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System design and the debt ceiling

Jun 01, 2023

love, too, has to be learned

Hello! It’s been a while. I am in the middle of final-ish book edits for the book (on an incredibly tight timeline), several other projects (also again, painful timelines, if only it were all more malleable) and this funny battle I’ve had with time over the past few weeks and not enoughness of it has produced a few lessons for me -

I lost my voice two weeks ago and then came down with a brutal bout of some sort of sickness. It’s funny the things that we take for granted, delicacies of presumed normalcy that could disappear at any moment.
I was able to see my family for the first time in several months on Mother’s Day, and it was again, a reminder that we operate under the theory of assumed static.
Overall, there is a world of last times that I try not to spend too much time in, but the idea of ends still haunt me.

Life is short, and there are no guarantees. I really am not one to spout platitudes that we all know!! But man, it’s hard to remember sometimes. I want to talk about the dynamics of wasted time through

The debt ceiling1
Design
Vulnerability (of course)

The Systems are Designed to Confuse

Dan Kaminsky (rest in peace) tweeted this back in 2018:

I'm increasingly thinking that every functioning system has two forms: The abstraction that outsiders are led to believe, and the reality that insiders actually and carefully operate.
You don't incrementally learn a system. You eventually unlearn its necessary lies.

Most of what we interact with circles this drain:

Learning the unnecessary lies of a system - and a lot of the systems we interact with rely on misunderstanding and misinterpretation to truly work.
That’s the most convoluted part of what Dan was talking about - this idea that “systems need to actively mislead in order to have the room to function.”

It’s confusing, by design! It’s all storytelling right? Like when we think about what is going on with the debt ceiling, it’s largely a function of narrative and measuring contests, posing to prove something that needs to be proved in the marketplace ideas, at extreme cost to literally the entire country.2

The Debt Ceiling as a System

I published a few primers here if you want to watch them, but where we are now with the negotiation (at time of publishing3) that they came to with the debt ceiling bill:

Two year suspension of the debt ceiling
Limits on federal discretionary spending to 1% growth
Reprogramming $10b of the $80b that was allocated to the IRS
Work requirements for SNAP for adults aged 50-54 (which totally backfired lmao)
Accelerating certain energy projects
Ending the freeze on student loan payments

And I’ve done my fair share of ragging on the debt ceiling (like I produced a video when I had no voice just to yell about it, which probably says more about my emotions than the actual debt ceiling lol) but I think that this is where Dan’s analysis is really important.

We are focused on the fragment of the fractal of reality that the debt ceiling creates
The inaccuracy that we all have in understanding4 the purpose of the debt ceiling is not a bug, but instead a feature
If it isn’t actively confusing people, it doesn’t work.

He wrote:

Maybe that's why everyone's so focused on motivations to the extraordinary exclusion of everything else.

If you can figure out what people personally want (like Manchin wanting to build a natural gas thing in West Virginia) that’s going to be pretty influential to the decisions that people make.

But as one member of Congress said:

We’ll see where this comes out, but by definition we’re only measuring success on how much we lost

That’s a weird space to exist in, the photo-negative of what is actually net-good. Governments are designed to spend money. Spending and financing authority are not the same thing. ‘Political leverage’ is not putting the credit rating of the entire country at risk. It’s confusing, by design - and that’s okay, I think.

The Influence of Design

I saw this nice thread from Michelle Huang on UX/design examples that she came across in Japan, and it made me think about how much of our time is spent butting up against the world. She ended the thread with:

Human-centered design is sometimes a forced concept, but when there is enough care and respect, it becomes an inevitable byproduct… when we have a more effortless existence, we have more mental resources to take care of public goods + care for each other

Good design is important. And it’s really hard. It’s one of those things that we don’t really think a lot about because it’s almost subliminal. But if we live in a well designed world - a world of humanity-centered design which considers the entire globe rather than just the people inhabiting it - then things become easier, simpler, nicer.

Design is integral to systems - but sometimes they have to mislead users.

The [1] correct use case and [2] how something actually works are not always the same thing. Functionally, something can work one way, but designers need “misdirection to protect the fragile, but useful truths.”

Dan again - “systems work because you don't know how they work, but think you do.”

The Importance of Vulnerability

There’s a Bob Dylan quote from Jonathan Cott’s Listening -

You must be vulnerable to be sensitive to reality.

As Maria Popova wrote in regards to Dylan

Self-knowledge might be the most difficult of life’s rewards — the hardest to earn and the hardest to bear. To know yourself is to know that you are not an unassailable fixity amid the entropic storm of the universe but a set of fragilities in constant flux. To know yourself is to know that you are not invulnerable.

I’ve written before on the crisis of meaning and I think that same framework is applicable here too. That’s one thing I think about with the debt ceiling and the markets at large, is the separation of emotion that we create from the lived lives to the economy, even though the two are integral. And it makes total sense that we do that, like we can’t design policy around people feeling bad (or can we…)

The economy is sentiment driven, because it’s driven by people.
But there is this broad resistance to any sort of reflection on emotion in the United States for a myriad of reasons.
But when we lose touch with that vulnerability, we lose touch with ourselves, and we lose touch with the world around us.

