Systems thinking and populism

The last few years have seen a dramatic increase in the number of Western democracies which are becoming dominated by populist politics. Populism has been a hard idea to define, but its politics are generally characterised by a narrow focus on a limited range of simple issues that resonate at a personal identity level. The issue par excellence is immigration, and we see many countries such as the United Kingdom, the United States, France, Italy and Hungary, to name just a few, where fear of outsiders ‘invading’ or ‘swamping’ the indigenous inhabitants is used to justify a range of repressive activities.

Populism is also characterised by a simplistic emphasis. Immigration is reduced to outsiders wanting to take ‘our’ jobs, houses, religion, and so on. These simplistic ideas are repeated over and over in the media, sometimes because that suits the political preferences of that media outlet, but sometimes because the news cycle works so fast that there is no time to look in more detail at the reasons why immigration has become such a big issue.

Reflecting on the most immediate hysteria in the United Kingdom about overcrowding in asylum processing centres, I thought about ideas put forward by Joseph Tainter, the American anthropologist. He suggested that as societies develop they become more complex, in terms of how resources are produced to support members of society, and in how more difficult it is to produce the knowledge needed to keep making the society ever more complex. We can represent Tainter’s ideas in a causal feedback loop as shown above. As the complexity increases, the cost of increasing the complexity increases, but as this happens the marginal return on this investment decreases. For example, the development of computer technology and the Internet in the late 20th century represented a huge leap forward in what our societies can do, but recent changes in the 21st-century have been more incremental than quantum, albeit at great expense.

This means that there is less investment in making new changes, unless consumers can be persuaded to keep buying by heavy advertising and marketing. So, for example, recent turmoil in United Kingdom politics has been about the need to increase economic growth, which in my country’s case depends on consumer spending. From Tainter’s argument, as less investment is made the growth in complexity cannot increase, and over time the causal feedback loop stabilises. Society does not become any more complex or sophisticated.

But what happens then? A society that has been indoctrinated with the idea that things can only get better will become restive, and easy prey to populist ideas which put the blame on outsiders. It is a much more difficult task to expect people to do the hard work of actually thinking about the complex network of factors driving the way the world and our own particular societies work.

Of course, simplistic populist policies about stopping immigration will not do anything to stop the powerful reasons driving immigration from the global South or poorer European countries. I do not want here to try and explain what these forces are, rather my point is that education of children and adults everywhere needs to include skills in thinking systemically and about complexity. We all need to be able to understand that the problems that we are facing in the modern world are not amenable to simplistic, populist activities, and that the people pushing these ideas are dangerous emperors with no clothes.