The Tragedy of Donella Meadow’s Thinking in Systems.

This week, I’ve been reading Donella Meadow’s Thinking in Systems, because I wanted to wrap my head around the ideas that involve systems thinking and understand it better. And until about halfway through the book, it was holding to some pretty basic examples, and it was doing a fine job of convincing me that it had valuable ideas.

There was one thing that gave me pause, but it wasn’t about her thinking. She writes about New England forestry, and how ever since the Civil War the industry there has experience a predictable 40-year cycle of boom and bust, because the entire industry is trapped in a prisoner’s dilemma: either they over-log and destroy the forests’ ability to produce lumber at a steady state, or they’re out-bid by their competitors who over-log, go under, and get bought by those some competitors. In hard times, some of them go under anyway, get bought, and create larger holdings, until those holdings are shattered by bankruptcy in the next cycle.

In this story, I want to understand the system that creates this problem: the political forces that prevent the lumber industry from collectively reaching an optimal “steady state” of forestry.

The book states that there are four common meta-states for any exploitation of a natural resource:

• an unharvested condition, in which humans aren’t exploiting it, and it produces at maximum


• the optimal harvest, in which we harvest from it at a state that leaves it capable of sustaining itself. It produces less than its natural state, but as much as it can and produce a constant harvest for humans.


• an over harvest, in which we harvest too much, its ability to reproduce new resources is damaged, the harvesters experience their own cut-back as a result, and then the resource recovers and new harvesters move in. This is the oscillating state.


• an excessive harvest, in which so much of the resource is cut out that it cannot recover, not in a meaningful amount of time as humans understand it. This is the collapsed state.

About halfway through the book, though, Meadows does start to get into the political questions that influence such systems, and this is where I wanted to throw the book against the wall.

Because Garett Hardin

Because she quotes Garett Hardin approvingly and enthusiastically, and she embraces his ideas.

Garrett Hardin wrote The Tragedy of the Commons. Most people have heard of it, but I’m going to tell you something you may not know: “The tragedy of the commons” did not, historically, exist. When Hardin wrote his essay, he invented the idea out of whole cloth, and his examples were entirely hypothetical.

Hardin invented the idea, and his examples, because he hated Black people.

Hardin was a straight up, unrepentant, loud and proud white supremacist. Meadows paraphrases one of his most offensive examples. She writes: “If every family can have any number of children it wants, but society as a whole has to support the cost of education, health care, and environmental protection for all children, the number of children born can exceed the capacity of society to support them all. (This is the example that caused Hardin to write his article.)”

It’s that parenthetical that caused my Book, Meet Wall moment.

Hardin wrote those ideas at a time when conversations about “How Black People Were Gonna Outbreed White People” was a part of daily conservative discourse. It was a meme that existed everywhere in the 1960s in rural and conservative America. It was on the radio, it was in church newsletters, it was every goddamned place. Hardin wrote The Tragedy of the Commons to convince white people not to succumb to an empathetic view of Black people, but instead that we, the master race, should be prepared for ecological disaster and must be prepared to “throw the lesser races overboard” if civilization was to survive. In the meantime, welfare and school lunches and all that were just setting the stage for making that collapse happen sooner.

Meadows is quoting that idea, and does so approvingly.

Commons were real. Tragedies about them aren’t.

“But the tragedy of the commons, that’s real, isn’t it?”

No. It’s not. When you say that, you’re “thinking like a state,” as historian James Scott puts it.

Go back to before the invention of capitalism and the regulatory state. The word “commons” is the antithesis of what you and I call a “resource.” A commons was a shared communal source of subsistence that everyone within walking distance of it recognized as their responsibility to nurture. Grazing land, water, timber, fishing, game, all the natural resources that could be over-harvested were managed by local collective consensus to ensure that they weren’t. The means for deciding how that resources was shared, harvested, and accounted were local, idiosyncratic, tied up in the local history and local ecology, often unwritten, and based on there being little inequality among the families involved in the commons’ sustainability.

