s you and your mum, you and your baby, you and your romantic partner, maybe you and your best friend – but that’s about as far as it goes. It’s a very impoverished view of the social world.” It’s the classic psychologist move, he says – to “simplify everything” so as to “study basic mechanisms”, “shorn of complications”.
Then on Saturday my wife shared a series of essays by economist Katy Shields about the capture of economics by a market-fundamentalist ideology that has led to decades of delay and even pushed us in precisely the wrong direction on climate change. Among other things, she shares her thoughts on why the field of economics has ignored decades of challenge by “heterodox” economists who try to call out the problem. In her third essay, Shields writes:
Ecologists study the health of ecosystems. Not just the tree but the tree in relation to everything around it — soil, fungi, air, insects, birds, pollution, climate — and all that in relation to each other. This, in turn, requires them to engage with, to listen to other disciplines …
[E]conomists, by contrast, study the linear correlations, the parts. Like, how GDP relates to emissions, but not how these values in turn relate to others, like food, labour, energy. … Rather than draw on the wisdom of other disciplines, … they develop their own set of assumptions about how the world works.
Shields doesn’t say this explicitly, but one of the driving motivations in academic economics has been to keep things analytically tractable, to focus on “basic mechanisms,” “shorn of complications,” so to speak.
It’s a little like physicists giving up working on most of the problems they’ve grappled with for the last few centuries because they’re just too darn hard.
It reminds me of the way funders give grants and hold grantees accountable. The standard approach is to fund narrow interventions and require that grantees spend the money in exactly the way they said they would in their proposals. In other words, no complexity, no learning, and no responses to changed circumstances allowed! As I wrote here, the only real advantage of the approach is that it’s easy and cheap.
I suspect that there are two intertwined issues.
One is that we really do avoid doing things that are hard because they are hard. It’s easy to understand why: taking on hard problems is risky. For the most part we operate in environments that punish “failure,” even though it is absolutely necessary in order for learning to occur. That’s why it’s so important to foster institutional cultures that prioritize and reward progress and learning rather than efficiency and minimizing risk.
I wonder if there isn’t another issue here as well, a reluctance to take on challenges that involve engaging with the realities of relationships, which tend to be not just hard, but messy as well. It’s so much easier to just keep things “tractable.”
That may be part of the explanation for the reluctance to engage with people outside one’s specialty – it’s challenging to try to have conversations with people who operate from a different paradigm and who use different languages. Of course in academia the lack of support for (or even active discouragement of) engagement across disciplines may play a bigger part.
More importantly, wading into ecosystems has a tendency to embroil us in the problems we’re grappling with. We prefer to keep a separation between us and them, to maintain the pretense that we somehow stand apart from the problems we’re trying to address, rather than operating from inside the very system that we’re trying to affect, whether we be economists talking about people’s livelihoods, government bureaucrats trying to manage public services, or funders hoping to move the needle on one of our myriad social challenges.
Why would we want to become embroiled? I’m reminded of a passage in Imani Perry’s Vexy Thing in which she talks about her frequent use of “we” in the text:
I hold on to “we” for another reason. I believe that ... the posture of distance in which one is not implicated in the mechanics of domination because one is not at the top of the global capitalist heap is untenable and unethical. That is to say, to claim a “we” in this morass is to deliberately disavow innocence. We are deeply and terribly guilty. Guilt, of course, is not equally distributed. But seeking innocence is a distraction of the highest order to critical thought. We are called to think through our own socio-political sins.
The fact is that our insistence on maintaining distance from those we study or help or affect is an integral part of the way the system staves off the threat of too-radical change.
I happen to think we desperately need radical change.
And if we want that change to do more than lead to a recycled set of old injustices, we are going to need to find ways to embrace the complexity of real systems and the mess of real relationships. And it is my suspicion that those are not necessarily different things.
Links & Thoughts
What Do I Do In a Time Like This? Rory Truex is an Associate Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton who specializes in authoritarianism, China, and U.S.-China relations. In this essay he shares some concrete ways we can show up in this critical moment.
Some Parallel Explorations. There are a couple people who come up in Katy Shields’ essay series that I’d recommend exploring further.
Donella H. Meadows’ book, Thinking in Systems: A Primer, is a very readable introduction to systems thinking that includes the 12 leverage points for intervening in systems. It’s quite short and practical.
Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist is a must-read. I wrote on Twitter in 2018 that the biggest takeaway for me was that “the economy is not an implacable consequence of immutable laws to which we must adapt ourselves, it is the consequence of decisions that we have made and that we can change. Economics is a design problem.”
In 2020 my friend and podcaster David Rayburn conducted a series of interviews on “steady state economics,” including an interview with Hermann Daly about “ecological economics.” You can find that one here, as well as conversations with Rob Dietz and Brian Czech of the Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.
If you want to share thoughts on anything I’ve said here or have ideas about further questions or topics you’d like me to explore, please feel free to reply to the newsletter email or contact me here.
The insight on grant funders really hit home for me. Rather than solving "the problem," which would take much more money and much more direct engagement and risk, funders will seek out low-risk, low-cost opportunities to pick at some minor aspect of a problem. They can then trumpet that their investment "paid off" in some narrowly-defined way, even if "the problem" remains in place, perhaps even in a worse state than before.
Funders would rather replace the wiper blades on your car than provide a new car. And they really, really don't want to take on changing car culture itself.