How do things go from bad to worse?

Abstract

Humans are constantly making evaluations about the direction of movement in time of systems perceived as relevant, in terms of whether things are moving to the better or to the worse. The relevant system may be very small or as large as the whole planet earth; evaluations seldom go beyond the solar system. We evaluate things like health, wealth, security, justice, etc. and we have a strange capacity for putting many diverse variables together into a single rough evaluation. Accountants evaluate the state of a balance sheet or position statement quantitatively in terms of dollars; economists evaluate aggregates like the GNP. But almost everyone goes beyond quantification into rough, qualitative evaluations of the total state of a system. The evaluation of overall systems runs into the difficulty that different persons evaluate the same perceived change differently. Nevertheless, there are many processes in society by which differing evaluations are coordinated, even if they are not reconciled. The market is one, politics is another, and the moral order is a third. In large systems we are unlikely to come out with a single answer to even the question of whether things are getting better or worse. But we can identify certain instances where there is wide agreement that a movement is for the worse: the ‘cliffs’-disasters, premature deaths, losses of liberty, etc. We can furthermore specify certain dynamic systems likely to produce these dramatic worsenings, and perhaps do something about them.