Commons weren’t “tragic”; commons (the resource and the communal awareness of it) were literally the means by which a town-and-farm community tied to a valley, to a region of arable land, to a river, or to a seafront, managed to keep themselves alive for generation after generation.

That’s what a commons is.

Several inventions combined in the 18th century to destroy the commons: gunpowder gave princes a far greater reach over which to impose their will; cartography and the new sciences of measurement and statistics gave those same princes the ability to “understand” their realm as a physical entity; and finally the invention of the limited liability corporation, the ability to impose one’s will at a distance using only money, created a relationship between princes and their banks that required a steady, reliable, comprehensible and uniform way of accounting for it all. The commons, with their local, quirky, “nobody owns that, how will you tax that?” nature, had to go. It all had to be standardized so the state’s accountants could account for it.

The commons were enclosed: parceled off and privatized. Formally recognized as belonging to the local lordling, not the people who depended on it. Rents could be extracted, and resources could be mined, and if the resource was exhausted, oh well, that’s not the lordling’s concern; he just needs money, he doesn’t have to be too concerned with how the peasants get it.

The Benefit of the Doubt

Hardin took a word and turned it into an attack on minorities because he thought they were “lesser races” who didn’t deserve the “largesse” of white people (it wasn’t largesse at all; black slaves built a lot of the 19th century USA and didn’t get paid for it, and white people continue to reap benefits from what those black hands built).

Meadows quotes not just Hardin’s erroneous idea, but Hardin’s vicious racist reasoning behind the idea, couched in a generic language that belies the conversation Hardin was participating in, and makes it central to one of the points she’s making.

She goes further, too, quoting Hardin’s three “alternatives” to tragedy: Educate, Privatize, and Regulate. She writes:

Some “primitive” cultures have managed common resources effectively for generations through education and exhortation. Garrett Hardin does not believe that option is dependable, however. Common resources protected only by tradition or an “honor system” may attract those who do not respect the tradition or who have no honor. Privatization works more reliably than exhortation…

As Ivan Illich has pointed out (note: PDF), those “primitives” didn’t manage through education and exhortation; they managed through regulation, on a local scale. Meadows is giving in to modern thinking here, trapped in her own experiences about how natural resources are created and distributed. Local communities had a fixed and limited range; even with good roads, an ox-drawn wagon can’t travel more than 80 miles before the animal has eaten more food than the wagon can profitably haul, and that’s been part of the human condition since the invention of the ox-drawn wagon. Privatization is a modern and radical change in the way people use and think about natural resources, and during the European transition of the 19th century hundreds of thousands of peasants were transformed from “stewards of the land” into wage laborers, cast into poverty, and often left to starve.

I really, really want to believe this is a case of naivete. Meadows died in 2001, so we can’t ask her, but her general politics in the book is a fairly anodyne liberal sort, with comfortable nods toward alternative families and abortion rights and so forth. And I really want to believe that her editors, who were all academics of the economic, macro-sociological sort, were unfamiliar with the context or meaning behind Hardin’s work.

An egregious and offensive error this big damages any arguments the book might be making. And that’s unfortunate, because the basics about systems thinking, its purpose, modeling, and uses, are really valuable and generic. I just wish I hadn’t hit this speedbump, or that she’d written it quite so enthusiastically.

I ought to be a Sad Puppy.

No, I'm not a supporter of snot-nosed Vox Day's ridiculous and stupid campaign to overwrite the will of Hugo voters. I'm not going to say that he and his ilk deserve anything over than public opprobrium in the face of their self-serving and malign campaign to deprive the science fiction community of its next level up.

When it comes to what I like to read, well... I generally like what Baen has to offer. Sad, but true. I bounce off women writers more often than I do men, I like bad space opera and ridiculous tales of derring-do, and I cheer when the hero gets laid. One of my favorite writers is David Friggin Weber, which is about as silly as its sounds.

