The Perils of Positive Feedback
Graeme Sephton
Feb 2005
The destabilizing influence of money in our society and how, if private money always dominates political campaigns, the Public Interest will always lose.
The founding fathers created the Constitution to nurture and protect a young vulnerable democracy because they understood that political and military power could very quickly surge and escalate into imbalance and tyranny. One broad principle they applied was referred to as the “checks and balances” within the system. A modern day systems analyst would look at those common sense measures and describe them as system “decoupling”, “damping”, “attenuation” and “negative feedback.” An example of system “decoupling” that was incorporated into law is the principle of separation of church and state. In today’s world where some multinationals are bigger than many nations the founders might have deemed separation of corporation and state to also be critically essential.
Have you ever looked around and marveled that amidst our apparent formidable success so many things seem to be going seriously wrong in our world? Recently I realized that an excess of positive feedback loops causes many of our problems. They permeate our whole political and social system and until we understand and take account of then, we will continue to be the bewildered and overwhelmed victims of a system that is successful like an algae bloom is successful. And just to define terms, by positive feedback I do not mean it in the usual sense of kind words of encouragement.
A positive feedback loop is where any system which produces an output or product, continually takes a fraction of the output, amplifies it massively and then feeds it back as additional input. And that makes the output grow even faster and more gargantuan as the fed back portion gets repeatedly amplified as it continually loops back around. The only successful designs that incorporate positive feedback that I can think of are things that need to race urgently towards terminal phase; binary switches in computers and atomic bombs work very fast due to positive feedback.
There are some common and easily recognized examples of unintended positive feedback loops. They are not pretty. Algae blooms and plagues come immediately to mind. Or when a microphone screams and whistles through a PA system, that is an example of positive feedback. It doesn't take an engineer to tell you it is bad - unpleasant to the ear, and potentially destructive to the overloaded electronics and speakers. What happens is the microphone picks up a sound that is amplified and feeds back from the speakers into the mike to be amplified over and over, causing the whole system of mike, amplifier and speakers to slam into shrill overload. Moving the microphone away from the speakers can break this “positive feedback loop”. Because engineers have been battling to tame positive feedback for the benefit of mankind for some time, we avoid configurations that have excessive feedback at the design phase. Like the framers of the constitution with their checks and balances, good system design eliminates runaway positive feedback. Without such precautions, destructive exponential increases can misappropriate all the power or other resources and engulf a system whole. It is innately self-destructive to ignore this problem. It is more dangerous than terrorists and cholesterol combined.
Systems that include excessive positive feedback, be they mechanical, economic, social or political, are not robustly stable in the long term. They typically terminate with a crash. They cannot long endure.
The reason engineers learned about this hazard first is because, when time constants are short, catastrophic problems manifest very quickly. Sound waves for instance repeat hundreds and thousands of times per second; audio system disasters are fast and furious and excruciatingly obvious. In an acoustical system the designer will discover a design flaw and/or catastrophic failure in a few seconds. Chemical reactions in high explosives are another dramatic example that depend on positive feedback. In any new mechanical design the prototypes are easily observed and if the designer sees smoke billowing out, design revision is assured. As mentioned, the instability caused by positive feedback can be easily managed with the antidotes of decoupling, attenuation and phasing to change the feedback to the useful stabilizing negative feedback type.
But political and economic systems have longer time constants, sometimes generations, and are not as physically constrained. The relationships of the inputs and the outputs are fuzzier and harder to observe and measure. It makes the issue of avoiding dangerous feedback loops in our political system much more challenging, but of critical importance for us to understand.
Unchecked money flowing to politicians is analogous to the destructive positive feedback of the audio example earlier. The higher the profitability of an enterprise the greater is the potential for the feedback. Although it takes longer for macro-economic systems to get to a ruinous overload situation the symptoms are observable. When sitting in a traffic jam, choking on pollution as the global climate drifts towards boil, it is not immediately obvious that positive feedback loops are the primary culprit. Our politicians-for-sale system does not incorporate the attenuation or the negative feedback that sensible and prudent design mandates and that our founders prudently endorsed. The "best government that money can buy" is not ultimately very good government at all unless you are the highest bidder.
A perfect example of this defective feedback mechanism can be seen in the spectacular bloom of Enron. At a slightly broader level, Dick Cheney’s secretive energy policy committee is another recent example of dysfunctional outcomes from positive feedback loops. Successful energy corporations contribute money and purchase influence and then use the administration’s policy-making amplification to increase their profitability via the regulations they help craft. These increased profits then allow them to purchase even more political influence in the next cycle. In this instance and quite typically, the politically nurtured “economic success” tends to drown out any significant diversity in energy approaches; even when new and innovative approaches are urgently needed. It tends to overwhelm or intentionally impede any viable alternatives from effectively competing. In general such feedback can effectively suppress diversity and innovation. In the long run it is not even actually good for business or a long-term viable economy. Just like an overloaded sound system is not good for the sound system or the audience.
