I've pondered how to teach "systems thinking" as a whole, but one specific example is brought to mind by the article below -- some very basic facts about flying a plane.
Most people seem to believe that if you want a plane to go "up", you would pull back on the control yoke and point the plane "up".
That isn't actually true.
If you pull back on the controls, it is true that for a very brief time, the plane climb a little by consuming forward speed (and slowing down). BUT -- if you continue to hold the controls back, as the plane slows more and more, it will start shuddering, and,having lost flying speed, start falling to the ground. If you insist on pointing the plane up even more at that point, you will crash. Period.
There is no free lunch. If you want the plane to climb for real, consistently, over time, and stay up, you need to use the engine via the throttle. You need to provide power. You don't need to raise the nose of the plane at all -- just add power and you will climb.
There are amazing parallels in thinking here in politicians who discovered that plundering our nation's hard-won resources and spending them and calling the rise in "GDP" income, things appeared to be going "up". Right now, we're at the "shuddering" and "losing flying speed" stage.
If short-term greed isn't replaced by hard work, as with the airplane, there is only one foreseeable outcome.
People need to get their noses out of the air, individually and collectively. "Me first, Me now, only Me" is not a survivable strategy, or national policy, or cultural norm we should even tolerate, let alone praise when it has a short-term benefit at an even larger long-term cost.
This is a 1st grader type of perceptual error, akin to a dog with his leash around a tree who can't reach his food dish and isn't willing to walk away from the food back to get unwrapped around the tree. Pulling harder and harder is not the right answer.
The question is how to teach that perception, to about 6 billion people, in under two years. Our engine is the collection of virtues we once respected: honesty, hard work, integrity, compassion, perseverance, hope. They made the country great, and abandoning them is making the country sink. In the very short run, turning away from them has a short-term visible gain, but there is always a longer-term, significantly larger loss that comes with it.
So, the more we "win" the "behinder we get." There is no sequence of such short-term gains that will get us to prosperity and economic health. We need to walk AWAY from the food of short-term gain, back to the tree and get our leash unstuck, and recover "flying speed" before the wings stop doing their magical thing of producing lift and simply turn into heavy weights.
A plane has been described as a collection of parts, any one of which, by itself, would simply fall out of the sky. This is true for the nation as well. It doesn't fly because this part is "better than" that part -- it flies because the parts WORK TOGETHER. If you remove the "working together" part, all you have left is a bunch of rocks in the sky, that will, duh, fall down.
Party Gridlock in Washington Feeds New Fear of a Debt Crisis
WASHINGTON — Senator Evan Bayh’s comments this week about a dysfunctional Congress reflected a complaint being directed at Washington with increasing frequency, and there is broad agreement among critics about Exhibit A: The unwillingness of the two parties to compromise...
Yet rarely has the political system seemed more polarized and less able to solve big problems that involve trust, tough choices and little short-term gain. The main urgency for both parties seems to be about pinning blame on the other, before November’s elections, ...
Mr. Bayh, the centrist Democrat from Indiana, lodged his complaint about excessive partisanship and Congressional gridlock on Monday by way of explaining his decision not to seek re-election.
“I used to think it would take a global financial crisis to get both parties to the table, but we just had one,” said G. William Hoagland, who was a fiscal policy adviser to Senate Republican leaders and a witness to past bipartisan budget summits. “These days I wonder if this country is even governable.”
Sensing political advantage, Republicans are resisting President Obama’s call for a bipartisan commission ...
“There isn’t a single sitting member of Congress — not one — that doesn’t know exactly where we’re headed,” Mr. Simpson said.... “And to use the politics of fear and division and hate on each other — we are at a point right now where it doesn’t make a damn whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican if you’ve forgotten you’re an American.”
Elected Republicans, however, are under intense pressure from their party’s conservative base to oppose any tax increases — a line in the sand that dims any prospects for bipartisan cooperation....
But anger about big deficits has stoked the populism roiling politics, and Republicans as well as some conservative Democrats want to cut spending right now as a way of addressing perceptions among voters that government has gotten too big, too intrusive and too profligate.
Many analysts say the president and Congress could send a strong signal to global markets by agreeing this year to a package of both long-term tax increases and spending reductions...
As debt rises, so do interest costs; by 2014, at a projected $516 billion, they will exceed the budget for annual appropriations for domestic programs. The government will be competing with the private sector for credit, forcing interest rates higher and imperiling future prosperity.
Lesser financial and fiscal crises have brought the two parties together to compromise on tough choices about taxes and spending. .. Those bipartisan deals were done during times of divided government, when one party had the White House and the other controlled at least one chamber of Congress, giving each side some governing responsibility to find solutions. Now, with Democrats controlling the White House and Congress, the parties have less incentive to work together.
Republicans today see opposition as a way back to power in November, and their party is more ideologically antitax than in the past, especially now that it is courting the Tea Party movement. Conservative activists so oppose compromise of any sort that several lawmakers have drawn primary challengers for working with Democrats.
Because the worst of the fiscal problem remains years away and therefore somewhat hypothetical to most people, there is also not the same incentive to act immediately that drove, for example, the 1983 deal, when Social Security was facing an imminent crisis.
More than Mr. Obama could have imagined, the situation now tests his promise to break Washington’s gridlock and to lead in making “the hard choices.”
Yet politicians’ failure to reduce deficits has long reflected voters’ opposition to the necessary steps.
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