Levers to Pull For the Change You Want
It just may take a while
Photo by David Birozy on Unsplash
Moving to a post-growth economy will take time. It’s not going to happen next Tuesday, but it will happen at some point. Let’s do it by design and not disaster.
One of the original authors of Limits to Growth, Donella Meadows was kind enough to tell us how. Meadows identified twelve leverage points for creating change in systems, ranked from the least to most effective. Those at the beginning of the list are the easiest to achieve, but the least effective. Those near the end of the list have the most impact, but take a lot of work to get to. Leverage points are points in a system where a small change/action can lead to long and lasting long-term effects. You can find a more detailed walk through of the concepts by Meadows here: Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System - The Donella Meadows Project
Constants, parameters, numbers: Adjusting numerical values.
The sizes of buffers and stabilizing stocks: Changing the capacity of systems to absorb shocks.
The structure of material stocks and flows: Altering the physical layout of the system.
The lengths of delays: Modifying time delays in feedback loops.
The strength of negative feedback loops: Enhancing the effectiveness of balancing feedback.
The gain around driving positive feedback loops: Increasing the power of reinforcing feedback.
The structure of information flows: Changing who has access to information.
The rules of the system: Altering the regulations and incentives.
The power to self-organize: Allowing systems to develop their own structures.
The goals of the system: Changing the objective of the system.
The mindset or paradigm out of which the system arises: Shifting the underlying beliefs and values.
The power to transcend paradigms: Enabling the system to move beyond its current framework.
You have to learn to walk before you can run. Here is a breakdown of each leverage point in more detail.
Parameters are numbers, goals, targets often set by governments. These may be clean air standards, fishing limitations to ensure healthy fish stocks, and other standards that can be set. Meadows felt that we spend most of our time on setting these parameters, but noted that they rarely change behavior in the long-term. They don’t change what people believe. They just change what people comply with - and they can change after every election.
The size of buffers and stocks, relative to flows. This is a balancing act between reserves held in store (whether that is water in a river or inventories in a warehouse) and the speed of the outflows of that stock. A large river with small outflows is not a problem. A large river with large outflows, or a small river with large outflows is. You can stabilize a system with added buffers, but that may make it hard for a system to react with any kind of speed if that is required.
Structure of material stocks and flows. You should really try to plan out a system if you can. If you build a system that is inefficient it often needs to be torn down and built again. You can’t easily rearrange a highway system that doesn’t get things and people where they need to be. An economic system that serves capital over the wellbeing of people isn’t easy to redesign quickly. In Meadow’s own words: “Physical structure is crucial in a system, but rarely a leverage point, because changing it is rarely quick or simple. The leverage point is in proper design in the first place.”
Lengths of delays relative to the rate of system changes. The example that Meadow’s gives here is a shower with a water heater that is far away. It can take forever for system to change after that signal is sent. You have to factor in expected delays in the system you are working with. In the shower example, the hot water will come, you just have to wait a minute. Know the expected delays going in so as not to overreact. Many delays are baked into the systems we use. Think reactions to economic data - leading and lagging indicators. Change the delays if you can, but often you can’t.
Strength of negative feedback loops, relative to the impacts they are trying to correct against. Most complex systems have many negative feedback loops, that need to have a self-correcting mechanism (think a thermostat for constant temperature in your house). A great example that Meadows mentions is our own need for rest, recreation, socialization and meditation. In the short-term, ignoring these needs are not a big deal. Ignoring them over the long-term can be catastrophic. On a broader sense think of the planetary boundary framework. Ignoring CO2 buildup or deforestation just today doesn’t harm much, but doing so for decades has gotten us into quite a mess.
The gain around driving positive feedback loops. The more a positive feedback loop works, the more power it gains to keep going. It is self-reinforcing. Population growth is self-reinforcing. So is the spread of the flu. We pursue the positive feedback loop of economic growth because we want more and more of it, but all positive feedback loops can eventually strain a system and cause it to collapse.
The structure of information flows. Information is power. The more consolidated and controlled it is, the more power individuals who have a monopoly on that information have, and the less poser a broader society has. A society that doesn’t have proper information (how damaging climate change is) cannot make the appropriate changes to correct the system.
The Rules of the system (incentives, punishments, constraints). The rules of the game determine what is and what is not possible. We are currently working on a paper on pensions in a post-growth world at Arketa Institute and are finding that in many jurisdictions degrowth is kind of illegal. Pension fund trustees are required by fiduciary duty and law to pursue growth. In effect, it is illegal to not destroy the future of pensioners as long as you make them richer today. Changing those rules could have a profound effect.
The power to add, change, evolve, or self-organize system structure. This is where a lot of the degrowth movement is trying to get to. You see ideas such as UBI, the four-day work week, universal basic service, a jobs guarantee, the right to repair and other degrowth friendly policies as ways to change the system. We currently are forced into one economic culture: capitalism. This shuts down experimentation and learning what might work better.
The goals of the system. The goals of a complex system can change slowly over time as a society’s views on what the goal should be evolve. Or they can evolve relatively quickly when the person at the top of a large organization sets a new goal. New CEOs, new presidents, new prime ministers and any other figure at the head of a large organization can change things relatively fast. People may see this and say, oh, we just need to get a degrowther in the White House. First, let me stop laughing, and second, that person has to remain somewhat popular. Culture and the political system has to allow that person to get to power in the first place, and they have to remain popular enough to stick around. Sorry folks, but I don’t think you will have a degrowth president (at least not an intentional one), anytime soon.