I have always felt discouraged by what seemed to me a political system of legalized bribery and conflict of interest but I only recently realized why it is so dysfunctional. I thought it was my esthetic response to the apparent lack of integrity of it all. In fact “conflict of interest” is analogous to a feedback loop also. The feedback risk is that a particular lack of impartiality will impair judgment and create imbalanced outcomes.
Our current predicaments of over-dependence on oil, climate change, pollution, urban sprawl and various other dire situations illustrates the point fairly well. In a better-designed political/market system, all those other costs and unsatisfactory effects would be factored in as real costs. They would then act as negative feedback. As it is, large contributions and interests with “access” to politicians drown out and overwhelm all the other possible points of view and alternatives. The money and influence feedback distorts the decision-making; for instance currently we mostly just design for bigger traffic jams and a catastrophic failure of oil supplies.
Long before systems analysts came up with the terms of feedback theory the founding fathers preached the gospel of “checks and balances”. They had a common sense understanding that unless influence and power was balanced and checked, a democratic system was vulnerable to unlooked for tyrannies and instability. The challenge for our era is to understand the linkages that have allowed money to steal our democracy and then distort our culture. Anyone, conservative or progressive, who wants a viable planet for the next generation, has no other choice but to address what is wrong with our currently self-destructing system.
I recently finished reading a delightful and inspirational book by Granny D Haddock, “Walking Across America in my 90th Year”. In her odyssey she eventually arrived at a viable solution to provide an alternative to the private money that always buys up all the politicians.
She suggested that the way forward is to insist that our legislators introduce laws that allow public funding for political campaigning. This would provide a real alternative for those who are willing to refuse large private donations. Such a system is already working well in Maine and Arizona. In Maine over 80% of the candidates now choose to run with public money, or “clean”.
I was thrilled to hear that a few years ago in Maine, a single mother who worked as a waitress successfully challenged an incumbent and was elected to their state assembly. How many waitresses have been able to get to Washington as congressional representatives in the last few decades? Or even run? Publicly funded elections really can produce diverse candidates and diverse ideas to actually give us real choices. Diverse approaches and ways of seeing and understanding problems have a much greater potential to produce creative and successful solutions than our current narrow system allows. Will another “war” like the war on drugs, or the war on crime, or the war on poverty have any greater success than its predecessors?
It is the very nature of runaway systems that they are hard to manage or modify. Drastically damping the money feedback distortion by electoral and campaign finance reform is now critical to our survival. Otherwise the unchecked positive feedback loops will continue to drive us towards unsustainable, unattractive and disastrous futures. Public funding of election campaigns is probably really the only way for the people to wrest their representatives back from the special interests with the deep pockets. We must make them accountable to the voters once again. It has already been achieved in some states, but as we know in Massachusetts, entrenched interests will fight hard to derail such initiatives.
This nation’s founders identified powerful threats and came up with pragmatic solutions. The monarchy was overthrown, an American aristocracy was disavowed and the power of the church was dealt with appropriately. Also, by law, foreign governments were not allowed to directly participate or interfere in government. Today many multinationals that are richer and more powerful than foreign governments routinely influence government and even propose legislation and write federal regulations.
Our original and inspirational national foundation has aged and urgently needs to be inspected by a new constitutional assembly with a view to a common sense renewal that provides contemporary checks and balances. Without such a renewal, progressives, conservatives and all other people of good will face futile busy-work, desperately shoring up endless cracks and fissures. Between us all we will never have enough fingers to plug all the holes. We will win some of our innumerable rear guard battles but the war will sweep by us unchecked. Without a reevaluation and renewal of the foundation, our fearful red parts will continue to be championed and deceived by made-for-TV charlatans and our blue parts will suffer exasperation and despair.
The survival of a sustainable and peaceful environment on our planet now makes it an urgent necessity to address this fundamental problem.
The presently entrenched system is not going to be easy to budge but what effort is your future worth? Whatever you personally consider our most urgent problem or impending crisis, it is not likely that it will be soluble without addressing the overarching problem and the inevitable distortions caused by the existing positive feedback loops for money. Whatever political or spiritual organizations and movements you belong to, urge them to join in an immense coalition of organizations to break the money feedback loop. And if they are ensconced and secure and want to stay in their trench you will have to go over the top and leave them behind.
So the good news is that there are fundamental institutional solutions. But we will only save ourselves by turning off our TVs, looking around carefully and then working as if our survival depended on this next American Revolution. It does.
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Graeme Sephton is a telecommunications projects engineer at UMass and also president of a non-profit organization, Freedom of Information Advocacy Coalition. www.foiac.org