Depth changes who decides (on intervention points)

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Figure: Soft Ratios Research.
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Ground: The voices are synthetic [pause] no act, just the thinking.
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Figure: Hoyd Breton, a designer at Soft Ratios Studio, teaching himself in the open [pause] which is half a conversation. [pause] A review is the other half.
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Ground: One subject at a time, twice a week [pause] Tuesday and Thursday. [pause] Today, intervention points.
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Figure: A familiar diagram shows twelve places to intervene. Near the bottom: numbers, reserves, pipes, delays. Higher up: information, rules, self-organization, goals, paradigms. The invitation seems obvious. Stop adjusting the dial. Reach deeper.
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Ground: It looks like a ladder leaning against a wall. The higher hand appears wiser than the lower one.
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Figure: That reading has travelled well. A tax rate has little force. A change in purpose has much more. Find the deepest point within reach, press there, and the rest of the structure follows.
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Ground: But a lever isn't simply a place where force enters. It has a handle, a pivot, and something underneath. [pause] Someone gets to put a hand on it. Someone decides what counts as movement. Someone else may carry the weight. [pause] Depth doesn't settle any of that. A far-reaching intervention can still be imposed. [pause] So the clean ladder already feels incomplete. It ranks the force of change before asking who has permission to cause it.
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Figure: Donella Meadows didn't describe these as neutral opportunities. She called them “points of power.” She names legislators, courts, corporations, lobbyists, citizens, and people pushed outside decisions that govern their lives. [pause] She also warned that the ranking was tentative. Slippery. Open to revision. Not a recipe. [pause] The list changed between 1997 and 1999, after systems analysts and activists pressed her with comments and objections. She said she'd rethought entries, added some, removed others, changed the order, and added caveats. [pause] In the earlier flip-chart version she later reproduced, one entry named “the distribution of power over the rules of the system.” [pause] In the expanded hierarchy, that concern was spread across rules and the capacity for self-organization. [pause] There's no evidence that she meant to hide political authority. She still wrote that power over rules is real power. But once the labels travel without the argument around them, the question of power becomes easy to miss.
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Ground: Abstraction is part of the attraction, though. A ladder that works for a pond, a company, a city, and an economy lets unlike things become comparable. [pause] Naming every owner, regulator, worker, resident, and government could make the picture too crowded to see. [pause] Perhaps the diagram has to be empty enough to travel.
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Figure: Portability is useful. The mistake is treating the empty space as proof that no one occupies it. [pause] A systems map can show why replacing one official changes little when the same incentives, information, and rules remain. That's a real gain over blaming every outcome on individual character. [pause] But the correction can go too far. If every person becomes a role produced by structure, the language can flatten the difference between someone compelled by a rule and someone wealthy enough to write it.
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Ground: Then the ladder needs a second dimension. How deeply does an intervention reach, and how is authority arranged around it?
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Figure: That changes the opening claim. The hierarchy isn't a hunt for the most efficient place to push. It's a map of ways decisions get made, with greater and greater consequences.
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Ground: At the shallow end, an office adjusts a rate, a subsidy, a budget, a standard. The consequences may be severe, but the institution's purpose remains mostly intact.
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Figure: Further in, someone decides what becomes visible, which conduct is allowed, who may form an alternative institution, what outcome counts as success, and what the culture accepts as natural.
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Ground: Each step changes outcomes and the terms under which those outcomes may be contested.
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Figure: Start with information. Meadows used the Toxics Release Inventory to show public disclosure changing conduct without a new formal penalty. Congress gave the public access to emissions data from individual facilities that communities hadn't possessed before. [pause] After the early releases, firms reporting larger amounts drew more press attention. Investors imposed losses averaging about four million dollars in market value per reporting firm. Those hit hardest later cut emissions more than their peers.
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Ground: The number didn't act by itself. Journalists could publish it. Investors could punish it. Firms could respond to the punishment.
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Figure: And some of the response shifted waste management rather than reducing waste generation. On-site releases fell while off-site transfers rose, with little change in total toxic waste produced.
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Ground: A clean downward line at the plant gate could conceal trucks carrying the problem elsewhere.
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Figure: Affected residents often didn't know about the inventory. Or they lacked the means to interpret it, the knowledge of what action was possible, or support from local institutions. The same disclosure that investors could use might do nothing for the people breathing the emissions.
