#6 Econfusionomics Part 2: How we think about the economy

One of the big things that confuses me about economics is the way we tend to think and talk about it. It’s confusing that we can be so confused about what an ‘economy’ is.

How we think about the economy matters, because it influences our decisions in many areas of our lives, from small everyday choices around spending, saving and giving, all the way to big life decisions, career choices and political preferences.

In 2017, the charity now known as ‘Our Economy’ published a research report called ‘Exploring How People Feel About Economics‘, capturing their findings from speaking with over 5,000 people. The second part of the report, ‘Understanding “the economy”‘, is based upon 35 hour-long interviews all with people sharing ‘a sense of disengagement from economics
communication’. From these interviews, the authors identify two different mental models people tend to use when thinking about the economy.

The report itself gives a great summary of what mental models are but, in short, a mental model of something is the idea we have in mind when we think about that thing. It is the way we imagine the thing to be, or the way we envisage it as working. The two mental models of the economy are:

Like a personal or household budget, but on a large scale (e.g. Britain’s economy is like a budget for the whole of Britain)
A relative state of ability, health or worth (e.g. Britain’s economy is a sort of state-of-play of how well things are going for Brits, relative to other times and other places)

Mental models are useful because they simplify things that are too complex to hold in our minds, and enable us to think about and interact with things even if we don’t fully understand them. For example, I don’t fully understand my car, but with my mental model of it as something that needs petrol and is controlled in the way I learned, I make an adequate driver. My mental model helps me get by without having to learn engineering, physics and chemistry, and without having to train as a car mechanic. Equally, we rely on our mental models of the economy to get by without having studied economics.

There is a risk, though, that a mental model might not fully align with reality, and might therefore cause problems for us when it informs our actions. If my mental model of all cars was that they use diesel and have automatic gearboxes, things aren’t going to be pretty when I try to fuel up and take a drive in a petrol car with a manual gearbox. Similarly, there is a risk that our mental models of the economy might lead us astray.

The economy as a budget

It’s understandable why many of us would conceive of the economy as a kind of macro-budget:

It is common for the media and politicians to refer to ‘gross domestic product’ or ‘GDP’ when talking about the state of the economy, and this is a single number in a currency. In 2022, the UK’s GDP was £2.2 trillion. Looks kind of like a huge budget, right?
People often talk about money or value ‘going into’ or being ‘taken out of’ the economy, just like money can go into and out of our bank accounts and impact our household budget.
The government can borrows money and can have debts to pay, just as households can.

Despite these similarities, this mental model leads us astray because an economy, even when measured by GDP, is less like a big pot of money and more like a huge machine with lots of moving parts, where money is just one of the things being chucked around in it. As such, if we think of the economy as being like a household budget, we might overlook all the things relevant to an economy that aren’t just the sum of money moving around in it. We might forget the people, what they’re doing, the reasons they’re doing it, the value of what they’re doing (whether in money or not), and how value and money is moving among them. And forgetting about these things seems like forgetting about a lot that is relevant to our decisions and actions.

Perhaps more alarmingly, even a government budget doesn’t work like a household budget, and so we’re making a huge mistake if we believe that governments should manage their spending and borrowing just like households must in order to ‘live within their means’. Positive Money have a good article explaining this. Given the dire impacts of austerity in the UK, a political choice that was misrepresented as sensibly ‘living within our means’, it is not an overstatement to say that the ‘household budget’ mental model has helped legitimise a significant degree of unnecessary hardship and suffering. (The Wikipedia article on the UK government’s austerity programme gives a detailed overview of the impacts, while this Guardian article captures more personal stories from citizens and workers.)

The economy as a state of health, ability or worth

It’s also understandable why many of us would have the second mental model, conceiving of the economy as a relative state of ability, health or worth:

Media headlines and summaries often assert how week or poorly the economy is doing, or compare whether it’s doing better or worse than at other times in the past, or better or worse than the economies of other nations.
Political campaigning and debating often focuses on whether doing something would be good or bad for the economy.
As mentioned earlier, claims about economic performance or health often focus around one number: ‘gross domestic product’ or ‘GDP’, and we’re often just told how much it’s gone up or down by, with up considered good and down considered bad.
When we’re told things are going badly for the economy, this tends to come along with things not going so well for people (jobs are lost, businesses close, we can’t afford as much), and when we’re told things are going well in the economy, this tends to come along with things going well for people (jobs pay well, businesses survive and thrive, we can afford more).

