The danger of "systems thinking" is that it misleads otherwise clever people into believing they've found a cheat sheet for subjects they don't have deep knowle

The danger of "systems thinking" is that it misleads otherwise clever people into believing they've found a cheat sheet for subjects they don't have deep knowledge in. This article is a fine example of that. I didn't know what right-half-plane zeroes are. I knew some of the examples it gave (Veritasium has a fun video on the bicycle steering phenomenon), but not that there was a category they all fit into. Neat. But I got squinty when the author said the intended audience was everybody, and got a hunch it was going to wander into the current economy ... which it did, sort of, except that in this case, "wandering" into the subject meant, "wrap it up with a graph and then point at it and go, see! See! I can predict the economy now!" The follow-up at https://jbconsulting.substack.com/p/on-shelter-futures-part-1 https://jbconsulting.substack.com/p/on-shelter-futures-part-... goes into more detail and concludes that interest rate hikes will increase inflation over the next 5-ish years, but there's no "part 2" in the series to be found (paywalled?). There are lots of graphs and the author tries to build a case out of several arguments, buuuuut in the end it feels like that IASIP conspiracy board meme. I smell a faint whiff of gish galloping here and there, but one thing that stands out to me is that the author chooses to normalize housing costs against inflation, but there's no mention of wage stagnation anywhere. Rents and housing costs can't rise a whole lot more, certainly not to the extent the author seems to be predicting, because people can't afford them. This is already a conversation happening in every housing market in at least several countries. In the US, pick literally any local subreddit and ask if anyone knows of an affordable place to rent, I dare you. There's already a huge epidemic of unhoused people and van-dwelling is more popular than it has ever been, and consumers are currently getting squeezed in a lot of directions. Here, one of the things in my browser history before this article was this thread: https://old.reddit.com/r/news/comments/v8knl5/gas_prices_hit_5_national_average_after_rapid_rise/ibs341g/ https://old.reddit.com/r/news/comments/v8knl5/gas_prices_hit... So, if wages don't rise to meet these costs, then something big is going to break way before the cost increases the article is doomsaying.