Subject: Unintended - but predictable - effects

Posted by Eric Stiens on 1/17/2009
In Reply To:Unintended - but predictable - effects Posted by Philip Abode on 1/16/2009

Message:

A few quick responses:

On Jan 16, 2009, at 9:43 AM, Michael Round wrote:


The focus of SD seems to be in K-12, with many posts seeking to integrate SD concepts in their classes. What we see in reality, however, is a failure by adults to recognize simple cause-and-effect relationships.


To be fair:

1) This is a list specifically for the discussion of using SD in a K-12 context. Many of us here believe for various reasons that SD is a vital tool to be part of primary and secondary education, but I would hardly say the field of SD is focused on K-12 education. Indeed, you can find plenty of examples of some of the leading lights of SD calling for much MORE of a focus on K-12 education.

2) One of the insights of ST in general, and SD in particular is that cause-and-effect relationships are rarely simple, and often non-intuitive and recursive


On Jan 16, 2009, at 11:56 AM, Malczynski, Leonard A wrote:
Shades of Lester Thurow in The Zero Sum Society!



This seems to be an underlying motivation and is understood by every politician.
Although we can be "arm's - length" modelers and present 'what ifs', values ultimately drive decisions.





Don't good models often reveal that in fact we aren't talking about simple tradeoffs at all? And that while we may conceive of a system as binary zero-sum choices in the short-term, that they are often interconnected at a much deeper and more complex level over the longterm? ie; taxation policy is often seen as zero-sum, yet once we start figuring externalities and public goods into the equations, we can see that it isn't zero sum at all - likewise a suburb that splits from it's city may decide that any money paid to the city (in terms of say, shared public school funding) is money taken out of its own pocket, yet we see more and more that highly fragmented and walled off metropolitan areas due much worse in the global economy that interconnected ones



On Jan 16, 2009, at 2:12 PM, Philip Abode wrote:
[Philip Abode, Ed.D] I wonder how one can use SD to show that UFMC in the long run destroys competition and tends toward monopoly as Marx once hypothesized, an idea also held by Microsoft's Bill Gates when he said every corporation is a monopolist at heart.
[Philip Abode, Ed.D]

I think capital-L Libertarians (of which I am not one, having already outed myself as a small-l libertarian socialist) would argue that corporate capitalism always tends towards monopoly and concentration of wealth but true unfettered markets (anarcho-capitalism) would in fact not have this tendency

Regardless, it would be interesting to have working SD models of various economic theories - wasn't Michael Radzicki at WPI working on such a thing?