Cumulative decay
Cumulative decay
Why is it that when an organization gets bigger and longer, it tends to become bureaucratic and lose its flexibility and innovative spirit? Why do dynasties that were once so prosperous always fall into decay and even extinction? In this talk, we talk about the dynamics of systemic decay [1].
The decline of a system is not just a systemic problem, nor is it a cultural problem at all, nor is it an ideological problem or an educational problem, but it is structural.
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Mr. Jin Guantao sums up a general rule in his book “The Philosophy of Systems”, “Prosperity and Crisis”, etc.: * The reason why a system will always decay is because of “unorganized power”. *
Take a simple example. There is a pond in the wild with water plants and fish and shrimp in it. Why does the water in the pond become shallow over time and become a swamp?
Jin Guantao said that we can look at the pond as a system. This system includes three “subsystems”: water, water plants, and fish and shrimp. The water feeds the water plants, the water plants feed the fish, and all parties get along well, so the pond as an ecosystem can exist for a long time and is quite stable. But it doesn’t stay the same, it evolves.
Fish feces, fish carcasses, decaying water plants, all this organic matter doesn’t get recycled away, they keep increasing and settling in the pond. The pond gets more and more muddy, and of course the water gets shallower.
The law is that there are various sub-systems in a large system, and the sub-systems are coupled together with each other to fulfill the function of the large system. But the subsystems also have their own logic, they have to develop themselves, and they have other, not exactly the functions that the larger system wants.
Those extra functions of the subsystems are what Jin Guantao calls “unorganized power”-that is, power outside of the organization’s design. The unorganized forces slowly accumulate and lead to the decay of the larger system.
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Take another example of land salinization. Farmers are never completely dependent on the weather to grow their fields; rain is very limited and you have to divert water from the river to irrigate the fields. And irrigation can’t be done indefinitely because there is an unorganized force building up in the shadows: salt.
There is a certain amount of salt in the river and in the land itself, and originally this salt was so low that it didn’t affect the crops. But when the river water irrigates the land it is evaporated, and what evaporates away is pure water, and the salt stays. When new river water comes in, new salts are left behind, and over time the salts accumulate and the land becomes saline.
Rainwater does not have this problem because there is no salt in it. Natural land is not salinized when it is only watered by rain. The ancients understood this perfectly, so after a piece of land had been planted for a few years in a row, it would be left fallow, stopping irrigation and allowing the rain to wash the land away. But fallow is not enough to turn things around, because you always have to plant and irrigate again.
Let’s take the oldest civilization of mankind, the Two River Basin Civilization. Wheat is so sensitive to the salinity of the land that within a thousand years, from 3500 B.C. to 2500 B.C., wheat yields dropped to 15% of what they were! In another 500 years, it would be down to 2% and wheat would be useless. Barley was not as sensitive to salt, but yields were also declining. In 2400 B.C., the yield of barley was 2,600 kilograms per hectare; by 1700 B.C., it was only 1,000 kilograms per hectare, or nearly two-thirds less.
Archaeologists believe that the salinization of the land was the root cause of the extinction of the ancient civilizations of the two river basins.
Remember this phrase: “Unorganized forces accumulate in the shadows. “ . As long as this dynamic is present, the system must decay. Some people used to say that systems decay because of “entropy increase”, but this has nothing to do with entropy increase, so don’t abuse the concept of physics. Don’t abuse the concept of physics. Closed systems are the ones that must have entropy increase! We are talking about open systems. But there is something that is “increasing” - unorganized forces are increasing.
I see the dynamics of this process of decay and eventual collapse as being the opposite of the process by which a complex system moves to a steady state. In the latter case, there is a decreasing Lyapunov function [2], whereas here there is something increasing. These are technical issues and need not be elaborated upon.
Divine power exceeds royal power, organizations become rigid, and dynasties are finally destroyed, all because of the secret accumulation of disorganized forces.
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What is the accumulation of unorganized forces responsible for the cycle of governance and chaos in Chinese history?