All of this does suggest that the economy is some sort of needle or dial moving up and down, indicating how well or poorly we’re doing, how good or bad things are, or how healthy and stable our situation is.

This is not perhaps as damaging as the budget mental model can be. It’s not entirely inaccurate either; measurement and comparison really is the backbone of most economics and talk of the economy, so it’s possible we’d barely mention the economy if we weren’t interested in how well or poorly a bunch of people were collectively doing.

However, what this mental model does mask is the sheer depth of detail and breadth of potential that underlies any particular measurement of how well or poorly an ‘economy’ is doing.

There is an excellent article here on The Conversation that gives a great insight into the complexities of ‘measuring’ an economy, highlights the flaws of GDP as a measure, and surveys the emerging alternatives. If we think the economy is ‘just’ a measure of how well or poorly we’re doing, we risk allowing social progress to be represented by a number or indicator that masks all of the complexity lying behind it, such as:

What is and isn’t measured.
How it’s measured.
How the things measured are linked to ‘progress’.
How we’re defining ‘progress’.
What the impact of the measurement will be; how it will impact our understanding of progress and how it will inform decisions and actions.

And if we overlook these details, we might be tempted, in the midst of all the talk of GDP and the economy, to think that there just is some objective and clear-cut thing that we call ‘the economy’ and that GDP is the one scientifically rigorous measure of that thing.

But this is far from the case. Because for each of the details listed above there is a choice to be made. Contrary to what would seem to be the case from the way politicians and the media tend to talk, what constitutes ‘the economy’ and how we measure it really is in the eye of the beholder; how we do it now is a choice, and that choice has consequences – it’s well within our ability to make a different choice and change those consequences.

#5 Econfusionomics Part 1: Introduction

Photo by Monstera: https://www.pexels.com/photo/bag-of-dollars-against-blue-background-5849587/

Around four years ago, I said goodbye to the world of academic philosophy and tried my hand at something different, which happened to be management consulting. Where philosophy had been about applying structured thinking in order to understand things better, consulting was more about applying structure in both thought and action in order to act more effectively. So I started to focus less on how the way we think affects our understanding of something, and more on how the way we think affects the way we actually behave and act in the world.

Given this, it’s no surprise that I became fascinated with economics. So much of how our lives play out, both in our day-to-day activities and our broader lifetimes, is governed by the economic situation we find ourselves in. How we spend our time, who we spend it with, what impact we have on the world and other people, how long we live, our quality of life, our degree of freedom, our degree of control; all of this and more is heavily impacted by, if not dictated by, our economic situation. And when I say ‘economic situation’, I’m using it in a broader than usual sense, not just to mean our financial circumstances, but to mean everything that comprises the particular economic system we find ourselves in, including things like the way we trade tokens we call ‘money’, the conventions we uphold concerning ‘property’, and the social norms we have around what is considered ‘work’ and what isn’t.

I was hoping to finish a whole post covering several things that confuse me about economics, but I’ve already missed my own deadline for posting something in February! So this will do for now, and I’ll cover each confusing thing in the posts to follow.

#4 A now-in-my-thirties-father-to-a-one-year-old sort of a resolution

It’s a bizarre experience to return this blog and see the dates against the measly total of three posts I managed to turn out, the last one arriving in September 2021, over an entire year ago!

The delay isn’t entirely surprising. Not only do I have a history of starting projects like blogs and then abandoning them after they inevitably tail off, I started one of the most involved projects you can undertake in December 2021: I became a Dad!

Understandably, life is rather different and blogging doesn’t feature high on the list of priorities when it comes to necessities like nappy changing, feeding and bathing, nor when it comes to the absolute joys of playing, reading board-books, exploring the world, and generally taking the opportunity to be a silly weirdo in the name of entertaining a small human.

