Four Layer Model of Social Systems | Deep Code Experiment: Episode 1

My proposition is that social systems are composed of 4 layers that are connected and influence each other.- Financial Layer: this layer is about how money flows and agreements around money work.

Well, by contrast, in Germany the Great Depression produced hyperinflation which broke the financial system and hammered the economic layer. In fact, it went all the way down to the sociopolitical layer with the collapse of the Weimar Republic, which then penetrated into the cultural layer. Things like the Holocaust, were Germans turned against Ger... See more

You might imagine that roughly around the time when TARP and the various bail-out decisions were being made, that it could have gone either way, and that we could have, for example, allowed the too-big-to-fail entities to fail, and that it would have had negative consequences at the financial layer, negative consequences probably at the economic le... See more

- Economic Layer: this layer is about physical infrastructure, skills, distribution of resources where people are working and things of that sort.- Sociopolitical layer: this layer is about the effectiveness, legitimacy and trust in various kinds of social institutions including schools, government and things like that.- Cultural layer: this layer ... See more

I would propose that this was being done, and that it was done at the cost of sociopolitical and cultural capital. So, quite specifically, what I would say is that things like Trump phenomenon and Brexit are directly and linearly connected to the various bailouts that happened in the United States and Europe, that it was a direct subsidy of the pol... See more

So, specifically, I imagine that what happened in 2008 crisis is that, consciously or unconsciously, a decision was made to prevent or inhibit the negative consequences of the financial and to a lesser, but very important extent, economic layers by actually spending resources at the sociopolitical and cultural layers.

Eventually, as the negative consequences of the financial crisis played its way out, and say, all the banks disappeared, some kind of new approach (e.g. Google innovating an entirely new way of handling banking) or the emergence of an entirely different regime, would have come into place, and we would have moved forward effectively with no damage b... See more

The first idea is you can think about any social system using those layers. The second idea and (the more important point) is to think about the way that the layers can actually be traded off against each other.

As an example of a similar historic circumstance you can take a look at what happened in the United States and in Germany in the context of the great depression in the 1930s. In the United States the financial depression hits the financial layer quite badly, it burned down to the economic later, it burned under the political layer which is to say t... See more