Introduction
Have you ever heard of someone coming down with a severe headache, taking a large dose of headache medicine, and feeling just fine in a couple of hours? The next day, the same thing occurs. The person checks into the hospital several weeks later to find out they have brain cancer. Four days later, that person is dead.
I hate to start this article with such a morose example, but it addresses the idea expressed in this article. Symptomatic solutions to problems frequently just disguise the underlying structural problems.
I have written in other articles about the systems archetype known as shifting the burden. When a person seeks a quick, easy solution, the system’s structural influence causes the problem to worsen.
Systemic Behavior Grows Worse
“Behavior grows better before it grows worse.”
Any success at overcoming structural influence will only last for a short while. We find simple, “easy,” interventions enticing because they seem to work — in the short term. Then, again, compensating feedback takes over and things get even worse.
Economic stimulus gets people to spend more money. This causes a nominal increase in GDP. It also causes a lack of savings and investment, resulting in reduced employment and reduced availability of goods in the future.
Comment
I want you to think about situations in which you’ve encountered a problem that seemed rather easy to solve at the beginning, only to have it become much worse at some time in the future. Because politicians don’t understand the complexity of the American economy, they frequently implement short-term solutions that have a devastating effect in the long term. Neither the self-professed “capitalists” nor the self-professed “socialists” have a true understanding of the structure of a healthy economy.
I will give you a short list of cases in which short-term solutions lead to long-term problems. I will discuss these in greater length in the future.
Expanding the money supply helps finance short-term problems, but in the long-term, it leads to resource misallocation and eventually to inflation.
Wage and price controls seem like a simple solution, but they ignore the importance of price signals and inevitably cause greater harm.
Conclusion
The short-term success achieved by symptomatic solutions applied to a system does not always translate into the results the system produces.
When addressing any problem, always examine the system’s structure. Remember that systemic structure always has more influence than any short-term action.
The American stock market provides a perfect example. When an analyst compares current market behavior with past behavior, always ask: “Does the market have the same structure today as it did when the previous pattern formed?”