Still, I retain a bugging eagerness to write things, and I think this blog remains the right platform; it’s public and ‘published’ enough that there’s a degree of pressure to refine what I’m saying beyond a cryptic note-to-self, but it’s hidden-away and unofficial enough that I needn’t care too much about it. On that second point, I am keenly aware that publishing anything to the internet effectively means be that you can be held accountable for what you’ve said for eternity. But that in itself hits upon something I’d like to feel better about: being confident writing something down, or saying something, that you feel happy to commit yourself to being held accountable for the rest of your life.

That took an unexpectedly deep/dark turn, given that my purpose at the outset of this post was just to say this:

I’m resolving to write one blog post per month this calendar year. I’m not usually one for new-year’s resolutions, but turning 30 and now being father to an actual human one-year-old both seem to have squeezed something, and this is one direction the pressure is bursting out in. (This blog is also great for practising strange metaphors.) Call it a now-in-my-thirties-father-to-a-one-year-old sort of a resolution.

There are a few things I’m hoping to marshall some thoughts on, which may or may not include:

More on ‘design’: overdesign and underdesign, design versus evolution.
Being socially ‘atomised’ in the modern world.
Why economics is so confusing.

#3 Personal Responsibility

I recently listened to an episode of Moral Maze on ‘Personal Responsibility’. Essentially it was a debate over whether personal responsibility was a good thing we should encourage more of, or a not-so-good thing we should re-evaluate or de-prioritise.

My goodness it was a mess. From what I can remember, one side was arguing that getting people to take personal responsibility is not only a legitimate expectation we should all have of one another, more so than we currently do, but also that it is empowering to give people greater personal responsibility, as it helps people to help themselves. Meanwhile, the other side were arguing that what we hold people personally responsible for needs to be dialled back, because we don’t live in a true meritocracy, and much of someone’s personal life situation is determined by factors entirely outside of their control, so it would be unfair to hold them personally responsible for that.

It doesn’t take a genius to see that both of these things can be true; that it can be good to give a person more responsibility, and also be the case that much of that person’s situation is outside of their control and should be treated as such. So why did the debate play out as if these were incompatible, exclusive scenarios?

Reflecting on it since, I think there are two different things we might mean when we say ‘personal responsibility’. And I think it’s the conflation of these two different things that leads to such muddled debate. Only once we clearly distinguish between these distinct elements of ‘personal responsibility’ can we see how the aforementioned scenarios are compatible, and where the debate faltered.

Two Elements of Responsibility

I think there are two different things we might mean when we say someone is ‘responsible’ for something. Sometimes we might mean both together.

1. Accountability

First, when someone is responsible for something, it generally also means they’re held ‘accountable’ for that thing. If the thing goes well, it’s that person’s achievement, and if it goes badly, it’s their fault. To be accountable is to be expected to do something, and to be liable for the consequences of succeeding or failing.

2. Capability

This second meaning is slightly more hidden and less emphasised. When someone is described as a ‘very responsible person’, it generally means they’re very ‘capable’ of doing what might be required or expected of them. It means they’re a safe pair of hands if you want to entrust something to them, or leave it in their care. It’s also what is meant when a person is given ‘increased responsibility’. It’s not just that more is expected of that person, but that they are given greater freedoms or more authority to make them ‘capable’ of meeting those expectations.

Empowerment Versus Expectation

It’s not difficult to see that accountability and capability must come together for genuine personal responsibility. But it’s also easy to overlook this or confuse them, and I think that’s what we do a lot of the time.

More specifically, I think we mistake mere accountability for responsibility, without realising that the crucial second element of capability is lacking or absent.

Accountability without capability is problematic because it sets an expectation that someone will do something, but without empowering them to do it. This happens if you give a shop assistant the responsibility of locking up without giving them the keys. Or if you set speed limits without putting up any signs showing the limit. Or if you tell people they must recycle but provide no bins.

Accountability with capability is true responsibility, because it simultaneously sets an expectation and empowers one to achieve it. It’s what happens when you’re promoted to a role with responsibility for improving a team’s performance, and you’re given the authority to set strategy and make changes to achieve that. Or when you’re expected to achieve a certain grade, and you’re given access to all of the resources and teaching hours you reasonably require to reach that level. Or when you’re expected to manage your own finances, and you have access to all of the accurate information you need to make informed choices and decisions.

