Single-Loop and Double-Loop Learning and Homelessness – Part III – Capitalism

In Part II of this series, we wrote: “Nothing is preventing us from investing more in housing for those on the lower rungs of the economic scale, than we do for those on the upper rungs. Nothing is preventing us from enacting policies that will make all the investments we make, as a nation, in a more equitable manner. We can create a more equitable society, with much less income and wealth inequality.”

Implicitly, though, up until now, in this series, we have accepted capitalism, which undergirds our economy, as an unquestionable governing variable. The language we now use, across the country, that we will make homelessness rare, brief and nonrecurring, implicitly, if not explicitly, is based on the acceptance of this governing variable. We can make homelessness rare, brief and nonrecurring, but we can’t end homelessness in the absolute sense of the word, because in a capitalist society, there will always be economic churn. 

What if we were to question that governing variable? Double-loop learning compels us think about this. In a recent episode of the excellent KERA show, Think, Can Capitalism Work Forever? the host Krys Boyd interviewed Raj Patel and they considered this very question. Patel and Jason W. Moore recently published A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet. The book is a marvelous example of broad and encompassing double-loop learning. 

As Bill McKibben writes, it, “helps us see the startling reality behind what we usually dismiss as the obvious and everyday.” It does this by looking back, and according to Kim Stanley Robinson, offering a, “compelling interpretation of how we got to where we are now.” More importantly, it offers some ideas for, “how we might go on to create a more just and sustainable civilization.” We highly recommend listening to this Think episode to learn more about what might replace the current system. 

Obviously, we don’t know if Patel and Moore’s ideas will work. It is thinking about the ideas we have raised in this series, and not being afraid to question the governing variables that undergird our society, which is important. Such thinking has particular urgency because the effects of our current way of life are, quite literally, killing us. 

Raj Patel

(Courtesy of Raj Patel and Sheila Menezes)

This is not hyperbole. Homelessness kills: As our President and CEO, Cindy J. Crain warned us, in a haunting piece about a year and a half ago, the life expectancy of chronically homeless individuals, in the United States, is in the mid-sixties. Inequality kills: As the World Bank tells us, “Crime rates and inequality are positively correlated (within each country and, particularly, between countries), and it appears that this correlation reflects causation from inequality to crime rates, even controlling for other crime determinants.” Capitalism, unfettered and unregulated, as it is practiced today, kills: As Patel and Moore remind us, it threatens to leave us all homeless, as it endangers, our very existence, as a species, in this, our home, Planet Earth.