I’ve read the articles too. San Fransisco is dying, in a doom spiral where there won’t be money to do diddly squat, and it’s all the fault of liberal policies and the (expletive) people who won’t return to office. Doom, doom, it will spread, and our entire money system is at stake.
They are not digging deep enough.
They are looking at the immediate fallout and points of change, and reaching for either confirmation bias (they hated the policies to begin with), bandwagon effect (it’s what “everyone else” already believes), or any of a number of other cognitive biases. But they aren’t looking at the system.
Our culture does that. A lot.
Take a step back: systems and behavior
Our decisions produce data that moves through space and time. It is the compounding of decisions that creates a pocket environment that is set up to produce failure. Sometimes it’s done deliberately, like when a psychopath starts siloing people who have certain information so the psychopath can twist the narrative to their will. More often, it’s as simple as too many people mimicking the decisions of others because that other got what they wanted.
Usually what’s wanted is money. It’s a fundamental part of surviving in our world. It’s necessary for our basic existence: food, water, shelter. The more money that can be accumulated, the further into the future your existence is assured.
Except it’s not. No matter how much you make, how much money is in the bank, or how much your assets are worth, we’re still people. Our skin and organs can tear, and bones can break. Viruses and toxins can enter and disrupt our system through the very air we breathe. If the environment is no longer hospitable to basic human needs, humans die. We can’t just decide to swim down into the Marianas trench, or take a quick ramble through the heart of a volcano or to the top of Mount Everest; we have to bring a reasonable environment with us.
People are creatures of pattern-finding, adaptation, and habit. We remember or find instances of what worked before, and repeat; if the repetition doesn’t work, we try something else. If the repetition works, we repeat again, and again, and again until habit forms. This is really reductionist and is the barest tip of what actually goes into our decision making, but in a system that’s been pushed to the extreme of a major rebalance, they are qualities that are important to remember. This pattern-finding, adaptation, and habit-forming is particularly important, because it’s not just one person. It creates a cumulative effect, while each individual wants what alone doesn’t seem like it could possibly be a problem.
People look towards each other to cut the corners of experimentation and get to what they want faster. So if one person figures out how to bend a system to their will, 50 others with cognitive biases that make that pattern easier to see will replicate the experiment for themselves. It spreads further from there.
On the individual level, there’s stability points: points of reference where people will snarl and snap to keep it as-is. It’s not because it’s in some way perfect, beneficial, or intrinsically wholesome. It’s because they don’t want to have to think about it again. They found their way around it, and shifting it will change their pathways. Get enough people thinking this way, and the stability point becomes a more concrete corner of a larger system.
Change still happens — nothing can really stop change. But it’s slowed significantly, and more likely to intertwingle so deeply with adjacent systems that a significant change will have ripple effects far beyond its immediate point. There will be an information and energy push/pull. People will pull from the inside to keep it within a certain wobble, and a push from the outside to keep the wobble from impacting their corner.
That’s the really cool thing about systems. When they work and are kept within healthy margins, you can stress one point and the rest will give a little. The whole will still function. The diagrams below a simplistic representation, but basically the acknowledged stability point can shift to accommodate, while other factors stretch to support the shift. It’s a close-enough approximation whether it’s the holistic system, a subsystem, or even an individual’s physical or mental wellbeing.
The real problems come in when the healthy margins are removed, either by design, depletion (here, our compounded effect), or dysfunction.
When the system is stressed to the point of breaking, the ripple effects bounce back and shift the egregious corner(s) of the system into a balance that the whole system can better support. In short, the system forces a change.
A forced change can feel like the end of reality. It is, on one level: the beliefs previously held, the stability points previously depended on, no longer function as they used to. All the repetition in the world won’t create the same outcomes that the previous repetitions produced. It requires a fundamental shift to a brain’s interpretation of reality.
Back to San Fransisco
The part of the system that is being treated as a stability point in the doom spiral narrative is money. The transfer of money, the value of assets, and the foundations of the continued flow and building of it. In this narrative, office buildings are empty assets and symbols of work going undone. Retail stores are an organ of transfer. Who is left — vagrants, drug addicts, and those people who fill the social structures that try to help them — are seen (they’ve been there all along) and supply a narrative of what got so fucked up. The narrative assumes that the inability to support the previously viable flow of wealth is entirely due to others’ bad decisions. Why? Because it repeatedly worked before.