Accountability with capability is simply delivering on both sides of the deal. Something is expected of you, and in return you are given the tools you need to fulfil those expectations.

There’s a clear and obvious injustice to accountability without capability. It’s unreasonable to hold people responsible for not living up to expectations that it’s not within their power to meet. And yet this injustice is pervasive in the so-called ‘meritocracy’ we find ourselves in.

Misunderstanding Meritocracy

When politicians in the UK talk about making our society fairer, more equal and more balanced, the word ‘meritocracy’ usually isn’t far behind. The idea of a ‘meritocracy’ is that people are able to progress, achieve and reap rewards through the application of their personal talents, skills and effort. It’s roughly ‘you get out what you put in’, which is probably a mantra we all live by in one respect or another, to some degree or other. On the surface, it makes sense and does seem reasonably fair.

Regardless of whether or not a perfect meritocracy is something we should aspire to, the way in which we purport to make our institutions ‘meritocratic’ is misguided. It’s misguided because it employs the confused notion of personal responsibility we covered above, of accountability without capability, which brings expectation without also delivering empowerment.

We seem to think we can make our institutions meritocratic by ‘leveling the playing field’ purely when it comes to expectations. Under this way of thinking, universities are meritocratic so long as they have the same entry requirements of all students. Hiring is meritocratic so long as the position is advertised externally and all applicants are equally considered. The allocation of funding and awards is meritocratic so long as the judging criteria are the same for all candidates. The idea is that everyone is held equally accountable for the same things. Everyone is held to the same expectations.

What this misses entirely is the unlevel playing field when it comes to how much we’re each empowered with the capability to meet those expectations. It misses any privilege we benefit from which brings things within an easier grasping distance, and any disadvantage we suffer which removes things from easy reach. It ignores benefits from money spent on extra home tutoring and well resourced private schooling, and ignores any challenges from racism, sexism, implicit biases, hunger, lack of access to resources, and lack of time, space and support for learning.

A true meritocracy would need to level this playing field of empowerment or capability, to ensure that everyone is equally as empowered and capable of meeting the expectations they’re held accountable for.

Of course, the factors which create divergence between our different levels of empowerment or capability are myriad, complex and in many cases deeply engrained, so it’s no easy task to level that playing field. This is why we see more conscious institutions choosing to mitigate for the unlevel playing field, rather than level it. A single institution can’t control for the extent to which a person has been empowered or made capable in their life so far, but they can control the expectations they set. As such, we see some institutions moderating their expectations in line with people’s individual situations, as when universities give different or unconditional offers to students they deem to be at a disadvantage.

This is surely better than nothing, but it really is a very poor mitigation for a very large problem in the grand scheme of things. It’s a sticking plaster on a severed head. The root of the problem is the messy and wide ranging inequality of empowerment in every kind of dimension of life you could imagine. And that can only be thoroughly addressed by rebalancing the empowerment itself.

But as long as leaders are able to peddle a misguided notion personal responsibility in terms of accountability alone (without capability), and a view of meritocracy as equality of expectation (without equality of empowerment), it’ll be all too easy for them to look as if they’re fighting for meritocratic fairness while they’re actually leaving real structural inequality entirely untouched.

Expectation over empowerment in Conservative policy

Not only is there a danger of structural inequality being left untouched, there’s a real danger of it being cemented and exacerbated. We need only look at relatively recent Tory policy to see this in action.

Austerity, for example, put the onus on citizens to ‘do the same, with less’. To some, it effectively said, ‘you’ll still need to get that job to feed your family, but without your local library for support and assistance‘. And to some it said ‘you’ll still need to feed your family, but with less money than we were giving you before‘. In fact, as the cost of living has risen and incomes have fallen, the cuts imposed by austerity have effectively demanded that citizens ‘do more, with less’ (as made abundantly clear in this 2012 Oxfam briefing paper). This holds true even while employment has risen, with people having to work more to maintain their income, and many having to absorb the impacts of uncertain hours and limited rights on zero-hours contracts. Under austerity, expectations have increased while empowerment has withered.

