So welcome to this section on Systems Thinking in Bottom-up Policymaking. What we've been talking about throughout the lecture is ecostructure. And in bottom-up policy making we really want to develop our concern with ecostructures that allows more and better Involvement by ordinary citizens in solving policy problems. So in your reading for this course in Colander and Kupers you're given the example of the traffic ramps in two countries, in Germany and Holland. And if you go through the reading you'll see that in traffic ramps in Germany, German motorists automatically have a norm where they will go on an on-ramp and seamlessly alternate one car after another after another on the on-ramp to their expressway. But in Holland the norm is to go up the on-ramp and just push yourself as fast as you can, taking any opportunity you can to get into the stream of traffic. So nobody is going to give up their turn or wait doing an alternating traffic system. And the authors note that when Dutch drivers are in Germany they have no problem driving like Germans. And when Germans are in Holland, they realize that no one's going to wait for them and they'd better drive like Dutch motorists. And what the example has given in the reading four is to suggest that rather than building traffic lights and putting police all over the highways, what makes Germany work so much better is the norm and the expectation by every single German motorist that this is how you drive and it makes German roadways safer, at lower cost. And the idea is to think about how we can shift the ecostructure of motorists, so that we can reach the critical mass that makes them drive like Germans. These norms and expectations can set up a self-perpetuating equilibrium that one could call in public health a culture of health, where we don't have to keep telling people not to smoke, their next door neighbors do it, where we've reached that critical mass. And in bottom-up system's thinking, we want to think about ecostructures that do that. Now the authors speculate that perhaps we can establish norms of alternating by building shorter ramps. They noticed that short ramps are characteristic of German highways, and future work in systems modeling ought to examine whether short ramps are what leads to the norm of alternating your merging onto the highway. But the point is, we need to think about norms of how individual agents drive and we can model them in our systems modeling, and then work on policies that help build these bottom-up social structures and norms and expectations. And that's the focus. So the role of the policy maker isn't to reach in with a master plan that makes everybody do it their way with a lot of traffic lights and traffic cops, but to set up systems that make norm shifting automatic. So in public health if we put food labels in restaurants and on all the foods and make them easy to understand, and we communicate clearly, those food labels might make the thought of calorie consciousness automatic in shift norms. We can make changes in the built environment with better, cleaner, well-lit sidewalks that make walking more normative. We can create information flows about public health problems that are communicated clearly that make civic engagement much more easy. We could create information flows about what our government is doing that makes engagement with the government easy and makes government more accountable. We're trying to understand how to make the norms change, rather than to dictate them from the top to let people make their own minds up based upon the environment that they inhabit, both of social and cultural environment. So how do we use complexity science to think about these bottom-up ecostructures? Well, in agent-based modeling we can actually use the computer to see what happens with different norms. You go to your net logo model and you can change the turtle so that they have different norms and find out which norms work better. You essentially could make a computer version of a German road versus a Dutch road. The other thing you can do in system dynamics modeling that we've explored is to look at different policies and see how they shift norms. We had a time in the course when we could use different amounts of foreign funding and pay for performance systems in order to see if it could change the delivery of quality in a health system. So with our tools we can focus our science on how do we shift norms and how much do those norms matter for the outcomes we're concerned about. But moreover, once we're doing this in our scientific work, we want to engage policymakers. And shift their thinking rather than to be controllers of our actions, to put them into the business of ecostructure creation, to change the ways we think about what we're trying to do as bottom-up agents in our systems. In the reading by Colander and Kupers, there's a little bit of attention to this new norm of a for-benefit enterprise. They noticed that right now we've really divided the world into the for-profit world and the non-profit world, and this has been successful. Obviously, the capitalist world has made a lot of money and we no longer live in Philton squalor. And I think we should all be pretty happy about that, compared to the opposite would be us living in the type of cities that Charles Dickens described in tenement housing with very little to eat and filth everywhere. So, the for-profit world has done something that the authors of your reading are very concerned about. They've been able to keep their focus on profit, but to say to all of us to give us the expectation that they don't solve social problems, the business world is there only to make money. And if you've got a social problem, that's the problem for your government or for the non-profit sector. But we want to think about bottom-up solutions that are in-between, and this new idea, which the authors raise is the for-benefit enterprise. The authors comment that I think we may agree, I think I agree that the people I know are interested in other things besides money. Even people working in for-profit businesses have many other objectives, and many for-profit businesses have many other objectives, besides chasing money. So what we're looking for is an ecostructure where a for-profit or a nonprofit can spin-off activities that are really devoted to civic benefit. And the reason this can happen, the reason it already is happening is because people in a post-scarcity society are already understanding that what gives life meaning is solving social problems. It gives them social status and gives them a sense of well-being. So what we're seeing happening are spin-offs from private industry, where they will crowd-source funding for a social enterprise that comes out of corporate responsibility. Not only will this come out of corporations, but even nonprofits will find themselves engaging in various levels of government. The basic concept behind the for-benefit enterprise is transparency, where they've made clear to everybody inside the organization and outside that they exist to solve a specific social problem. And that's what the expectation is so that the shareholders and the government regulators are not confused about what the basic purpose of the enterprise is. So, expect to see more of for-benefit enterprises as a bottom-up form of activity. And what I think we should be ready for is developing ecostructures as policymakers that allow for-benefit enterprises to function and to contribute to the solution of social problems, because our social problems are too big to be left simply to government. And our for-profit institutions want to become involved, and this would offer them a way to do that. So what do we want to think about, we want to have bottom-up strategies. We've talked about the public health triumvirate. And really what this comes to in public health is engaging the grass roots in any effort to illuminate problems. And to develop a participatory model to help shift the norms and expectations for what the roles will be of government leaders, civic leaders, and the public health technocrat. So, this is a new model. I realize that many people who learn systems thinking and systems modeling stay with the old model, where they ask their client what's your problem? They go to the computer and say, here's your solution, and then they walk away. In bottom-up engagement, the technocrat would be building something more than just a model. They would be building shared expectations for what the roles will be in a new ecostructure that supports them. Here, a public health technocrat would use their modeling skills and their systems thinking in order to bring together politicians and civic leaders. And so we won't be solving problems by issuing memos and regulations from the top. We will be building new expectations and new institutions that help harness the energy and interest of grass roots organizations in solving the social problems that they perceive and share.