I'm a little more sensitive now that I was in my 20s. Admittedly, in my 20s I was living through the early Cyberpunk era and its post-New Wave backlash, which both embraced and attacked the mores and ethics of New Wave feminist SF 1970s. I wince if the story is too obviously written by a an old white guy who thinks a homogeneous, conservative version of Southern California in space!, where the men are men and the women are pliant, is paradise. But the truth is I'm an old white guy who likes reading stories written by other old white guys.

Which is why I really can't stand the Sad Puppy / Rabid Puppy thing at all. Look, boys, we're old. Like, really old. Kids these days are going to forge their own worlds, with their own stories, and there ain't a damn thing we can do about it. You can poison some awards processes and wreck a fine time you could have otherwise enjoyed. The kids will have this world long after we're gone, and the only thing we can do is try to hand off a world of faith, hope and caritas... or, in the case of the SP/RP crowd, a burning cinder, a hellscape fixed forever in a universe of pure hatred.

Nobody is stopping anyone from writing. No one is preventing you from buying John C. Wright's books. (I wouldn't encourage anyone to give Wright money, though; his hackneyed, ridiculous style would disqualify him long before we start discussing his manifest personal cruelty.)

Go ahead, write the swash and the buckle. Just remember that you're outnumbered. Your niche rose to prominence because of the privileges we white, English-speaking guys had in the early 20th century. But in the age of the Internet, you are outnumbered, you are a minority, and you are an embarrassment if you continue to write with the kind of deft wit and narrative grace that brought Ken Robeson or Victor Appleton fame.

I realized the other day that there's a line of thought in David Weber's Honor Harrington series that is never coherently explicated, but it's clearly there.

We, now, live in the Age of the Psychopath. Almost all the restraints that prevented psychopaths from clawing their way into positions of authority are gone; books and magazines on the subject remind us that one out of twenty people is a psychopath-- usually above average in intelligence, unrestrained by common communal or instinctual fear or guilt about mistreating others, and in our hyperindividualized culture, plunked down straight into a mass population of ready victims. Most psychopaths aren't like those in the movies; they're not murderers, for example, because they're mostly above average in intelligence and know that's a crime they're unlikely to get away with.

One of the premises of the Manticoran system is that of entailment, the idea that there is an inherited nobility, with inherited responsibilities and rights, that cannot be transferred out of a family. And one of the follow-on premises is that the nobility, with their own house in Parliament, is a firewall against psychopaths.

If a significant amount of power in the government rests with the House of Lords, and the House of Lords is made up of men and women who inherit their positions from their progenitors, then it follows that, unlike the House of Commons, the House of Lords is made up of a population that, by now, has the same number of psychopaths as the general population.

That's not to say that psychopaths won't rise to the role of Whip, or some other leadership role within the House of Lords, but the house itself is made up mostly of neurotypicals. And their main job is to be a brake as the House of Commons barrels along, determined to make the concentration of wealth and power by means indistinguishable from sadism.

There was an outbreak on Twitter this morning of quotes around the classic, classic film, Heavy Metal, which is one of my all-time favorite movies. But the outbreak had me thinking about an important issue, which is writing comedy.

Almost all comedy emerges from a disputation of power. In the classic man vs. man or man vs. nature, for example, comedy emerges when a man tries and fails to overcome a problem because of overreach fueled by arrogance and ignorance. A classic example is, to use television, fromSeinfeld when Kramer tried to adapt his bathtub for better waterflow in defiance of his landlord’s requirement to reduce water use; he lacked understanding of the problem and arrogantly assumed he knew how to fix it; the resulting flood of his entire apartment was consequently funny. Other classic sources of comedy come from the Upstairs/Downstairs mould of television, where the powerful are never torn down, but are routinely shown up as incompetent and undeserving of their status by their cleverer underlings. Even The Argument Sketch from Monty Python is all about the two characters attempting to powerplay each other, each cleverly looking for a way to either needle or deflect the other’s jibe, to put the other man “under.”