One of the clearest examples of expectation trumping empowerment is the implementation of universal credit. Whereas the previous goal had been to pay benefits within 2 weeks of a claim, universal credit was effectively designed with a built in waiting period of 6 weeks, as described here:

UC’s Long Hello comprises a seven day waiting period (an arbitrary period during which a the claimant is not entitled to any award), followed by a Regular Assessment Period of one month (which determines how much the claimant should be paid), and then a further week (or longer if there are administrative problems) for the payment to go through.
Patrick Butler, ‘Debt and food banks: the legacy of universal credit’s Long Hello‘, The Guardian, 9th June 2016

Unsurprisingly, the promise of cash in 6 weeks’ time is not particularly helpful if you’re in need of cash within the next month. And given the way the world works, payments on pretty important things like, say, a place to live or food to eat, tend to be due within the month the costs are incurred, if not sooner (e.g., immediately, at the supermarket till). As detailed in the same article, many claimants ended up in rent arrears, seeking debt advice and relying on charity food parcels in order to see them through the 6 week wait.

More than just a naïve design choice, the 6 week wait time is a clear example of expectation trumping empowerment. Rather than empowering claimants to help themselves by providing the resources they need as soon as possible, the implementation of universal credit said ‘we expect you to survive for another 6 weeks without any of those resources’.

If you need further evidence that this sort of expectation was consciously built into the design of universal credit, you need only look at this press briefing from the Department for Work and Pensions:

“Universal Credit payments are designed to mirror the world of work, with monthly payments reflecting the way many working people are paid.”

Even when people were facing financial hardships to the extent that they needed to claim Universal Credit, there was an overriding concern that claimants be taught a lesson about how payment works in the world of work by being made to wait for payment each month just like many others (despite the fact that many earning less than £10,000 were paid weekly). Note that claimants weren’t actually provided with any kind of training to build skills which might help them secure better paid work, they were simply expected to learn better financial management by being left for a bit longer up financial shit creek.

This punitive and patronising treatment of claimants can only feed the sense of shame associated with claiming benefits, which has become so strong as to dissuade those in need from making a claim. Effectively, we’re even internalising an attitude of expectation over empowerment, where we opt to expect more of ourselves and one another rather than feeling empowered to utilise the help available and encouraging others to do so.

This trend spans across many other areas. Our approach to justice prioritises punishment and the expectation of reform over providing the empowerment to reform, and our approach to education prioritises measuring students against expectations over empowering them to learn.

In sum, the implicit guiding vision of the conservative government has been, and continues to be, one which burdens citizens with expectation rather than elevating them through empowerment.

Moving Forward

To return to the initial quandary of the Moral Maze, we can say the following:

Yes, of course it’s important to give people more personal responsibility, but it can’t be just a blind or punitive raising of expectations; expectations must be accompanied by commensurate or proportionate empowerment which enables people to achieve those expectations.

As usual, I’m going to end with some further questions prompted by this post, which I’ll try to explore in future:

How can we design the way we do things to grant more actual personal responsibility, where expectations are accompanied by empowerment?
What role does capital play in this exchange of expectation and empowerment? (It seems that capital empowers those who have it, and expects of those who don’t).
How might we prevent leaders from peddling a misguided notion personal responsibility in terms of accountability alone (without capability), and a view of meritocracy as equality of expectation (without equality of empowerment)?

#2 – Design

In my previous post, I posed some questions on design which I’d now like to expand on:

How does ‘design’ relate to social reality? And can we proactively ‘design’ our social reality so that it works better for us?

What is design?

Without looking at the myriad definitions or conceptions of ‘design’ which are no doubt already out there, I think design is:

Planning something with the intention that it has an effect.

In academic philosophy people propose, adjust and debate definitions all the time. We want a good definition of a word to identify precisely what it is we’re talking about when we use that word. A definition should be broad enough to include all the different things we might use the word for. But at the same time, we don’t want the word to mean absolutely anything. So a definition should also be narrow enough that it only includes the relevant things, and excludes everything else. Philosophers tend to road-test definitions by checking whether they’re broad enough and narrow enough to suit the intended purpose of the word.

So in that vein, how good is our definition of design?

This definition looks suitably broad, because it includes a lot of things which we might consider ‘edge cases’ or ‘borderline cases’ of design. It includes things which aren’t ideal or perfect cases of design, but which we would still want to call design. Here are some examples.

