We can't thrive on flat land
A call to unflatten the world before we succumb to the dust
No one set out to create the Dust Bowl.
Americans ventured west to make a life for themselves and their families. An abundance of rain provided a good life, which inspired an unrestrained pursuit of growth that could not continue indefinitely.
When the rain stopped, we crashed onto hard, flat land — a land whose soil turned to dust and suffocated the very life it used to give.
The Dust Bowl remains one of the worst man-made ecological disasters in American history. Our choices created the conditions that threatened to render the Great Plains uninhabitable.
In much the same way, our choices have created an economy unfit for people. We must now recenter it or risk our own destruction.
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How did we create the Dust Bowl?
We often call the Great Plains the breadbasket of the nation because it produces a bountiful wheat harvest. In the 1920s, many years passed with ample rain and golden wheat, creating the illusion that nothing could go wrong.
Then, land development companies used the concept “rain follows the plow” to deceive their prospects into buying more land. World War I instigated an increase in production and kept prices up, which encouraged an industrialized approach to farming. And like every factory, the only thing that mattered was getting it to produce as much as possible.
Farmers exchanged their Lister plow, which dug a deep furrow and caught and held blowing soil, for a one-way plow, which was cheaper, tore through the soil faster, and increased the risk of erosion.
When the price of wheat started to decline, farmers opted to plant even more land, removing the natural grasses that kept the soil from turning into dust and drifting away. Suitcase farmers, landowners who hired others to manage their farms, solidified the transition from farms as homes to farms as factories for the low-cost production of wheat.
Then the land was hit with a multiyear drought. Crops failed, exposing the earth to winds that swept the dust all the way to the East Coast.
Poor choices collided with forces outside human control, leaving most of the Great Plains in a state of erosion.1
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We’ve created an economic dust bowl.
When the soil turned to dust and blew away, the ground left behind was hard and flat like cement. In much the same way, we’ve eroded nuance, complexity, and value, forcing our economy to function in a flattened world.
We reached this point through many of the same human tendencies that caused the Dust Bowl. We see them at work across our society in individuals, businesses, and institutions. By examining them, we can better understand how we got to where we are.
1. We miss the point.
The point we choose inevitably influences the choices we make, from what we do to how we do it. When we decided to define the point of westward expansion as increasing GDP,2 we set the conditions for a total collapse of the land.
When it comes to our economy, we frequently misdefine the point. Businesses pursue “more” over everything else, and by trying to serve everyone, they end up serving no one.
The pursuit of more also fuels our digital landscape. To reach the maximum audience, we play to the lowest common denominator, which leaves us with a two-dimensional media landscape increasingly animated by outrage.
Our tendency to reduce useful measures to performance targets also misdefines the point. When we use a measure to reward performance,3 we provide an incentive to manipulate the measure to receive the reward.4
In our economy, we’ve reduced the measures once used to understand the health of a publicly traded company into targets for their CEOs, resulting in choices that only indicate health if a spreadsheet defined reality. We’ve also reduced test scores into a target for teachers, resulting in an educational approach that prepares kids to take tests instead of preparing them for life.
2. We stop too soon.
Spurred by the end of the drought and mollified by enough good years, farmers started to forget the dust. They sought a more reliable water supply and chose to tap the Ogallala Aquifer, an underground reservoir stretching from Nebraska to North Texas.
This sounds like a great idea. In fact, it was the beginning of a bad idea. Irrigation allowed farmers to do things that weren’t good for the long term, like farming other crops that require even more water than wheat. What seemed at first like a good choice threatens to rob future generations of drinking water.
In our economy, we often pursue ideas that sound good, provided we never think past the initial intention. It’s only after we act that we realize many things that sound good are neither true nor good.
Take Playpumps International. Their idea sounds great: Children play on a merry-go-round and their activity pumps water from the ground into an elevated tank. The intent is to bring the "benefit of clean drinking water to up to 10 million people.” In practice, children would have to play nonstop for 27 hours each day to meet the minimum daily water requirements. Moreover, the pump is expensive to install and difficult to maintain. The result was expensive playground equipment, not clean drinking water.
As with this case, the nobler our intention, the easier it can be to dismiss questions about how the idea will work in practice. When things don’t work out, we seek another simplistic slogan to comfort ourselves. Often, that comfortable slogan works as well as closing unsealed windows and doors to keep out the pervasive dust.5
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3. We create bubbles.
In economics, a surge in asset prices driven by exuberant6 market behavior creates a bubble. In other words, we overvalue the asset, assigning it greater financial value than is warranted. While the positive vibes make us feel that what goes up must never come down, that if some is good, more must be better, that what is good in one area must be good in all areas — and that we will miss out if we don’t join in — bubbles eventually burst when our exuberance and FOMO can no longer defy reality.
Our current bubbles aren’t only about money; they’re also about where we invest our time and attention. We’re exuberant about individualism and have overvalued it to the point of isolation and atomization, with AI poised to give us peak solitude without ever feeling lonely. We should see it as a massive problem rather than a new economic frontier.
