Egy könyv mindenkinek…

…aki meg akarja érteni a világ működését. Na ez az első mondat meglehetősen fellengzősre sikeredett ezen első „könyvajánló” jellegű blogbejegyzésemben – de mentségemre szolgáljon, hogy ez tényleg egy nagyon jó könyv. Nagy bölcsességek emészthető esszenciája egy hiteles szerző tollából, aki az egész életét arra szentelte, hogy modellezze, és ezáltal megértse, érthetővé tegye a komplex rendszerek viselkedését. Donella Meadows neve a Római klub, és az általuk az 1970-es években közreadott „Növekedés határai” című jelentés nevével forrott össze. Tavaly megjelent könyvében (melyet amúgy még a 90-es évek elején elején írt, de máig teljesen aktuális, sőt még aktuálisabb mint valaha) egész életművét foglalja öszze sgyszerű közérthető nyelven, ismertetterjesztő stílusban. Vigyázat, nagyon nehezen letehető könyv! (Viszont szerencsére (sajnos?) nem hosszú.)

Kedvcsinálónak íme néhány részlet:

Ever since the Industrial Revolution, Western society has benefited from science, logic, and reductionism over intuition and holism. Psychologically and politically we would much rather assume that the cause of a problem is “out there,” rather than “in here.” It’s almost irresistible to blame something or someone else, to shift responsibility away from ourselves, and to look for the control knob, the product, the pill, the technical fix that will make a problem go away. (…) However, some of our “solutions” have created further problems. And some problems, (…) (for example) hunger, poverty, environmental degradation, economic instability, unemployment, chronic disease, drug addiction, and war, for example, persist in spite of the analytical ability and technical brilliance that have been directed toward eradicating them. No one deliberately creates those problems, no one wants them to persist, but they persist nonetheless. That is because they are intrinsically systems problems—undesirable behaviors characteristic of the system structures that produce them. They will yield only as we reclaim our intuition, stop casting blame, see the system as the source of its own problems, and find the courage and wisdom to restructure it.

Suppose you are for some reason lifted out of your accustomed place in society and put in the place of someone whose behavior you have never understood. Having been a staunch critic of government, you suddenly become part of government. Or having been a laborer in opposition to management, you become management (or vice versa). Perhaps having been an environmental critic of big business, you find yourself making environmental decisions for big business. Would that such transitions could happen much more often, in all directions, to broaden everyone’s horizons!
In your new position, you experience the information flows, the incentives and disincentives, the goals and discrepancies, the pressures—the bounded rationality—that goes with that position. It’s possible that you could retain your memory of how things look from another angle, and that you burst forth with innovations that transform the system, but it’s distinctly unlikely. If you become a manager, you probably will stop seeing labor as a deserving partner in production, and start seeing it as a cost to be minimized. If you become a financier, you probably will overinvest during booms and underinvest during busts, along with all the other financiers. If you become very poor, you will see the short-term rationality, the hope, the opportunity, the necessity of having many children. If you are now a fisherman with a mortgage on your boat, a family to support, and imperfect knowledge of the state of the fish population, you will overfish.

Strengthening and clarifying market signals, such as full-cost accounting, don’t get far these days, because of the weakening of another set of balancing feedback loops—those of democracy. This great system was invented to put self-correcting feedback between the people and their government. The people, informed about what their elected representatives do, respond by voting those representatives in or out of office. The process depends on the free, full, unbiased flow of information back and forth between electorate and leaders. Billions of dollars are spent to limit and bias and dominate that flow of clear information. Give the people who want to distort market-price signals the power to influence government leaders, allow the distributors of information to be self-interested partners, and none of the necessary balancing feedbacks work well. Both market and democracy erode. (…) Democracy works better without the brainwashing power of centralized mass communications. Traditional controls on fishing were sufficient until sonar spotting and drift nets and other technologies made it possible for a few actors to catch the last fish. The power of big industry calls for the power of big government to hold it in check; a global economy makes global regulations necessary.

…human cultures (…) are the store of behavioral repertoires, accumulated over not billions, but hundreds of thousands of years. They are a stock out of which social evolution can arise. Unfortunately, people appreciate the precious evolutionary potential of cultures even less than they understand the preciousness of every genetic variation in the world’s ground squirrels. I guess that’s because one aspect of almost every culture is the belief in the utter superiority of that culture.

Ja igen, ha nem mondtam volna, a könyv sajnos angolul van – de igen szép egyszerű lecsiszolt kiforrott köznapi angolsággal, semmi flanc, középfokú nyelvismerettel is jól követhető. (Apropó – fordítására nem vállalkozik valaki? Szerintem a mai magyar szomorú rögvalóság számára is igen komoly üzenete lenne…)

És végére hagytam a lényeget: a könyv (a szürkeszférából) ingyenesen letölthető innen.