People have been dribbling out of San Fransisco for years. They left not because they didn’t love San Fransisco culture, but because they couldn’t afford it. When work from home became the norm, the equation changed and they could build a more reasonable life elsewhere. Read the short form narratives of people who went to Texas, the Carolinas, etc., from San Fransisco and other cities, and they picked their spots for two reasons: the housing was affordable, and they felt the culture was open enough to their point of view.
Even six months ago, an average apartment in San Fransisco could be $3–4k per month. That is hard to stomach for years on end when it’s a significant chunk of what used to be a high income; and it means a great swath of people couldn’t afford to have shelter. A two-family income making $15/hour for 40 hrs/week is unlikely to bring enough home to pay it, let alone eat and support the efforts of transportation to their income source. Yet the market, as a whole, chased that high housing cost simply because that’s the market.
One person made a decision. Others saw something they wanted, and followed suit. A new norm was established, agnostic of the full system in which it lived. A corner of the system literally looked at its navel and said, “wee, I’m rich!” with none of the fallouts hitting its perception. The fallouts existed, they just weren’t seen.
Housing costs became high due to supply and demand. A certain segment of the population could afford more (supply), and they were tethered to the area to make that income, so more was demanded. It’s really not unlike selling a glass of water for $100 because someone will pay due to system-provided circumstances like a natural disaster. Fair housing states that you can’t change the rent based on who is paying, so all rent was priced to chase the segment. Banks changed their computations to tell people they could afford a higher mortgage. The highest possible price became the norm.
Even this has further-out systems to support it: paying more became an agnostic way to decide who was the buyer in a market where there was less housing than buyers. Which is itself a product of multiple system stress points ranging from people who kept multiple homes, banks keeping foreclosed properties empty, the rising costs of building, existing utilities conduits, etc.
When the people who could afford to leave the high-cost housing left, the people who’d already suffered stayed, unable to shift their lives into a more realistic existence. Their avenues were cut off for lack of funds, and/or because leaving certain parts of their lives was traumatizing.
This is not survival of the fittest. This is using up system resources to build wealth in one corner. The wealth building fed off a system of interconnected health until the health foundered; now the system, in distress, is shifting. Because part of what happened was to build up pockets of monoculture — a downtown optimized for funds transfer and wealth building rather than holistic lives — the failure is glaring.
This isn’t even the scary part. This is the same basic function our environmental system is experiencing. Our world, our habitat, *the thing we literally cannot live without, *is being knocked closer and closer to forced rebalance. A part of the system gets overused. The overused part pushes and pulls to try to find a new balance, and in the effort unforeseen (often due to blinders) changes occur that impact the viability of people continuing to use that part for a production point. Eventually, people will leave the immediate environment.
The holistic system will find a balance. The production path won’t. People will have to work hard to rebalance their personal lives.
The people who depended on the production path will see their system — still just a subset of the whole, but from their point of view it’s their world — fall apart. We, as a species, are doing it in so many places very few people can actually grasp the impact; this person tried, and found we were pushing past most of them.
My biggest question is: can we learn from this very recognizable system with immediate human impact and use the mental model to shift how we’re thinking about our ecology?
The pundits aren’t wrong that San Fransisco’s “doom spiral” could set off an environment of cascading financial system failures; there’s a lot of money sunk into San Fransisco in complex and intertwingled connections, because people chased money as a singular stability point rather than as part of a system. Money also has it’s own monoculture in how so few people control so much of it. Pundits also look towards New York and see office spaces that are filling and seem to be expressing befuddlement as to why, and danger that it might follow suit. They don’t see how someone could successfully meet all their life’s needs within a few blocks; they also don’t see the recent population drops that are likely to impact the extent of the occupancy rates. They see the outcome (corporate rents continuing) without acknowledging the environmental differences and similarities. They are part of a whole, and their health depends on the health of the whole.
The simplest business case for this is: if there are no people, there is no business.
Sustainability isn’t a cap to wealth, but making sure that financial viability is long-term. The compounded wealth over time will far exceed what can be extract in the next five to ten years. It’s realized across a broad breadth of people in time beyond our individual existence. It’s not realized in a span of time around which we can build a personal mental model, and that seems to be the mental disconnect. Sustainability is, in part, a reminder that money is a construct, and without the resources that money is intended to transfer, it becomes meaningless. Money will not survive in a resource vacuum. Money will not survive without the energy of the people doing the work.
Humanism and sustainability is a core function of a healthy system, of which money is a construct intended to more fluidly exchange tools and resources. It’s a connectome, not a node.