By DON NEEPER
Formerly of Los Alamos
Society is a complex system. What’s a complex system? Many actors (decision makers) interacting by rules wherein results are not proportional to causes.
Coherent behaviors emerge in all complex systems. Schooling emerges among fish who have rules about swimming in a certain relation to other fish.
In the complex system that is society, the actors are the people and institutions, with diverse interactions that include facial expressions, TV news, and intrusive internet advertising.
We learn the social rules at home, in the schools, from the media, and from experiences within the community. Ignore a rule, receive a rejection. Institutions, especially corporations, can be more successful than persons at ignoring the rules because institutions are insensitive to castigation. How can you male General Motors feel rejected?
The social mores, expectations, and written laws form the rules of interaction, rules that specify fixed prices for groceries, bargaining for cars, and the proper setting of tableware with the fork on the left. Among the emergent behaviors in society are the economy, the political polarization, and the disparities of income, medical care, race, neighborhood, and education.
I suggest that all of these disparities stem from an underlying disparity in opportunity.
Opportunity is the possibility that an individual’s expressed desires might have some measure of desired effect. The American myth is that “freedom” implies absence of rules, an absence that supposedly generates equal opportunity for persons. It doesn’t.
The rules aren’t absent. There are rules for almost every human activity, and living in a society means obeying the rules or suffering rejection, castigation, denial of opportunity.
Opportunity requires the knowledge, judgment, ability to communicate, and access to the objective. Opportunity also requires that a person follow the rules, even if unwritten rules limit that access—as in racism.
How to reduce disparities? Increase the equality of opportunity.
An emergent symptom in any complex system—whether the stock market or society—can be changed either by a forced repression or by altering the rules of interaction. For example, communism tried to enforce equality. How might we alter social rules to encourage equal opportunity without becoming a dictatorship? Through a broadened sense of public education.
Partly funded by property tax, public schools in poor neighborhoods are often poor schools. Disparity in income encourages disparity in education, which in turn reduces opportunity for the next generation. We have to—somehow—give children more equal schools and more experiences of mixing with children of other backgrounds. Continuous busing of students was a crude support for racial equality, but a class might occasionally trade schools, generating mixing across neighborhood boundaries. We need to stimulate mixing for adults, too, inducing voluntary mixing of persons of different experience, including persons of all ages. Consider vacation camps, internships, opportunities for senior involvement in care and aid of children.
Yes, social programs cost. So do the social subsidies that don’t cure an underlying condition. Welfare hasn’t cured poverty.
“College for everyone” is presumed to generate equality. However, more high-level free schools would generate only limited opportunities because college is academic. Not all persons want academic skills. Trade schools, community events, and travel can generate mixing, social skills, and opportunities. Opportunity is not only what you know, it is also “who you know.” That is increased by exposure to a wider variety of conversations. Opportunity depends on the ability to listen, understand, and communicate.
The disparity of opportunity must be relieved, but it can’t be altered by a single method or slogan. We must learn to do welcoming across boundaries. The U.S. is more like a continent than a single country, having different local cultures with different local rules.