Thinking In Systems, by Donella Meadows

A primer on Systems Thinking, though I can't really tell you what this is beyond thinking about systems.

Idk, a lot of people really like this book. And I didn't dislike it, but can't tell you anything I got out of it. Systems are complex! They have weird interactions! They don't behave linearly! I know all this, and don't think I got anything additional from the book about it.

The book also did a couple of my pet-peeve things of claiming that [bad outcome] is because [other people did thing], while [good outcome] would have happened if [your people] had done [your thing]. It's easy to assert this, but.... like, it would be nice to have evidence of it? Like so many books it feels like it's asserting more than arguing.

A couple of things that bothered me:
- cartoonish description of Adam Smith's economics. Stop doing this people! I fell out with economics a long time ago, but the cartoon complaint that Adam Smith thought everyone was perfectly rational and collectively maximised the common good is just silly
- this shouldn't have bothered me so much but: Meadows claims that flows can be changed faster than stocks can. This is often true, but it's entirely contingent! If you have a bathtub, opening the tap (the flow of water) can be done immediately but the stock of water (the water in the tub) only increases slowly; this is true. But if you have a glass of water and the tap is on full, it can be hard to change the flow of water (turn off the tap) fast enough to respond to the change in the stock (the water in the glass, before it overflows its edges) -- this is all contingent.