Things included by our definition of design

Purposefully bad design. Some excellent examples of this can be found here. These objects are painful to imagine using because they undermine their own functionality. They are plans for objects, drawn up with the intention that the objects will have some effect. It just so happens that, in these cases, the effect would be pretty infuriating.

Designs that fail. Our definition doesn’t say that the planned thing succeeds in having the intended effect, so it allows for cases where we’d want to say that the design failed, or was unsuccessful. You might design a footbridge which unintentionally wobbles disconcertingly from side to side. Or you might design a company rebrand which unintentionally leads to widespread mockery.

Designs never implemented. Our definition doesn’t require anything to be built or made real; it only requires something to be planned. Therefore, it accommodates all cases where designs for something are worked on but never implemented; where something has been designed but never built or realised. All over the world, wax crayon designs for rockets sit pinned to fridges, showcasing glorious vehicles which may never be rode into space.

As that example of rockets on fridges starts to highlight, our definition of design is general enough to allow ‘design’ to take place in any field or profession, in application to anything. It doesn’t specify who must do the designing – it could be a qualified designer or a pre-schooler, a robot or a cat (provided they can sufficiently plan and have intentions). It includes everything from an architect producing a blueprint of a proposed high-rise to a child dreaming up their perfect rollercoaster.

Given that it accommodates all of these different things we’d happily call ‘design’, our definition looks suitably broad. Now let’s see if it’s suitably narrow, by checking it excludes everything we want it to.

Things excluded by our definition of design

Planning something without intending it to have any effect.

Imagine planning to go and paint a wall. You plan it by choosing a wall, a day, and buying some paint. But you don’t intend your painting of the wall to have any effect. This doesn’t seem like something we’d want to call ‘design’.

One might argue that there is an element of design in the choice of paint. However, for the purpose of the example, you’re choosing the paint without any intention of your painting affecting things. So you’re not choosing the paint thinking ‘this colour will brighten someone’s day’ or ‘this will adhere best to the wall’. Rather, you’re entirely lacking intention when it comes to what your painting will achieve. You might as well pick a paint at random. We can say the same for all other choices in how you go about painting the wall; choice of brush, type of stroke, number of coats. If there’s absolutely no intention behind any of these choices, it seems right to say that there’s no ‘design’ happening.

One might object that the example isn’t a plausible one, because whenever we make any kind of choice in the course of planning something, we will inevitably have some sliver of intention that our action or choice will have some effect.

But this objection doesn’t threaten our definition of design, because the definition continues to work well once we adjust the example to make it plausible. Let’s accept that there will always be some sliver of intention behind your choices about how you paint the wall. It still seems as though there is more design happening the more you intend the painting to have a particular effect. For example, if you were to plan to paint the wall in yellow, intending that this would serve the dual purpose of complementing the colour of nearby houses and also being more visible to traffic in the dark, this seems to involve ‘design’ much more than simply picking yellow at random. If, in the first case, someone were to ask why the wall had been painted yellow, you could say ‘it was designed to complement the houses and increase visibility’. But if the yellow were picked at random, it would make more sense to say ‘there was no design to it, it was just picked at random.’

As such, it’s a virtue of our definition that it excludes planning something without intending it to have an effect.

Making or doing something intended to have an effect, but without planning it.

An example of this could be picking up some litter you notice, and popping it in the bin to keep the street tidy. You’ve done something with the intention to have an effect (the path will look less messy, and the piece of litter will be collected). But it does seem strange to say that this involved ‘design’. It makes more sense to say that no ‘designing’ happened; only action.

However, if you had instead planned a day litter picking with the intention of making the streets look less messy and ensuring the litter was collected, it would make more sense to say that your actions or your day were ‘designed’ to achieve this.

Even if you don’t think that it’s plausible to eradicate every ounce of planning from an action with intention, we can make the same sort of point we made above. Even accepting that there is always unavoidably some element of planning, it seems that there is more design happening whenever there is more planning happening. So if an artist meticulously plans out a performance with the intention that it makes an audience reflect on mortality, that very much seems like design. But if an artist improvises a performance on the spot, even with the same intention, this looks like something done more by impulse than design.

