The Sad State of American Politics! Can Complexity Theory Shed Any Light?

Obviously our country, the strongest and most prosperous in the world, has become unable to govern itself. We certainly face real and serious problems that need urgent attention. However even with the urgency and importance of each of these issues I cannot convince myself that they are so intractable that they must lead us into total gridlock of our political system.

Before going any further I want to assure you that this is not a political rant or a simple ten step solution. Rather it is a somewhat “out of the box” view of today’s world based on my amateur understanding of complexity theory.

My thinking began with the observation that we were deadlocked on such a broad spectrum of issues. The issues I am thinking of include such matters as healthcare, foreign policy, the Middle East, education, defense and unemployment. (I specifically do not include social and faith based issues like abortion, privacy, and genetic research.)

I speculated that there might be some property they all shared, some kind of “meta-reason”, that might provide some insight. Strangely enough the only answer I came up with was the rather simplistic observation that they were all extremely complex .

At that point I began to understand if and how complexity theory might shed light on the matter. I will skip through my reasoning and list a few of the observations and conclusions I came to. I warn you in advance that they are counter-intuitive, disturbing and annoying. I will list the “Seven Deadly Properties” without providing the deeper discussion they deserve.

No one understands or can explain how a complex system works.
No one can predict how a complex system will evolve over time.
Seemingly small and minor outside events can have a huge impact on a complex system. (The shooting of the Duke of Sarajevo causing WWI is a good example.)
“Common sense” rules like “cause & effect”, linearity/proportionality, even defining a desirable outcome don’t apply. These ways of looking at problems, that we are so used to, not only won’t work for complex systems, they will lead us astray every time and not prove at all helpful!
Complex systems left to their own devices with little or no outside regulation cannot be counted on to reach a beneficial, and certainly not optimal state, that we would regard as beneficial. (In brief, this is not necessarily because of malevolent or bad behavior. It happens because complex system are made up of thousands of groups with millions of people making decisions each day to benefit the groups they work for. Neither the individuals not the groups they work for can possibly predict how their well-intentioned actions will impact the larger system.)
In a complex system the “best mousetrap” cannot be counted on to win! This runs contrary to what your parents taught you but there are enough examples that should convince you how often this happens. Consider for example, the typewriter keyboard we use every day that was chosen because it was the slowest typing keyboard design when the typewriter was invented. That’s a well known fact among keyboard aficionados, yet because of the complexities of the typewriter industry it will never be replaced! There are many other examples, both humorous and serious.
Finally two laws of the universe that have not been given enough attention are at play in every complex system. First is “Murphy’s Law” that says that if anything can go wrong it will. This is as inviolable as the law of gravity and far too frequently overlooked. The impact of this law on a complex system cannot be overestimated. The second is the “Law of Unintended Consequences” which states that an action taken for apparently good and valid reasons may have one or more completely unintended consequences.

There is a lot more to be said about each of these properties to explain the reasoning behind each one. Sufficive to say they are each extremely important if to understand the complexity we must deal with.

As I observed earlier these properties, while they are absolutely true, are completely counterintuitive, hard to accept and all in all really annoying (to use polite language). We must deal with them if we are to realize our potential.

I suggest you take a little while to ruminate about each of these assertions, apply them to today’s problems and start the process of thinking about their serious implications. Taken together they mean that we as individuals and our government are using outmoded ways of thinking. Worse yet the way we are thinking and operating is pretty much guaranteed to make things worse!

You can ask how did things get this way. Just a few examples will help. In colonial times businessmen would gather under a mulberry tree to invest in each other’s businesses and lend money to each other. It was very simple. Things progressed from there and became what we now call “Wall Street” which as we all know no one understands because of its complexity.

You can ask just when did the simple mulberry tree financial system become complex? Disturbingly the answer is “Who knows”? To to paraphrase a Wall Street metaphor a bell doesn’t ring when a system becomes complex. It just happens!

One more example, out of many. You can look at cars up to about the 40's and you would understand how they worked. You could see each major system, the electrical system, brakes, steering, suspicion, etc. and if you were a bit handy, you might be able to fix them yourself! The engineer who designed them could explain everything about how the car worked.

Now have a look under the engine of your car and see if you can spot any of the systems that make up the car. With at least 30 computers in the car each with software doing who knows what, no one including the designers can give you a full explanation of what’s going on. From the Model T to today’s latest cars to future driverless cars, the slow progression from very simple to very complex takes place unnoticed but gives rise to a different way of thinking and operating.

Political Complexity in Action

To get an idea of the importance of complexity in politics we need to look at some real world examples.

Finance and Banking

First let’s think about what we’ll look at our financial system. It’s daunting to prepare a list of all the players. To mention just a few: banks, stock exchanges, ‘dark pools’, commodity markets, hedge funds, mortgage companies, private equity companies, hedge funds, payday lenders, US Treasury, Federal Reserve, SEC, lawyers, accountants, research firms, newsletters, insurance companies, media companies, the every branch of the federal government, state agencies, and on and on and on.

In each of these categories there there may be thousands of individual companies who employ millions of people. These institution all interact with each other. Imagine taking a gigantic piece of paper, placing a circle to designate each player and then drawing lines between the players that deal with each other frequently. Finally realize that many of these companies have thousands of employees, many of whom make consequential decisions every day. (It’s an unpleasant truth that not all these players play by the rules. Every political system has “bad players” who can at times have a large impact By their nature they are unpredictable.)

The whole thing is somewhat akin to the popular game of “How Many Steps to Kevin Bacon?” Anyone who plays the game is surprised that it usually takes only six steps. More significantly, the path it takes is surprising and unpredictable. and one or more of the links are through people who never knew Kevin Bacon.

In a similar way when an action is taken by a player in the financial system it ripples through the system in unpredictable ways taking an unpredictable route. Stop now and ask yourself several questions:

How can anyone ever hope to understand how this system works?
What measures would you use to tell if the system is working “properly”?
If you changed a law or a regulation what would happen?
If you let the system run, so to speak’ where will it go!
What should be done to make the system better? In fact, what do you mean by better?

These questions are so hard they seem to be silly. They would be meaningful in your day to day financial decision making but they are completely useless applied to a complex system.

Scary, isn’t it?

There are some conclusions you can reach that are important:

It is beyond absurd for anyone to make a useful contribution to our understanding in a bumper sticker, sound-bite, slogan, tweet, or short TV interview.
Every action to improve the system or remedy a problem is almost certain to have unintended consequences. That is as the system undergoes change unpredictable