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Ground: So “add an information flow” is unfinished. Information to whom, in what form, with what right to answer back? [pause] Visibility can point upward, exposing a powerful institution to scrutiny. It can also point downward, exposing workers, residents, or Indigenous land to an institution that remains opaque. [pause] The direction of sight matters as much as the amount of light.
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Figure: Meadows understood that indicators don't simply describe priorities. They steer attention, money, prestige, and administrative effort. What gets counted starts shaping what counts as a goal. [pause] Gross domestic product primarily records market production, along with specified imputed nonmarket production. It doesn't reveal whether natural foundations are being depleted, unpaid care is expanding, benefits are concentrated, or greater output produces greater dignity. [pause] She called power a kind of forbidden measure. Possible signs included extreme income gaps, concentrated media ownership, political imprisonment, the distribution of weapons, and the share of economic activity controlled by the largest corporations.
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Ground: Counting power doesn't redistribute it. But refusing to count it lets an account of national progress leave command and dependence outside the frame.
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Figure: The same choice appears in global indicators. A wish to reduce inequality can become a target for faster income growth among the poorer part of the population, while wealth concentration receives less attention. The chosen measure quietly favors one theory of change.
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Ground: Then the supposedly technical stage is already political. The person choosing what stands for progress is partly choosing which remedy will later look sensible.
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Figure: Yes—no. What stands for progress still has to be credible. But credibility doesn't erase the judgment involved in choosing it. Better to say that careful counting and public argument are both required. Neither can replace the other.
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Ground: Rules make the conflict harder to disguise.
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Figure: Rules distribute rights, prohibitions, rewards, penalties, and standing. A pollution rule decides what may be released, how harm is proven, who can challenge a permit, and what happens when a violation is found. [pause] In one examination of federal air-toxics rulemaking, industry supplied eighty-one percent of the comments. Public-interest groups supplied four percent. Changes in the final rules favored industry four times as often as public-interest positions.
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Ground: Participation was present. Influence wasn't evenly shared.
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Figure: The formal process let anyone submit a comment. It didn't give everyone equal time, technical staff, legal counsel, access to officials, or the ability to endure years of proceedings.
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Ground: An open door can preserve a closed room if only a few people can afford the corridor.
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Figure: Meadows saw lobbyists gathering where laws are written because rule-making determines every later move. She also saw wealth buying political access, turning an institution meant to balance power into another source of advantage.
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Ground: The loop stops looking accidental. Yesterday's gain buys today's access. Today's access writes tomorrow's terms. The next gain arrives wearing the authority of law.
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Figure: In 1938, FHA underwriting guidance formally incorporated racial discrimination into federal mortgage-risk judgments. HOLC grades were also shaped by neighborhood racial and ethnic composition, and later research found that neighborhoods placed on the riskier side of HOLC grading boundaries experienced lower homeownership and house values and greater segregation for decades.
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Ground: Eventually, the damaged neighborhood can be presented as proof that the old judgment was accurate. [pause] The rule withdraws credit. The withdrawal weakens property and public investment. The weakened conditions return as evidence of risk. [pause] Without the history, the pattern looks self-sustaining. With the history, it has authors, beneficiaries, and people denied the means to recover.
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Figure: That's where a structural explanation should sharpen responsibility instead of dissolving it. A lasting outcome can reproduce itself now and still have been deliberately started or defended by identifiable institutions.
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Ground: So the central question has moved. It isn't simply where the strongest point of intervention lies. It's who can reach that place, who's positioned beneath it, and who can refuse the motion.
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Figure: The capacity for self-organization sits deeper than fixed rules because it allows new rules, relationships, technologies, and institutions to arise. But even that phrase gathers unlike powers into one box. [pause] A corporation reorganizes through property, finance, contracts, and board authority. A state does it through law and coercive jurisdiction. A community may rely on association, custom, solidarity, and rights that the state can recognize or suppress.
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Ground: Calling all three self-organization can suggest a level floor. One actor arrives with a treasury and lawyers. Another arrives with unpaid time, inherited knowledge, and the risk of retaliation.
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Figure: In a study of 129 Indigenous lands in Brazil's Atlantic Forest, the 73 lands included in the before-and-after tenure analysis saw average annual net deforestation fall from roughly three-quarters of one percent to almost zero after formal tenure.
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Ground: The ecological result came with authority over land, not merely advice about managing it better.
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Figure: But local authority doesn't erase inequality within a community. Forestry decentralization in Nepal reduced poverty more among historically advantaged groups, modestly widening caste and ethnic gaps. Elsewhere, local elites became more likely to capture the benefits over time, though outside organizations could limit that.
