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chaitanyasethi 's review for:
Thinking in Systems: A Primer
by Donella H. Meadows
I found this book because it was briefly mentioned in Kate Raworth's Doughnut Economics. There was a link to a fantastic lecture by Donella Meadows and that brought me to this book. And voilà.
The central idea, as suggested in the title, is that the world is full of complex systems and it's far more important to be able to figure out how to tweak the system rather than playing around with knobs and buttons. For eg. the recession part of the business cycle will not go away just by toying around with interest rates. It's more important to understand the behaviour of the economic cycle to figure out why recession comes and goes in waves and how to see it coming from prior experience. As a 'textbook', this is very accessible. I wish more academic texts were written in such a language where you don't need any prior experience with technology, science, economics, or sociology to be able to comprehend the point being made.
That aside, I do wish it gave at least 2-3 examples of systems where applied thinking from this book brought about a change because this book just introduces the idea and the ways to modify a system, without actually showing how it could be done, which, in my mind, diminishes the book as a possible policy formation tool. I have to content myself by considering this as more of a philosophical tool to view the world around.
The central idea, as suggested in the title, is that the world is full of complex systems and it's far more important to be able to figure out how to tweak the system rather than playing around with knobs and buttons. For eg. the recession part of the business cycle will not go away just by toying around with interest rates. It's more important to understand the behaviour of the economic cycle to figure out why recession comes and goes in waves and how to see it coming from prior experience. As a 'textbook', this is very accessible. I wish more academic texts were written in such a language where you don't need any prior experience with technology, science, economics, or sociology to be able to comprehend the point being made.
That aside, I do wish it gave at least 2-3 examples of systems where applied thinking from this book brought about a change because this book just introduces the idea and the ways to modify a system, without actually showing how it could be done, which, in my mind, diminishes the book as a possible policy formation tool. I have to content myself by considering this as more of a philosophical tool to view the world around.