So it seems to be another virtue of our definition that it excludes anything that doesn’t involve some degree of planning.

What is the point of all this?

Good question. Why labour over getting a good definition of ‘design’ established?

In general, a clear and accurate definition of something can show us how that thing connects up with the rest of the world. It’s like getting the full job description of a word or concept, rather than just the job title. Fleshing out this full job description can prompt us to challenge assumptions we may hold, and help us begin to think in a fresh way, opening up new questions and ideas. It can also help us to see how a word or concept might apply to different degrees or extents, rather than being something that’s either applicable or not in a binary manner. And if the word or concept is indeed not binary, but more blurry, then fleshing out a definition can help us establish a paradigm case of that word or concept. We can then distinguish the paradigm case – the most ideal, pure or perfect instance of the thing – from all of the more messy cases that differ from the paradigm in various ways.

Recognising these various shades of the thing can enable us to see the dimensions along which something can be more or less like the paradigm. We saw this above, in the way that more intention and more planning produced something that seemed more like design. In this way, fleshing out a definition can provide us with a toolkit for engineering or dismantling the thing we’re defining. Once we know the key components that make a thing tick, we know what we need to build and fine-tune to bring about the paradigm, and we know what we need to impair and destroy to erode and eradicate the paradigm.

So definitions in general are great, but why define design in particular? Last post I wrote about what I’m calling ‘social reality’; the things we humans bring to the world through our conventions and behaviour, that cannot exist independently of us, such as institutions, laws, borders and money. I said:

I think most of our screw-ups are the result of our social reality distorting our view of actual reality, or at least becoming dangerously uncoupled from it.

I’m interested in defining design because I suspect that most of our social reality is very poorly designed or not designed at all. I think it is this lack or absence of good design which has allowed our social reality to go off the rails and become decoupled from actual reality, resulting in many of our biggest screw ups. I also think that redesigning our social reality, to bring it back into alignment or harmony with actual reality, might be a promising way of rectifying our screw ups and preventing further ones.

I’ve already inflated this post far beyond what it was intended to be. You could say I designed it badly. So I’m going to end with further questions to follow up on:

To what extent has our social reality been actively designed and constructed, and to what extent has it just emerged? If there has been an element of design, how successful has it been?
To what extent do we passively imbibe social reality, and to what extent do we play a more active and participatory role in creating it? Is there a clear line to be drawn here, or is it more blurry? (Thanks Ed)
What constitutes good, successful design when it comes to designing social reality? What difference does it make to social reality? Can it be realistically achieved? If so, how?

All comments welcomed, and if you can recommend any relevant books, articles, sites, podcasts, etc, please let me know.

#1 – Intro

Why octopus.law.blog?

I have some clusters of ideas and questions bubbling around in my head. I’d love to explore them and build upon them further, but I’m concerned that I won’t manage to do this in any real way unless I begin funneling them into something more creative and constructive. So I’ve decided to write a blog. It’s not the first time I’ve decided to write a blog, and it might not be the last. It’s called octopus.law.blog because, when such a URL is available, it must be used.

So, what are the ideas and questions bubbling around?

Accidents of History

The overarching and general question is: how have we ended up here? How have we humans ended up being as we are and doing what we do? From the little I’ve read so far, it’s clear that much of what we take for granted in the way we live and work has come about more by accident than by design. I want to understand more about the accidents of history which have landed us where we are. Hopefully, this might help us work out how we unpick ourselves from some of the more knotty and undesirable accidents, and how we might engineer things differently so that we can have more happy accidents in future.

Social Reality

I’m particularly interested in ‘social reality’. I’m using ‘social reality’ very broadly, to mean everything we humans bring to the world by convention or behaviour, such as money, laws and corporations. Unlike planets, sticks and atoms – which exist regardless of what us humans are up to, and would be here even if we’d never existed – money, laws and corporations only exist because we humans collectively behave in certain ways. A £5 note wouldn’t be money if ATMs didn’t dispense them and no shops accepted them. And laws wouldn’t exist if there were no courts, no police, and no agreed consequences whatsoever for any sort of action.

