One of the great pleasures in life is to browse around a good bookshop. I picked up a great book at the Columbia University bookshop last month. It was a primer on systems thinking by the late Donella Meadows, a scientist and systems analyst who was lead author of the 1972 book The Limits to Growth.
Dana, as she was known, was one of those early environmentalists who suggested that there are limits to human consumption. Her book was finished in 1993, but it took her friends nearly seven years to complete the editing after she died in 2001.
Her book is full of simple stories on why there is an internal logic to systems. It begins with a quotation from Robert Pirsig, author of the 1970s cult classic, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: 'If a revolution destroys a government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves ... There's so much talk about the system. And so little understanding.'
The way we think defines our world. Classic teachers, such as Aristotle or Confucius, taught not on specific subjects, but offered wide-ranging thoughts on man and nature. Today's students are taught to be specialists. We know more and more about less and less. Classical philosophers knew less about much more.
As specialists, we think more narrowly and partially, using models of the world that have many assumptions, which could be patently false. In economics, the most basic assumption is 'other things being equal'. In life, other things are often not equal. If the assumption is wrong, the theory is wrong. Macroeconomics went wrong because much of its theory did not add up.
As an environmentalist, Dana defined a system as an interconnected set of elements that is coherently organised for a function or purpose. A system is more than the sum of its parts, which exhibits adaptive, dynamic, goal-seeking, self-preserving, self-organising and evolutionary behaviour. Societies are complex systems with their own logic and inconsistencies.
She illustrates this with a coiled spring toy which can 'walk itself' downstairs. If you tilt the spring at the top of the stairs, the coil tilts over into the step, pulls itself and tilts over the next step. It is the tension in the spring that gives it its motion. In other words, our action releases behaviour that is latent in the structure of the spring - and it walks itself down the stairs.