We also see bubbles in our impulse to rid the world of every conceived risk — real or imagined — and every manner of friction. These bubbles contribute to extreme risk aversion, an increasingly common external locus of control, and an inability to delay gratification, which we should see as degenerative traits or behaviors rather than habits to reinforce.
We feel our exuberance for efficiency in the pace of our lives. Marshall McLuhan said, “The greatest discovery of the twenty-first century will be the discovery that Man was not meant to live at the speed of light.” We’ve pushed a concept that’s vastly improved the world to a point that not only is it preventing us from appreciating the world it helped to usher in, it’s also exerting such constant pressure we’ve undermined our ability to think. We’re left frazzled, distracted, superficial, and empty, with most gurus insisting that the solution is (you guessed it) more efficiency.
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We’re trying to use the flat earth to our advantage.
When we dismiss nuance, complexity, and value, we find ourselves subsisting on hard, flat land. Some of us have noticed the hollowness, while others have accepted it – and even lean into it.
Those trying to use the flatten world to their advantage recast everything as a neatly defined problem that can be easily solved, as if everything were a matter of following the right formula or aligning an obvious set of inputs with outputs. It’s why so many businesses seem to have a solution for your problem.
This recasting leads to a proliferation of silver bullet solutions and universal frameworks. You can communicate the ideas faster, sell them more easily, and weaponize them more effectively against your enemy. The “us versus them” framing turns on our ingrained tribal tendencies, which gives us the needed meaning we don’t get from a flat world.
By leaning in, we’re only making our grasp of the real world more shallow. We try to cover our lack of understanding with grand narratives that are ever more simplistic, revising history to fit the conclusion we want people to draw.
When you can no longer deal with nuance, it’s much easier to declare everything broken, burn it all down, and start over — even if that means you may rule over nothing but ashes.7
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We need to unflatten the world.
Building an economy on flat land distorts our exchanges and undermines our existence.
The world is not flat. It is full of mysteries, nuance, and context. It contains both intended and unintended effects, things in our control and outside it. It is increasingly interconnected and interdependent. It's also composed of individuals with agency who make choices for reasons as individual as they are.
To create an economy where we can thrive, we must recenter our economy on value.
We start by determining what is valuable and why. Then we must simultaneously address the human tendencies that created our economic dust bowl.
To define the right point, we must ask: If this is what winning looks like, what does that mean for the game? What behaviors will we encourage? Will anyone ever feel like they won?
To think past the initial intention, we must ask: How would this work over time? What will it touch? What do we lose?
To lessen the expansion of bubbles, we must ask: When does this stop being valuable? How do we understand moderation? What tradeoffs are acceptable and when?
This effort will take time. If we wait until we cannot breathe for all the dust, we will have waited too long. The best time to start was decades ago.
The second-best time is now.
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That’s why WTP exists.
We create our economy through our choices. Making choices based on value gives us a better foundation. Engaging in an economy through exchanges based on mutual value creates a culture that makes the most of our time.
When it comes to value, context is everything. That’s why I focus on questions rather than answers. Singular answers flatten the world. Questions provide space to consider all the angles. They change how you understand everything.
What you consider valuable may not be valuable to someone else. What we should or should not do will vary widely depending on the context. And if we set the wrong focus, we will find ourselves wasting a lot of time.
So let us begin by asking, “What’s the point?” and continue our inquiry from there.
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References
Burns, K. (Director). (2014). The Dust Bowl: A Film by Ken Burns. https://kenburns.com/films/dust-bowl/
Hansen, C. (2023, November 26). The Dust Bowl: The Great Depression’s ecological disaster - Morning AG clips. Morning Ag Clips. https://www.morningagclips.com/the-dust-bowl-the-great-depressions-ecological-disaster/
Leslie, I. (2015). Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends On It (Reprint edition). Basic Books.
In the case of the Dust Bowl, erode means “to wear away by the action of wind.” In the case of our economic dust bowl, erode means “to eat into or away by slow destruction of substance.”
The Homestead Act of 1862 was a significant piece of legislation in the United States that aimed to encourage settlement and development of the American West by attracting farmers, thereby expanding the nation's agricultural base and overall economy. Had they made the point societal growth rather than economic growth, we would have likely reaped the same economic benefits without the same natural and ultimately economic disaster.
Performance need not be tied to economic compensation. It may be tied to social status or other forms of reward.
Goodhart’s Law states that “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” In other words, when we use a measure to reward performance, we provide an incentive to manipulate the measure to receive the reward.
According to one of the people in Ken Burns’ documentary, it was normal to go to bed and wake up with dust covering everything except where their head had been on the pillow.
Exuberant means “joyously unrestrained and enthusiastic” and “extreme or excessive in degree, size, or extent.”
This impulse existed for those in government at the time of the Dust Bowl. Many suggested that it wasn’t worth the effort to save the people or the land. They should instead pull out and let it fail.