I think many of the ways in which we humans have gone awry, many of the bad historical accidents we’ve undergone, have resulted from our social reality distorting our view of actual reality. I think this is why we allow people to die of cold and hunger while others hoard immense wealth. We’ve allowed the mere social reality of ‘not having enough money’ to dictate the actual reality of ‘not having enough food or shelter to survive’. We’ve allowed the mere social reality of ‘countries with borders’ to dictate the actual reality of ‘where humans can physically move freely’.

Most pressingly, we’ve allowed the social reality of ‘economic growth’ to dictate the actual reality of ‘how we use and manage our resources’. The economics of our social reality has blinded us to the environmental limitations of our actual reality, and so we’ve severely mismanaged our resources.

Our resource management has been tailored to an economic social reality where infinite growth is possible, resources aren’t finite and there are no environmental impacts. In actual reality, none of those things are the case. It’s like we’ve been playing by the rules of poker, but the game has been chess all along. And unsurprisingly, that means we’re losing at chess.

To zoom out again: I think most of our screw-ups are the result of our social reality distorting our view of actual reality, or at least becoming dangerously uncoupled from it.

Isn’t that obvious / trivial?

I realise there is a sense in which it is totally trivial to say that social reality is the source of our screw-ups. Because our screw-ups must be things we humans are responsible for bringing to the world, and if ‘social reality’ is broadly defined as pretty much anything we bring to the world which can’t exist independently of us, then of course our screw-ups will have a basis in social reality.

That is indeed trivial, and I’m trying to say something more specific. It’s not just that our screw-ups have a basis in social reality. It’s that the screw-ups happen when our social reality becomes decoupled from our actual reality, becomes misaligned with it, or maybe even outright contradicts it. In other words, our major screw ups happen when our social reality fails to respect actual reality. They happen when we get too big for our boots, and forget that our human endeavours will always, sooner or later, bump up against cold hard reality. They happen when we delude ourselves that the world is exactly as we think it is, rather than something much larger and more complex that we only have a narrow and selective perspective upon.

It may seem odd to think that our screw-ups are due to, essentially, a failure to understand the world. We have mastered the scientific method as a means of deepening our understanding, enough that we have been able to make great leaps in technology and medicine. Isn’t our understanding pretty good?

I think it’s very telling that we don’t find the scientific method, or even just empirical observation, being employed much outside of laboratories and academic institutions. When was the last time someone at work made a decision based on extremely scant evidence, or none at all? Or neglected to properly observe actual outcomes so that those observations could inform future decisions? When was the last time a government implemented policy which wasn’t adequately researched or evidenced? This happens all the time. It is remarkable how little, in the ways we live and work, we properly observe how something is panning out, and then make adjustments informed by what we’ve observed.

To ‘properly’ observe and adjust is important, because we are subject to an array of cognitive biases that skew and distort the way we perceive and react to the world. So even when we’re doing our best to observe and adjust, if we’re not mitigating for our cognitive biases, we’re likely to be observing patterns that aren’t really there, searching for evidence that supports our already held beliefs, and making unfounded assumptions about the best actions going forward.

Given all of this, it’s not surprising that our social reality of institutions, companies, laws, economics, etc, could have become dangerously decoupled from actual reality, in ways we’re not always aware of.

So there’s the main question I’m interested in pursuing: are humanity’s major screw-ups due to social reality becoming decoupled from actual reality? And if so, what are the implications? How can we avoid the decoupling, and keep our social reality better aligned with actual reality?

As a first step, I’ll read John Searle’s book The Construction of Social Reality.

I’ll end for now by calling out some other things I’m interested in exploring:

How does ‘design’ relate to social reality? And can we proactively ‘design’ our social reality so that it works better for us?
I suspect that we agree on more than we think, in terms of what is ‘good’ and ‘bad’. What we disagree on is how to get to the things we agree are good, like fairness, safety, and security. Is this true or not? And either way, what are the implications?
I suspect the biggest failures of social reality occur when it becomes easier for us to do bad things than it is to do good things. If this is true, then we could improve things greatly by making bad things hard to do and good things easy to do. Is there promise in this, or is it naive?

If you can recommend any relevant books, articles, sites, podcasts, etc, please let me know.