# 6. The structure of information flows There was this subdivision of identical houses, the story goes, except that for some reason the **electric meter** in some of the houses was installed in the basement and in others it was installed **in the front hall**, where the residents could see it constantly, going round faster or slower as they used more or less electricity. With no other change, with identical prices, electricity consumption was 30 percent lower in the houses where the meter was in the front hall.
We systems-heads love that story because it's an example of a **high leverage point in the information structure of the system**. It's not a parameter adjustment, not a strengthening or weakening of an existing loop. **It's a new loop, delivering information to a place where it wasn't going before and therefore causing people to behave differently**.
A more recent example is the Toxic Release Inventory, the U.S. government's requirement, instituted in 1986, that every factory releasing **hazardous air pollutants report** those emissions publicly every year. Suddenly every community could find out precisely what was coming out of the smokestacks in town. There was no law against those emissions, no fines, no determination of "safe" levels, just information. But by 1990, emissions dropped 40 percent. They have continued to go down since, not so much because of citizen outrage as because of corporate shame. One chemical company that found itself on the Top Ten Polluters list reduced its emissions by 90 percent, just **to "get off that list."**
**Missing feedback **is one of the most common causes of system malfunction. Adding or restoring information can be a powerful intervention, usually much easier and cheaper than rebuilding physical infrastructure. The **tragedy of the commons** that is crashing the **world's commercial fisheries** occurs because there is no feedback from the state of the fish population to the decision to invest in fishing vessels. (Contrary to economic opinion, the price of fish doesn't provide that feedback. As the fish get more scarce and hence more expensive. it becomes all the more profitable to go out and catch them. That's a perverse feedback, a positive loop that leads to collapse.)
It's important that the missing feedback be restored to the **right place** and in **compelling form**. To take another tragedy of the commons, it's not enough to inform all the users of an **aquifer** that the groundwater level is dropping. That could initiate a race to the bottom. It would be more effective to set a water price that rises steeply as the pumping rate begins to exceed the recharge rate.
Compelling feedback. Suppose taxpayers could specify on their return forms what government services their tax payments must be spent on. (Radical democracy!) Suppose any town or company that puts a water intake pipe in a river had to put it immediately downstream from its own outflow pipe. Suppose any public or private official who made the decision to invest in a nuclear power plant got the waste from that plant stored on his/her lawn. Suppose (this is an old one) that the politicians who de. clare war were required to spend that war in the front lines.
We humans have a systematic tendency to **avoid accountability** for our own decisions. That's why so **many feedback loops are missing**--and why this kind of leverage point is so often popular with the masses, unpopular with the powers that be, and effective, if you can get the powers that be to permit it to happen (or go around them and **make it happen** anyway).