Which is why there’s a moment in Heavy Metal‘s “Lincoln F. Sternn” segment that once seemed funny, but now dies like a landed fish. The scene is supposed to be comic. Sternn is on trial for being a very bad man, and his list of achievements is impressive. ”Lincoln Sternn, you stand here accused of 12 counts of murder in the first degree, 14 counts of armed theft of Federation property, 22 counts of piracy in high space, 18 counts of fraud, 37 counts of rape, and one moving violation.” The prosecutor pauses after every count to let it sink in. The “camera” (Heavy Metal is animated) looks over the bored judge, the restless jury, the steely-eyed prosecutor. When the prosecutor reads the rape charge, the camera focuses on Sternn… whose smile broadens knowingly.

That used to be considered humor. It’s funy, because, see, we all know that, while, legally, rape is, like, a bad thing, Sternn is such a manly man that, well, he was just putting women in their proper place in the power structure, and it’s not like he killed them or anything, he was just doing what a man does.

The women in that scene aren’t human beings; they’re merely pawns.

Once you live in a world where men and women are equals, it stops being funny. Instead, it comes across as horrifying, and Sternn’s consequential escape from justice (as well as the murder of his henchman) loses all comic impetus. Then again, so does getting away with murder.

Thought #1

The other day, I was casually playing Zuma (that stupidly addictive game from PopCap) when it suddenly hit me: the scene in Monty Python's Meaning of Life where the American tourists at a restaurant, given a selection of "topic cards" about which to converse while their meal is prepared, attempt their hands at philosophy, eventually handing the cards back with the comment, "Waiter, this conversation isn't very good."

While I get the surface of the joke, the underlying commentary that, sometimes, it is the customer that fails the meal at the restaurant. The restauranters have to deal with, not "poor" customers, but customers who just don't get it. I can appreciate now what Cleese was writing there.

Thought #2

While listening to Linkin Park in the car, I suddenly realized that the cargo vessels in David Weber's Honorverse were very poorly designed. The idea that the ships are "giant skins of metal stretched around a hyperdrive core" is ridiculous: why aren't they designed more like the Nostromo?

The hyperdrive core could dock with a containerization platform that can be loaded and integrated independently of the hyperdrive. The cartels could load and prepare the cargo completely independent of the n-space impeller and h-space "sails." A cargo vessel could drop a cargo into orbit with automated minimal station-keeping, or turn it over to a small, local station-keeping engine, and immediately turn around and pick up an outbound cargo (or empty containers, which could even be folded into a low-profile configuration, given that Weber's ships have pseudo-inertia in hyperspace propotionate to their hull diameter) and head back out without all that faffing about planets. The cartels already have massive infrastructure for moving cargo surface–to–orbit; a few small local ships to reduce hyperspace turnaround to nil would result in huge operational savings.

The first merchant cartel to introduce containerized cargo transport on the Terra—Manticore—New Potsdam run is going to destroy the competition.

Admittedly, this would have made Honor Among Enemies (the one where she commands a cargo vessel) a much more difficult novel to write.

I've been re-reading some old "How to write sex and romance" books that I have on my shelves, and the first one, Writing Romances," edited by Rita Gallagher and Rita Clay Estrada, may have had some good things to say about the genre, but is so sadly outdated that it fails to convey the modern market. The rise of the anonymous erotica romance makes all of the advice about subtletly and "this isn't soft-corn porn" seem trite and pointless. But it was Helen Myer's advice that really made want to throw the book across the room.

In a section entitled "The Love Scene," Myers tells us: "These are monogamous couples with healthy, sexual relationships. Mores and morals matter to these people, which challenges critics who label these books as soft pornography."

Uh, no. To claim that "mores and morals" are a challenge to pornography is to miss the point of pornography, and worse, leave no breathing room at all for that vast tract of writing known as erotica. Does it not exist, or can we admit that it exists on a continuum than envelops both the universe of romance novels and vast tracts of the the porniverse as well? To say that pornography writers write in a universe without morals is to say that pornographers write in a universe without plot; the two are inextricably entwined. Characters want, others oppose them, these conflicts keep the reader returning to an author or a series long after the sex has become routinized.