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Ground: Power transferred downward can pool again before it reaches the ground.
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Figure: That doesn't make self-governance futile. It means the arrangement needs clear decision rights, oversight, access to conflict resolution, and the ability to revise rules.
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Ground: And it keeps “community” from becoming another soft word for a place where everyone is presumed to want the same thing.
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Figure: Goals reach deeper because they decide which information matters and which rules seem successful. An institution organized around shareholder return, public health, territorial control, equality, or ecological repair will choose different investments and accept different harms.
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Ground: But “the goal of the system” can sound as if a single intention floats above conflict.
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Figure: Meadows treated goals as something that could emerge from behavior. A corporation may announce profit while acting as though continued growth and control are its governing purposes. A public institution may declare universal service while budgets and eligibility rules keep excluding the same people.
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Ground: Revealed purpose lives in what the arrangement keeps sacrificing.
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Figure: Germany's coal transition makes this visible. Public commitments to affected regions reached up to forty billion euros. Older displaced workers received adjustment support. Lignite operators were offered more than four billion euros in compensation. [pause] The Coal Commission included business, unions, environmental groups, scientists, politicians, and citizen representatives. It could advise. [pause] Parliament, the federal government, and the Federal Network Agency kept enforceable authority under the 2020 phase-out law.
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Ground: A seat in the conversation wasn't a hand on implementation. [pause] Compensation answered part of the material question: who would lose income, assets, or regional investment. By itself, it didn't answer who chose the timetable, the replacement institutions, or the ownership of what came next. [pause] A new public goal can leave old command intact. The destination changes while the passengers remain passengers.
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Figure: This is the first hard limit of the hierarchy. A deep intervention may have strong consequences and weak political legitimacy. Effectiveness, depth, and legitimacy are separate judgments.
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Ground: Could that standard freeze action? Every boundary excludes something. Every public contains disagreement. Waiting for unbroken consent can protect the very arrangement under challenge.
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Figure: Complete agreement isn't the threshold. The threshold is defensible authority: lawful power, early participation with influence, rights that can't be traded away for a predicted benefit, a visible account of who carries the burdens, and a way to challenge or revise the decision.
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Ground: Then legitimacy isn't the absence of conflict. It's conflict conducted under terms that don't make one side disposable.
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Figure: Romania under Ceaușescu shows why that distinction matters. Decree 770, issued in 1966, pursued a higher birth rate through state coercion. Women resisted through clandestine abortions, and families relinquished children they couldn't support. [pause] The birth rate eventually moved back toward its former path. But women bore sharply increased maternal death, and children bore institutionalization.
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Ground: A simple diagram could call that policy resistance: one goal pushes, another pushes back. [pause] The symmetry would be false. The state held law and enforcement. Women's bodies became the place where the correction was paid for. [pause] “Resistance” describes motion. It doesn't name the wound.
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Figure: Systems language earns its place only if it preserves that difference. It can explain why coercion fails to produce stable consent without pretending the coercer and the coerced hold equal power. [pause] The same caution applies to population in planetary models. Total population matters to material demand. But treating humanity as one consuming body can shift attention away from luxury use and concentrated ownership, and toward the fertility of poor and racialized women.
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Ground: A global line has no neighborhood, household, or workplace. It can descend smoothly while one place is poisoned early and another buys distance from the damage.
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Figure: World3 deliberately joined population, capital, food, resources, and pollution at a planetary scale. That scale exposed overshoot and delayed consequences with unusual force. It didn't separately represent rich and poor people, nations, owners, workers, colonies, or sacrifice zones.
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Ground: The omission doesn't cancel the physical limits. It changes what the model can say about living inside them.
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Figure: In 2019, about forty-eight percent of global emissions were attributed to the highest-income tenth of the world's population, and twelve percent to the lower half.
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Ground: And apparent efficiency can rest on labor the model never sees. Women perform roughly three times as much unpaid care as men worldwide. Ecological damage can lengthen the search for water, fuel, food, and care before any national output line records a crisis.
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Figure: A boundary isn't simply a technical convenience. It decides which harms appear in the account, which histories explain them, and whose welfare becomes an outside matter.