There is collapsing social trust in the United States - as the Financial Times writes

Levels of trust in the US have been eroding for decades and the share of Americans who say they do not trust other people in their neighborhood is now roughly double what you would expect based on US socio-economic development.

There is no trust. For good reason, right? Like. Come on. There are three things that illustrate this well in their own way (and completely unrelated to each other, so hang with me) - this push-pull of vulnerability and the intentional fluff of systems.

Walmart is the Fed
- Walmart has become the kingpin of the inflation fight, pushing their own private label brands because CPGs won’t lower prices on grocery items. They are essentially becoming inflation fighters on their own turf - which is good, great even.
Alfalfa is more important that the coin
- As Alex Williams said “where and how do we grow the alfalfa” is imo the kind of tradeoff people should be using the tools of economics to sort out, not, “are there unforeseen consequences to the trillion dollar coin” - we get so caught up in stuff that matter (the coin could have saved the debt ceiling) but we lose all focus on things that are important
The freedom to think
- This quote from Matt Darling - "what did happen when Americans got better unemployment benefits is that they were freed up to think about what kind of job they really wanted, and to pursue getting it.” When we give people space to not be in flight-or-fight mode, turns out, they think better.

It’s all applicable.

Positivity and Negativity

Jalen Amir King once wrote

“Jealousy is admiration turned sour” has been stuck in my head. Every negative feeling really is a positive one rotting

I think a lot about that - how most things aren’t bad things, but the really bad things are horrible things. Most things are good things if you peel them back a few layers. Lessons learned, painful reshapings. It’s all within perception.

There’s a tendency to get really blackpilled with the economy and and the freaking debt ceiling and politics and the systems that we interact with because it is so frustrating and confusing and it feels like any positivity that once was there is completely hollowed out.

And when we abstract a system to be intentionally misleading - when the only way it works is if its broken, then of course it’s going to be frustrating and confusing and hollow. And when the necessary unlearning begins to become more and more apparent, the vortex only grows deeper and wider and more painful.

Dan again -

Societies try to provide kids a sanitized view of the world, without work, without war, without sex, where you can fail on a test and not get fired from school. That's a lie, that's not reality. But knowing the lie has value, in some way.

Final Thoughts

So the systems are misleading, by design.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Kurt Vonnegut telling his wife that he was going to go buy envelopes -

Oh, she says, well, you're not a poor man. You know, why don't you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I'm going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot of people. And, see some great looking babes. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And, and ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don't know. The moral of the story is, is we're here on Earth to fart around. And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don't realize, or they don't care, is we're dancing animals. You know, we love to move around. And, we're not supposed to dance at all anymore.

Even amongst it all, it’s supposed to be fun. We are supposed to dance!! Then, there’s the end of this Scorsese interview on growing old -

I’m old. I read stuff. I see things. I want to tell stories, and there’s no more time. Kurosawa, when he got his Oscar, when George [Lucas] and Steven [Spielberg] gave it to him, he said, “I’m only now beginning to see the possibility of what cinema could be, and it’s too late.” He was 83. At the time, I said, “What does he mean?” Now I know what he means.

And Nietzche on learning how to love -

One must learn to love… in the end we are always rewarded for our good will, our patience, fair-mindedness, and gentleness with what is strange; gradually, it sheds its veil and turns out to be a new and indescribable beauty:—that is its thanks for our hospitality. Even those who love themselves will have learned it in this way: for there is no other way. Love, too, has to be learned

I’ve noticed that I tend to loop around certain ideas (something something OCD) and if I get really caught in that loop, I get biased towards inaction, towards the idea of tomorrow (ahem, debt ceiling). The thing with looping is that tomorrow never really comes, the perfect day never really happens, and time only will ever move forward - even if you’re not.

The systems we live in are functionally confusing (at best) and sometimes, that’s okay. It’s okay to be frustrated and mad, as long as we remember what we are doing, that we don’t get so lost in the sauce of anger that we lose all sense of self. That’s probably the best thing to remember. Finally -

Other Things

There are a LOT of these! Just because I wasn’t publishing definitely doesn’t mean I wasn’t reading!

Positive Climate

The next generation of nuclear reactors is being designed to fit into a standard shipping container and be delivered on a truck | Retrofitting an entire district’s fleet (to electric school buses) is at least as effective as moving all students from a district with average air pollution levels to one with air pollution levels in the 10th percentile.”

And more

Disclaimer: This is not financial advice or recommendation for any investment. The Content is for informational purposes only, you should not construe any such information or other material as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Before you say “😡 but i love inefficiency” please watch the tiktok series I have which you can find here

Even if things get fixed proper, it’s still going to create a lot of stress on the banking system as Victoria Guida reports here

This is rapidly changing, most of the news outlets have live updates on it - here’s CNN

The number of people that think its about spending is astounding