I've read romance where the passion is flat and drab and meanders across the page, and I've read erotica where there's no plot and no morals. (The latter often involves a lot of misogyny, surprise that.) Few people want to read much of that. But don't tell me that good pornography doesn't invoke questions of morals and mores.

What Ms. Myers is telling us, really, is that only in the monogamous sexual paradigm do love, romance, and respect intertwine. (I maintain the old-fashioned idea that having a solid set of working morals and hewing to them is the only source of self-respect.) She seems to have missed forseeing the rise of the polyamory/romance/erotica series coming out of the usual publishing houses these days. Well, we can't all be prophets.

Edwin Friedman was a rabbi and family counselor who published a highly influential book, Generation To Generation, about family therapy. The book is little known in secular circles, but pastoral counselors and especially chaplains know his work well.

Friedman's biggest contribution to family therapy is the diagnosis of the dysfunctional family as one full of peace-makers, who, by encouraging people to swallow their own wants and needs and instead learn how to "get along," bury rage and anguish and confrontation when those qualities are actually needed. What a family needs in these situations, he writes, is a leader, someone who can stand apart from the rest and say, "This is what we are as a family. This is where we're headed. This is how we'll get there. If you're not with this, tough." The leader, Friedman writes, leads by example, and by stamina-- by never giving in to the sabotage the most codependent members of the household engage in, as they try to suck the family back into the ennui of "just getting along."

What's fascinating to me is that Friedman sounds a lot like family therapy a'la Ayn Rand. "Selfhood" and "knowing where you stand" and "unflinching attention to reality" are big mantras with Friedman. It's very heady stuff.

And yet, his watchwords are about cohesion, altruism and community. He writes about the challenge of being what we would call now "the adult in the room," the mature person who refuses to participate in drama, but remains connected sufficient to both exemplify a principled and mature life and guide those he's trying to reach toward the goal.

How Rand and Friedman, both writing at about the same time, started from the premise the the average individual fails at differentiating himself, his principles, from the drama and emotional miasma of others-- fails at becoming a mature human being-- and arrive at two wholly different conclusions, one tragic, the other humane, is one of the great mysteries of the 20th century.

I don't write nonfiction, but if I did, I'd be offended at how bad the EPUB 2.0 editions of various ... For Dummies books are. I recently bought two, Genetics for Dummies and Bioinformatics for Dummies, and the translation from paper to digital is awful.

Subsection headers are frequently cut off. Images are rendered poorly, and (at least on the Nook) do not zoom. Worst of all, the index is corrupt. Although the table of contents seems to work fine, when you advance through the pages with the slider, all they ever say is "Introduction" and "There are 174 pages left in this section."

Nobody quality tested these books. Look, just because they're advanced topics unlikely to sell millions of copies does not mean you can afford to skimp on them.

In an article on the front page of the New York Times, a reporter included a quote from a French nobleman that he and his peers "must carry the values of nobility, set an example, and prove [to be] irreproachable."

What's with the "[to be]" inserted in there? Did the editor feel that the readers of the Times wouldn't know what "to prove irreproachable" meant? The meaning of "prove" here is synonymous with "exemplify"; is that use so archaic that people need translation?

So, I was re-reading Ethan of Athos, and between its original publication and now, the world has changed. For one thing, the arc of homosexual acceptance has seriously accelerated; the harassment Ethan suffers seems trite and perfunctory now.

But more than that, for reasons not worth going into for spoilery reasons, one of the other major characters needs to consume a lot of taurine to redacted. Much of the book is occupied with how Ethan and Ellie will get their hands on that much taurine. And as I was reading it, I turned the can over in my hand and asked, "Couldn't they just have gone and bought a case of Red Bull?"