Subject: Similarities and Differences between system dynamics and dialectical analysis

Posted by Karl North on 11/24/2010
In Reply To:Similarities and Differences between system dynamics and dialectical analysis Posted by George Richardson on 11/24/2010

Message:

Philip,

Here is a brief, unsophisticated attempt to address your question, which I have never seen posed in my years of following the ST/SD network.

Early in my disenchantment with exclusively reductive ways of doing science, I was drawn to both methods of inquiry as powerful tools of analysis, and struck by the similarity in their underlying paradigms, in the Kuhnian sense of a scientific worldview or approach to understanding how the world works. Both value an an understanding of how things change over time, and approach that understanding in the same way: with methods that look for structural causes. So both system dynamics and the dialectical method are ways of modeling causal relations including the discovery of feedback structures And both seek the historical time horizon appropriate to the problem. Like system dynamics Marxian social science is deeply historical as well as systemic in approach. Finally, in both the boundary of inquiry is set by the nature of the problem, so part of the problem is to discover the 'system of interest'. So at their best both approaches drive inquiry in a multidisciplinary direction, looking for root causes, and this is what I find attractive in each, and is so rare in the knowledge business.

Marxists apparently do not feel the need for simulation modeling, to be analytically persuasive. However most Marxian modeling makes heavy use of quantitative data, and does describe shifting loop dominance, but with verbal analysis and somewhat different terminology. For instance, decades ago Marxian political economists saw as a likely scenario the financialization of capitalism that we see today, explaining it in terms of the structural relations of the capitalist system and inherent contradictions that would deepen over time to push the center of power from the manufacturing toward the financial class.

The diagrammatic modeling that I find so useful in SD is rare in Marxian science. Biological Marxists Levins and Lewontin of the Harvard School of Public Health do use diagrammatic modeling that bears some resemblance to that of their neighbors at MIT.

Considering their underlying similarities, I find it unfortunate that there is so little communication between the two schools of scientific endeavor. The Marxists might push the use of systems dynamics modeling toward more weighty problems than business management, and the SD school might introduce the Marxists to a more quantitatively rigorous modeling method.

They could be complementary in other ways as well, For instance, while the Limits To Growth project dramatically revealed how the present decision rules governing interactions of key variables in the global system would lead to overshoot and collapse, it said nothing about what brought about those rules and is keeping them in place. Marxian political economy explains the socially constructed origin of a set of rules that create a type of social organization that ultimately cannibalizes itself in the way that the Limits To Growth model demonstrated.