The mindset or paradigm out of which the system arises. This gets down to what a society accepts as fair, or right, or a norm. The unstated assumptions of a society about how the world works or should work. These aren’t always fair, or just. They often aren’t, but they do tell you what a society will accept. The right to vote for women, interracial marriage, and gay marriage are all things that didn’t seem right or normal to Americans (and those in other countries) until relatively recently in the country’s history. America is now 250 years old, and for most of the history of the country those things seemed beyond what was acceptable.
The power to transcend paradigms. This one may be a little out there for some people. It is to keep oneself unattached to any paradigm, understanding that no paradigm can be “true” in that you can’t understand such a complex thing as the universe or how it operates. If no paradigm is right, you can choose the one that best serves your purpose. This kind of “enlightenment” can help you move beyond mastering the current paradigm, to show people that there are new ways of knowing and being beyond what they currently accept as normal. Yes, that thing does itself become a paradigm at that point. But if you want to keep rising above the paradigm, searching for new ways of knowing until you give up the ghost … more power to you.
What the hell is the purpose of this huge list?
I find Meadows’ leverage points helpful because it helps us understand what is easy to do, but will have the least impact and what is hardest to do, but will have the most impact. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do the easy stuff or should give up on the hard stuff. It can help you set your expectations and not get frustrated when after two years of writing a degrowth blog you haven’t changed the paradigm.
Changing the rules of the game is much harder than just accurately measuring the inputs to the system. But that first step needs to be done. The paradigm will eventually shift, but even if one man or woman gets the credit or the blame for the paradigm shift, the stage has to be set for that change to happen.
That is what I am up to here, what I am up to at Arketa Institute, and what I hope you are each up to in your own way. Use the leverage you have everyday. It adds up.
A thought on the implications of the last bit. This is something I've struggled with much of my life, because my father laid a geas on us that we were each responsible for saving the world. But I made no progress, couldn't figure out how. What helped the most was a pair of science fiction novels I read about ten years ago, Blackout and All Clear by Connie Willis. She uses the metaphor of winning World War II against the Nazis, and the characters are four time traveling historical researchers who get stuck in 1940s England when they should have been returned to 2060s Cambridge to write their reports. The message is that World War II, or Civil Rights, or environmental protection or whatever, these battles for what is right are never won by one well-known hero with all the Right Stuff. Martin Luther King didn't win rights for negroes in the 1960s, though he had an outsize role--it was all kinds of work by millions of people that had an effect. item $7 on Donella's list is what you're doing with the blog, and this is critically important. Degrowth gets no traction in the US because most people haven't heard of it, and many of those who have think it means simply voluntary poverty. I think it's unlikely that enough education could happen, of the masses, to force a change against the will of the ruling class before collapse comes. But when it does, "what happens depends on the ideas that are lying around."
With respect, it doesn’t take 12 steps. It takes three.
First step: upgrade our common sense of the aims, character, circumstances and capacity of the mid-century modern social evolution of the trust form of ownership to innovate the social trust for provisioning the mutual aid societies of workforce pensions, and civil society endowments, to see that they now have, under the circumstances that have prevailed since the early 1980s, the capacity to use the personal computing technologies of spreadsheet math, desktop publishing and digital communication to allocate the money aggregated into those trusts through the financial mathematics of equity paybacks to an actuarial/fiduciary cost of money, plus opportunistic upside, from enterprise cash flows prioritized by contract for suitability of the technology to the circumstances prevailing at the time, longevity of the social contract between the enterprise and popular choice over time, and fairness in how the business does business all the time, to invest the money we entrust to their discretionary control for income as well as safety to assure income security in a dignified future to so many, directly, as a private benefit, that it is also, of necessity, for us all, consequently, as a public good.
Step two: rewrite our social narrative of being human, together, and apart, in society, through economy, using money, on a planetary scale, in the 21st Century, and beyond... by looking through the lens of fiduciary money allocated through equity paybacks from suitability, longevity and fairness, to unshackle ourselves from the imaginary in which we are now locked, that Growth, as the simple numerical increase in qualitatively undifferentiated transaction volumes measured in prices paid in money, from one period of measurement to the next, is both necessary and sufficient to the longevity of our wellbeing, so that we can cure ourselves of our current growth addiction and make ourselves more authentically growth-agnostic, through a new imaginary of the economy as a mutual aid society for sharing abundance through enterprise and exchange, individually and institutionally, through Civil Society, Finance, Enterprise and Politics.
Step three: innovate new social platforms for popular participation in curated conversations at the vanguard of public discourse about prudence and loyalty in the allocation of fiduciary money through the financial mathematics of equity paybacks: what technologies are suitable to our time? how long will current suitability continue, until times change and new beginnings must be chosen? what is fair in how business does business across the six vectors of fairness in business: Fair Trade; Fair Engagement; Fair Reckoning; Fair Working; Fair Dealing and Fair Sharing.
These three steps do require a lot of new learning “so that our wisdom becomes strong enough to destroy wrong thinking sustained by resistance to change” (Charlie Munger, late of Berkshire-Hathaway).
But learning is the most human thing we humans can do!
The hard part is finding the thing that will motivate people to want to engage in this particular new learning.