Many scholars, including Jin Guantao, used to think that land annexation was an important factor. When the dynasty started, the population was small and everyone had land. Later on, when the gap between the rich and the poor widened, the poor had no choice but to sell their land in the event of natural disasters, and the rich took the opportunity to buy the land of the poor. As a result, the rich had more and more land and the poor had less and less land. In the end, the people had no land and could only rebel. This is a good story, but it is not historically accurate.
I understand that the mainstream scholars - including Mr. QIN Hui’s study and the General History of Modern China published by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences - all think that the so-called trend of increasing land annexation did not actually exist. Landowners were indeed willing to annex land, but the landowners’ children and grandchildren would sell the land, and the statistics suggest that the degree of land concentration in China was actually about the same in the early and late dynastic periods.
The real cumulative force was the government.
Each dynasty’s government gets bigger and bigger. At the beginning of the dynasty, although there was a lot of waste, there weren’t really many officials, and there were enough to rule China, and the level of taxation was very low, so the people had a pretty good life. But the bureaucracy always wanted to grow.
The characteristic of the government is that it can spend as much money as you give it, and it invents all kinds of new ways to spend it, and it always feels that money is not enough. What was even more frightening for the ancient dynasties was that the government had the unchecked power to levy taxes.
Then as the dynasty evolved, there must be more and more people eating the financial rice, the power of the government became greater and greater, its intervention in the society became stronger and stronger, and its running cost became higher and higher, so the tax rate was bound to become higher and higher.
This cumulative dynamics, reflected in the changes of the Chinese tax system, is very interesting [3].
There is a general pattern of tax collection by successive Chinese governments since the Qin system, which pretty much follows this rhythm -
In the beginning, the official “positive taxes” were not high enough to be affordable by the people;
With the size of the government, the tax revenue can not maintain the operation, so especially the local government, will invent a variety of new names to collect the people’s money, that is, taxes and miscellaneous taxes;
The exorbitant tax is a gray tax, which is prone to corruption, and the people complained a lot in the long run;
At this time, the central government will carry out a tax reform, all miscellaneous taxes are merged into the main tax, to formalize, simplify the procedures, reduce corruption - like the Tang Dynasty’s two tax law, the Northern Song Dynasty’s Wang Anshi change, the Ming Dynasty’s Zhang Juzheng’s one whip law, the Qing Dynasty’s apportionment of land into the acres, are all so;
However, after some more time, it was found that the expanded formal tax was again insufficient, and new miscellaneous taxes were introduced ……
Huang Zongxi, a thinker at the end of the Ming Dynasty, specifically talked about this law in Mingyi yi yuwanxue lu, saying that it was “the harm of accumulating mo return”, which we now call “Huang Zongxi’s Law”.
What should the people do? One way is to become subordinate to the “powerful”. In ancient times, there were policies to exempt the land of certain official families from taxes, so the people could live on as long as they paid the rent for the land they farmed for these people. Another option was to quit farming and go to the city to engage in handicrafts - because tax technology was limited at that time, the government mainly collected taxes from the land.
And this entered a vicious circle. The people who pay taxes become less, the government can only increase the tax rate; tax rate increased, the people are more reluctant to farm …… Finally, the court finances can only collapse.
To put it simply, the fundamental reason why all ancient Chinese dynasties declined and collapsed was that the government kept expanding, leading to the officials pushing the people to rebel.
This has little to do with the emperor’s own virtue, the level of officials, or even the degree of corruption, or even specific policies. With this dynamic in place, the fate of the dynasty was doomed.
So would you say that modern governments have broken this loop? Moderns do do it better because there are democratic checks and balances. First of all modern governments can’t just raise taxes, parliament can veto it and the people can protest. Furthermore some politicians will initiate tax cuts to please the people. Also, conservative politicians will seek to reduce the size of government.
But in my opinion, these practices are just like practicing fallow ground, which can only alleviate, but not prevent, the decline. In the United States, for example, the conservatives are so powerful, but the general trend is that the government is getting bigger and bigger and the taxes are getting higher and higher.
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Corporations have something building up as well.
Why do companies tend to ossify when they get bigger? According to Rumelt’s analysis in Critical Difficulties, we could roughly say it’s because of a ‘meritocracy culture’.
