Systemic Quotes

“Connectedness. One thing leads to another. Often in unexpected ways.”
― Holly Goldberg Sloan, Counting by 7s

“Whether it's racism, patriarchy, warmongering, greed, or child trafficking, it's counter to God's Kingdom. But the people caught in those systems are rarely the enemies; often they are just as caught, as longing for a rescue as the rest of us. We don't battle against flesh and blood, not really, but against the powers and principalities that hold us all captive.”
― Sarah Bessey, Out of Sorts: Making Peace with an Evolving Faith

“The drug smuggling today had, as its godparents, the bootleggers nearly a hundred years ago. The syndicates, the systems, the psyches were created back then.”
― Louise Penny, Glass Houses

“On the collective level, as more people do their own healing work, expand their capacity for connection, and trade individualism for interdependence, we will have a much greater capacity to change the oppressive systems that keep all of us, and especially the most marginalized, from being free.”
― Noëlle Janka, Rebel Healing: Transforming Ourselves and the Systems That Make Us Sick

“Yeah... they tell you to work from the inside, which is perhaps their greatest deception of all...”
― Josh Burggraf, Digestate: A Food & Eating Themed Anthology

“An incompetent government locks criminals up, whereas a competent government treats the criminal as a sickened person that probably has a range of systemic deficiencies that need to be treated in order to rehabilitate them back into society.”
― Steven Magee

“As an engineer, I had a successful career managing the world’s largest telescopes and the largest solar photovoltaic power generation system in the USA. Where I went wrong was not understanding the systemic corruption that is present in the USA.”
― Steven Magee

“What if we looked at the law as a piece of software, the operating system of the United States of America. After all, laws play the same role as software in providing instructions for a given system - if this, then that, and so on. If a team of software engineers was asked to analyze the entire body of federal law, they would see tens of thousand of pages of poorly documented code, with a multitude of complex, spaghetti-like interdependencies between the individual components. Could the principles of good software design be used to improve the way we write financial regulations?

Li, William, Pablo Azar, David Larochelle, Phil Hill, and Andrew W. Lo. 2015. 'Law Is Code: A Software Engineering Approach to Analyzing the United States Code.' Journal of Business and Technology Law 10: 297.

A useful feature of network graphs if the ability to model contagion. Like an epidemiologist studying the spread of a contagious disease from its point of origin, we should identify the potential linkages through which a financial crisis may travel.

Billio, Monica, Mila Getmansky, Andrew W. Lo, and Loriana Pelizzon, 2012. 'Econometric Measures of Connectedness and Systemic Risk in the Finance and Insurance Sectors.' Journal of Financial Economics, 104: 535-559.

This approach can also be used to measure the network of banks, insurance companies, and sovereign nations. The idea is to see how macroeconomic problems facing countries might get transmitted to the financial system and vice versa.

Billio, Monica, Mila Getmansky, Dale Gray, Andrew W. Lo, Robert C. Merton, and Loriana Pelizzon. 2016. 'Granger-Causality Networks of Sovereign Risk.' Working Paper, MIT Laboratory for Financial Engineering.”
― Andrew W. Lo, Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought

“Systemic inflammation is a component of altitude sickness.”
― Steven Magee, Toxic Altitude

“It's a systemic rot, the good police officers cover-up for the bad police officers.”
― Steven Magee

“The systemic rot is so severe in the police that the government should replace it with something that actually works for the masses and call it ‘Citizens Assistance’ with the focus being on excellent customer service that is quality controlled!”
― Steven Magee

“When dealing with systemic injustice, just because something is not calculated doesn't mean it isn't by design.”
― Jamie Arpin-Ricci

“What is the flow and impact of disinformation? How is the disinformation spreading and what are its effects?”
― Roger spitz, Disrupt With Impact: Achieve Business Success in an Unpredictable World

“The system was never broken. It was built like that. Our task isn’t to fix it—it’s to grow something better beneath it.”
― Lawrence Nault