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Key points
- Systematic structural barriers often trump personal perseverance.
- To make meaningful change, it is often necessary to understand and change the structural rewards and punishments embedded in the system.
- More often than not, it is not that people are immoral, but rather that they're responding to a dysfunctional system.
- Systemic change is slow but necessary for our growth as individuals and as a society.
When I came to the University of Minnesota to pursue higher education, I serendipitously met Dr. Walter McClure, chair of the Center for Policy Design. He sent me a warm email out of the blue responding to one of my articles.
McClure is a terrific thinker and a prolific writer. He obtained a degree in physics from Yale University, then switched careers and applied his brilliant talent to healthcare and education policy. Lately, he's been working to make the discipline of policy analysis and design more rigorous.
McClure’s magnum opus is a slim book, Policy Design for Large Social Systems, in which he lays down the theory and methods of his novel thinking, which he calls Large System Architecture (LSA). His ability for complex theory-building, which apparently springs from his training in theoretical physics, is among the best in the social sciences that I have come across. In this article, I will unpack the connections between the insights of LSA and psychology and see how each can inform the other.
In psychology, there is significant interest in the subjects of change and personal transformation. Psychologists often ask: “How and why do people change?”
A fundamental motif in psychology is viewing human behavior through the lens of structural incentives—rewards and punishments. This is considered an important level of analysis because it provides a unique window into human behavior—explaining, in essence, why people do what they do.
What struck me about LSA is that McClure enlarged this fundamental motif from the individual to large systems of individuals and organizations. Regarding large systems of people and organizations that serve a definable purpose for society, he asks, “Why do the people and organizations do what they do? And if they are not doing what society wants of that system, how can we get them to change?”
Almost always, McClure says, when you see a macrosystem chronically performing counter to the goals society has for it, it is because the system is poorly structured, engendering incentives that reward undesired performance and punishing desired performance. The only cure, then, is to redesign the system with a new structure that replaces the bad incentives with proper incentives that reward the desired goals. LSA is a systematic discipline to do just that: redesign and implement improved macrosystem structure and incentives.
For example, in the healthcare system, most people can agree that the "goals" should be a system that will give everyone high-quality care at a cost that both individuals and the nation can afford. Instead, our badly performing healthcare system is eating the nation out of house and home, and steadily pricing itself beyond the reach of increasing numbers of Americans. And while our healthcare system does have pockets of excellence that are indeed the envy of the world, the overall quality is below that of other advanced nations.
Using LSA analysis, McClure looked at the incentives for providers and patients created by the structure of the flawed current system. He found that structure perversely rewards services—the more and the more costly they are—regardless of the health outcome. We could therefore completely reverse these incentives were we to redesign the healthcare system by measuring and informing patients how competing providers compare on health results and costliness and give premium and co-pay discounts for choosing efficient providers over inefficient ones.
This is but one example of LSA. McClure has identified strategies for incentive change in other large systems—public education, police reform, the economy, and so on—all built on realigning system incentives rewarding undesired performance to reward desired performance.
In short, LSA takes a fundamental motif of psychology writ large to accomplish desired change in large systems of organizations and people. Below, I will use the insights of LSA to analyze the struggles of immigrants and refugees navigating higher education and the job market.
Using LSA to Analyze Zero-Generation Students
Individual problems are often social problems. The vast majority of humans could not survive on their own; by and large, we need to cooperate for survival.
When one person interacts with another person, a kind of "third world" is created that is more than the individual can experience alone. That “third world” can lead to magnificent experiences or miserable ones—all depending on the social structure under which we interact.
Mohammed (a pseudonym of an international graduate student from Yemen) is a zero-generation student who was admitted to Harvard, and whom I studied as part of my research on immigrants and refugees in U.S. higher education. He recently graduated and started looking for a job.
Mohammed lived most of his adult life in Yemen, speaking exclusively in Arabic and socializing with traditional Islamic values. Mohammed was well-adapted for life in Yemen—but in America, he is what Dr. McClure calls “structural poor,” defined as historically marginalized people who lack “skills that require considerable time, effort and mentoring to develop, skills that they scarcely know exist let alone how to acquire.”
“Too many middle-class adults fault the structural poor for low skills and undisciplined work habits,” Dr. McClure wrote. “They blame their poor genes and weak character, implying their woes are ineluctable and irremediable, thereby excusing themselves to ignore all this human misery.” However, LSA tells us that it is not about the individual; instead, it is about the social, cultural, and structural conditions under which the individual operates.
The conversation around mobilizing the structural poor from the bottom of the pyramid to the top is often marred with internal politics within minority groups. This dynamic is noted between two groups, who should collaborate, yet they often compete against each other: the middle class and the structural poor.
Middle Class vs. Structural Poor
Oblivious to their own privileged upbringing, many people in the middle class expect the structural poor to "grow up" and rise against adversity. Many in the middle class are blind to their own privileges—perhaps they had successful parents, safe neighbors, and thriving communities—many of which likely provided mentorship benefits and networking sources, which in turn helped ensure their future success.
Conversely, the structural poor were much more likely to grow up in chaotic, insecure, violent social conditions, often those that breed low self-esteem and self-confidence—all of which engender their ability to exercise the principle of delayed gratification, which complicates their future.
When looking for jobs, many in the middle class know what to say and do, while many among the structural poor struggle in the dark. Conversely, the structural poor are often significantly less educated and/or less aware of social and emotional learning skills—all of which are necessary to get and hold a job. For those who grew up in the middle class, such skills are typically learned during the formative years and thus become second nature during adulthood. In the words of Dr. McClure, “The middle class and the structural poor are playing on an uneven game field; one could even say they are in altogether different games.”
Conclusion
People will generally avoid taking risks to avoid punishment and will strive to engage in behaviors that result in rewards. When immigrants and refugees struggle to navigate higher education and the job market, it is not that people in those two sectors have no moral desire to help them; instead, it is the systematic structures that are not conducive to the success of immigrants and refugees.
Simply put, when people struggle, the cause is often not a moral failure but rather the systematic structure under which people operate.