When a company has had a glorious period in its history and created a group of meritocrats, these people will then idolize the way things were done in the first place: this is how we do things here.
Then over time, when new people come in, they can’t talk about innovation, but about obedience, regulations, and respect for the authority of the old man. Older people have demanded to elevate their status and sphere of influence, as if a group of old revolutions were there all day long posing for seniority. The company grows firmly bureaucratic.
- Simply put, it is the seniority and status of the elderly and the inertia of doing things the old way that is accumulating. *
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So how do you think we can mitigate the accumulation? The easiest way is to change people diligently. “There are too many redundant functions in a subsystem like “people”. Whether you are an official or a businessman, you are only asking this person to work, but he will ask for status, he will develop his own power, he will want to bring his friends and family with him - if you absorb one person, you are absorbing a whole lot of people and things, so how can you not fail? It is better to replace a man before he takes root.
This is probably why companies in big cities are slower to become ossified. Companies in big cities have frequent turnover, job-hopping, layoffs, and hiring are commonplace, and it’s less likely that people will become tree-hugging when they’re essentially working not for a company, but in a workplace circle. Modern talent is either replaceable or easy to interface with, everyone can work in another company at any time, that is naturally less prone to corruption.
Furthermore, the modern workplace has become more specialized and purer. If you can distinguish your multiple identities clearly, and if you work for one company is to work for the company, avoiding bringing other functions in your life into the company, then you’ll be fine if you work for a long time.
But such a good culture in the workplace is not completely universal.
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Contemporary Chinese officialdom has a more formal provisions, county-level cadres can not serve in the local, must be exchanged for use. What are you kidding me, you in this county born and bred, the results when the governor of this county, finished the county public security director or your brother, then the county will not be your family’s? Mao Zedong than Zeng Guofan a place is that he did not use the same hometown, he asked cadres must come from all over the world.
However, the power of tradition is still strong [4].
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Our whole point in this talk is that * The decay of a system has little to do with ideological education, organizational discipline, or anything else, and is not a matter of culture, but is the result of the objective law that the forces of disorganization are accumulating insidiously. * Just as irrigation inevitably leads to salinization of the land.
If you want the base to last, you have to counteract the cumulative process with a special system. We have seen many attempts to do so, with some success, but we are far from being able to say that we have solved the problem.
Annotation
[In 1945, the Communist Party of China (CPC) led by Mao Zedong was already fighting for power. A “democrat” named Huang Yanpei traveled to Yan’an and had a conversation with Mao Zedong in a kiln, which became known as the “Kiln Dialogue”.
Huang Yanpei said, “Since you want to take over the world, let me ask you a question. In Chinese history, every dynasty has its own rise and fall, “its rise is vigorous, and its fall is sudden”, as if there is a cyclical law of governance and chaos in the netherworld. Do you, Mao Zedong, have any idea how to break out of this cycle?
The conversation between the two men has not been completely passed down. But it is said that the answer Mao gave was that we need to have democracy.
Democracy is certainly a good answer. But with the level of knowledge at the time, these two men may not have grasped the point. Huang Yanpei’s explanation of the cycle of governance and chaos was that after the rulers gained the world, they slowly slacked off, and “inertia set in,” which led to a bad culture; Mao Zedong organized a party-wide study of an article written by Guo Moruo, called “The Three Hundred Years’ Ritual of the Kashin Dynasty,” which summarized the reasons for the fall of the Ming Dynasty and the defeat of Li Zicheng, and also emphasized the ideological reasons, saying. “Do not repeat the mistake of pride in victory” ……
[2] Elite Day Class Season 3, Model Thinker 10: What is “Good” Complexity
[3] For an overview of taxation in ancient China, see Chen Xubin, Two Thousand Years of the Qin System: the Rules of Power for Feudal Emperors (Zhejiang People’s Publishing House, 2021).
[4] Cf. Feng Junqi, “Cadres in the Middle Counties,” PhD dissertation, Peking University, 2010.
Highlights
“Unorganized forces” - that is, forces outside the organizational design slowly accumulate and lead to the decay of the larger system.