Simple narratives lead to complex problems

How French Farmers help my teaching.

I was responsible for a problem-solving club at an online school a while ago. Every week I would get together with the kids and would discuss strategic and creative ways to look at problems while exploring biases that arise when looking at possible solutions.

We analyzed case studies of real-world problems (often complex) and students would try to generate solutions with whatever resources they had (usually their critical thinking and quick Google searches).

One of the main takeaways from that experience was that kids tend to oversimplify the complexity that revolves around a certain problem. Of course, I didn’t need the club to learn that. I knew it from my experience as a human being. The same way that I know, most adults, thinking poorly of children, with their “silly, simplistic solutions”, also do the same.

Accuracy isn't a priority to our brains, regardless of age.

We all struggle with the impulse of looking at things from an obvious standpoint, trying to craft a simple narrative that suits whatever view we have or sympathize with.

Last year, a couple of months after finishing this problem-solving club, I started teaching at The Socratic Experience. My course is focused on entrepreneurship and business, so, you can imagine that money was a fairly common topic. Especially since it can be tied to so many different things, from psychology to math, history, or even morality. The latter was a popular theme for discussion amongst my students.

If you assemble a bunch of teenagers, from various backgrounds, with an extreme curiosity about life and ask them to discuss money, you’re going to be surprised by the breadth of views and how deep the conversation goes. However, once you start talking about it, you always end up visiting certain words or ideas like “poverty” and “inequality”.

Recently, I found myself in such a discussion and tried to make a point that “whatever simple solution one may propose, it will eventually be proven wrong” since it’s a pretty complex topic. Contrary to physics, where most laws are unchangeable, when we talk about human psychology and behavior, we’re talking about something much more dynamic.

I told them a story to illustrate my point, which I’ll share with you as well.

French Farmers

If you’re reading this, you probably know that there’s a supranational, political, and economic organization called The European Union (EU), composed of different European countries. One of the things that the EU does is allocate money to different countries or projects, aiming at solving a myriad of problems. As a company, organization, institution, or individual you can apply to be a receiver of these funds, as long as you’re fit for service.

The European funds aim to solve a series of problems, ranging from disinformation or lack of innovation to social issues like inequality and poverty.

I like to give the example of French Farmers, in northern France, and their relationship with money, wealth, and inequality.

There are a series of French regions where most economy is based merely on agriculture. You don’t need an MBA to know that farming it’s not the most profitable industry, since the margins aren’t great and there’s a huge amount of labor necessary to build a proper business around it.

Inequality between wealthy people and the farmers on that area was booming, and the EU decided to create a fund aiming at that particular issue. French farmers could apply and they would get a given amount of money to help them grow their business, increasing their wealth and reducing inequality.

Sounds simple, right?

Now, let me stop this story just to ask you a quick question: if you were a farmer what would you do with the money? Where are you allocating it?

When the kids I was talking to were prompted to answer this, they crafted an even better question: “What’s the most important thing you can have as a farmer to increase your business?”

Most arrived at the same conclusion: we should buy more land.

Increasing the amount of land will increase the amount of products you have. It makes sense! It allows poor farmers to grow their businesses and drive the local economy, fighting inequality.

Expect it doesn’t.

One thing we need to ask ourselves is who actually owns the land that farmers are trying to buy. Other farmers? Sure, parts of it, but they’re not selling it. The rest of the land available to buy (or rent) belongs to wealthy people, who gladly take this new money from farmers, selling or, sometimes, even renting their fields.

So, if we follow the money, we’ll see that most of it, aiming at fighting inequality, is going to the hands of those already wealthy.

It seemed so obvious and yet…But there’s more.

Let’s say the EU already knows this and comes up with a set of conditions around the funds, such as a fixed percentage of the money to be spent on land. You’ll find resistance on 2 different ends.

The first one is the farmer’s mindset. You’re asking them to go against their own beliefs about managing their business. “What do you mean, I can’t spend money buying land?” is a great gateway to a protest due to undesired conditions. Spilling milk, parking trucks in public spaces to prevent traffic, or just occupying all the lines on the highway with slow tractors are some of the previous stunts.

But even if you’re able to deal with that, you’ll need to face the resistance of wealthy people. Since these funds are public, the regulation will be public as well, allowing for the land owners to increase the prices of land, making sure they have a bigger profit on a smaller piece of land.

Instead of asking 20 thousand dollars for 1 hectare, maybe they ask 15 for half of that, assuming that’s the maximum amount of money that farmers can spend. The prices will fluctuate according to the new rules, which goes against the original intention of the fund: fighting inequality.

This is an example of an easy solution that’s misleading. Easy narratives don’t always work, even if we really want to believe they do. Understanding the full complexity of a problem is hard and it can be overwhelming, so, we look for stories and simple, logical, step-by-step ideas that can help us have an opinion, even if misinformed.

Stories move the world, for the better and the worse

When I finish my story, usually students tend to understand that problems are more complex than what they seem. It makes sense to them. And yet, this is the moment I tell them (and you, fellow reader) that my explanation of the problem was, in itself, a story. A simplification of the problem that does not correspond to reality.

Part of what I wrote is true!

Some land-owners are wealthy people, others are farmers who are willing to sell. Some farmers are against having a rule in funds that prevents them from buying land, some of them are not. Some farmers tend to protest a lot, while others don’t partake in such things.

The truth is far more complex than it seems.

My own explanation is, in itself, a simple narrative (albeit slightly more developed than the original idea) trying to explain a hard problem. It’s still an oversimplification nevertheless. It’s not the full story.

We strive for simple narratives and that’s part of what’s wrong in today’s world.

We’ve been like this since we’re a species, but with current access to technology, spreading simplistic narratives around complex problems is easier than ever.

This is obviously dangerous.

When looking at these kinds of problems, we need to test different things and evaluate the results through a critical lens. Sometimes, data can give you solutions for these kinds of problems, other times we must try different and creative initiatives in order to bring change to the framework we’re using. Above everything else, we need to be conscious of our own biases and respect the power of storytelling.

That’s why I’m so proud of the work we do at The Socratic Experience, helping students to develop their critical thinking, creativity, and entrepreneurial skills. This combination aims at helping students to develop their own critical thinking and capacity to break through a simplistic view of things, formulating their own creative hypothesis and testing it out in the real world.

Teaching students certain skills is a fundamental step to bringing a Modern Golden Age. However, that doesn’t mean that, as adults, we’re free from worrying about our tendency to look for simplistic views of complex issues.

Let’s teach the youth how to be better, by becoming better ourselves.

"The art of simplicity is a puzzle of complexity." - Douglas Horton