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Ground: This is where decolonial criticism goes beyond adding another category. Coloniality isn't an outdated belief waiting for a better seminar. It persists through land, law, extraction, racial hierarchy, and authority over knowledge. [pause] An expert map may call itself complete while Indigenous legal and ecological orders survive beneath it, heard at a lower volume because the dominant institution controls recognition. [pause] Adding local knowledge as data isn't the same as sharing authority over the map. [pause] Plural knowledge changes who may define the boundary, instead of simply changing what information enters after the boundary is fixed.
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Figure: That moves paradigm change away from private revelation. A paradigm lives through schools, property law, professional authority, media, scientific institutions, religious life, and political leadership. It's reproduced through material arrangements as well as words. [pause] Assumptions such as growth is good, land is ownable, nature is a resource, and market price measures value aren't simply opinions. They organize which claims institutions recognize and which alternatives appear unrealistic. [pause] Yet replacing one universal doctrine with another can repeat the same dominance. Meadows's final point, the ability to transcend paradigms, argued against treating any doctrine as final.
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Ground: Openness sounds gentle. Institutions rarely surrender authority because someone becomes less attached to an idea.
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Figure: That's the second hard limit. The hierarchy identifies what could transform behavior. It doesn't explain how people without money, standing, organization, expertise, or coercive authority gain the capacity to make the change.
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Ground: Then the deepest rung can become a fantasy of benevolent command: imagine the correct worldview, place it at the top, and let every lower part fall into line.
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Figure: Meadows moved away from that posture. During her 1969–70 journey through Asia, she arrived as a technological optimist formed by the Sputnik age. Poverty, erosion, displacement, local ingenuity, and forms of flourishing unsettled her belief that laboratory science could repair every problem from above. [pause] Modeling first seemed to offer a wider instrument. Later, she admitted that the MIT systems community had exaggerated its ability to predict, control, and make complex arrangements work. [pause] She didn't abandon mathematical models. She changed what she claimed they could do. Assumptions had to be exposed, past behavior examined, competing explanations kept alive, and failures disclosed instead of defended. [pause] Careful work moved away from confident command and toward learning that could be corrected.
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Ground: That's the transformation inside the ladder. The analyst begins in a control room, looking for the decisive handle. The analyst ends on a dance floor, caught in the motion and unable to command every response. [pause] But the dance image has its own softness. Partners may adjust to one another. A ruler and a subject don't simply need better rhythm. [pause] Humility about consequences can't become vagueness about responsibility.
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Figure: Meadows's political writing kept that edge. She named corporate influence over trade rules, private money in elections, concentrated communication power, and government captured by wealth. She argued for antitrust, campaign-finance reform, public disclosure, voting, and organized pressure. [pause] A responsive practice also needs organized struggle: unions, associations, courts, elected bodies, Indigenous governments, watchdogs, coalitions, and lasting rights able to force powerful actors to give up control.
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Ground: So the dance governs how a change learns. Politics governs whether the people living with it have the standing to lead, refuse, revise, or remove it.
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Figure: This also changes the relation between shallow and deep intervention. A disclosure rule may look modest, yet help a constituency organize. A local experiment can prove an alternative. A procedural change can give affected people lasting standing in later decisions.
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Ground: The lower steps aren't beneath serious work. They can build the capacity needed to reach deeper ones.
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Figure: And deep change depends on them. A new public purpose without budgets, oversight, enforcement, and material support is a declaration. A new paradigm without institutions can remain a private language.
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Ground: The ranking still matters, but not as a score for interventions. It shows why changing a tax rate and changing who may write tax law are different acts.
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Figure: A reading alert to power asks who defines the system, who controls its information, who writes and enforces its rules, who may form alternatives, who sets its goals, and whose account of reality carries authority.
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Ground: It also asks where the costs land. Who loses land, time, income, safety, status, or a future. Who receives compensation. Who captures the new assets. Who can appeal after the celebration has ended.
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Figure: Those questions don't supply one correct intervention. They keep technical depth from borrowing the appearance of moral permission.
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Ground: The lever returns as a physical thing. Its movement depends on a pivot. Its force travels somewhere. With a sufficiently long effort arm, the hand at the handle can exert only a fraction of the force carried at the other end.
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Figure: Meadows made intervention less innocent by showing how small changes can redirect vast patterns. Reading her politically makes depth less innocent too.
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Ground: The greater the force, the more lives can be rearranged by a decision made far away.
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Figure: Depth makes authorization, accountability, and the power of revision more necessary, not less.
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Ground: When a change reaches deep enough to reorder many lives, what would prove that the people moved by it also had the power to move it?