The Collapse We Don't Want

Like 2008's financial meltdown, our social systems are heading for collapse—or we can redesign them to build the connected, thriving society that most Americans already crave.

When my cousin called lamenting her son Marcus (real person, fictional name) sleeping on Seattle streets despite having a job, I learned he'd encountered six different systems in a single year: housing authorities, mental health services, and substance abuse programs to name three.

Marcus isn't an outlier. His story is the predictable outcome of systems fragmenting the very people and communities they're meant to serve. Marcus represents something staggering: America (federal, state, local and private) spends $4.3 trillion annually on systems meant to help people like him. Yet homelessness, addiction, intimate partner violence, and social isolation persist - often worsening despite increased investment. In affluent communities, teenage anxiety, depression, and suicide attempts continue rising. Families are sometimes surrounded by every material comfort except the one thing that matters most: genuine human connection.

As Congress debates (since passed on July 4, 2025) reducing revenue from those with more, decreasing support for those with less, and growing the debt that those not yet born will inherit, we're missing a fundamental question: What if the challenge isn't how much we spend, but how we more broadly design systems intended to produce human flourishing?

Like financial regulators after 2008, we need both early warning systems to prevent systemic collapse and the wisdom to scale the connections already working—building the foundation for shared flourishing rather than just managing perpetual crisis.

Yet, even as systems intended to underwrite human flourishing display dangerous warning signs, human instincts include struggles:

• To trust collective wisdom in the face of conflicting expert testimony.

• To navigate complex systems.

• To acknowledge when models no longer fit evolved conditions.

• To identify higher order interests.

• To recognize opportunities for transformation.

Perhaps the same instincts that help us survive as individuals blind us from systemic risks.

The Last Day Anyone Saw It Coming: Impacts of Expert Testimony

September 15, 2008. Lehman Brothers, 158 years old survivor of civil and world wars, vanished overnight. Within hours, $613 billion in debt evaporated. The global economy buckled. And the transfer of wealth from those with less to those with more accelerated.

Experts excel at examining individual components but often miss the broader patterns that emerge from collective wisdom. Even Nobel Prize-winning economists missed the warning signs. While rescuing Bear Stearns that spring, before the U.S. Congress's Joint Economic Committee Federal Chairman Ben Bernanke called the subprime crisis "contained." Financial institutions had become too complex to understand, optimizing individual balance sheets while dumping systemic risks into an invisible web of interconnectedness.

When Complexity Becomes a Veil

Like pre-2008 financial institutions, our human services operate through labyrinthine networks, each optimizing their specialized piece while the complete picture remains invisible, hiding a collective fragility behind individual agency success stories found in annual reports. Agencies report success while community and longer-term individual needs compound across the gaps.

One permanent supportive housing leader told me, "Our job is to keep housing the homeless, not to end homelessness." We've created systems that supply funding based on the persistence of the problems they're meant to solve. Imagine funding fire departments based on how many fires occurred, or hospitals based on how many people stayed sick.

"My funding depends on proving how broken things are," another nonprofit executive director confided. "If I actually solved the problem, I'd lose my grants." Just as financial leaders dismissed housing bubble signals, convinced their sophisticated instruments proved system stability, human services leaders sometimes struggle to acknowledge uncomfortable truths about their sector’s broader impacts.

This perverse incentive structure is reinforced by funders' financial cycles. Nonprofit institutions are generally rewarded for tackling narrow problems with measurable outcomes on one-year time horizons, making it nearly impossible to address the slow-burning, interconnected challenges that create lasting change.

Thickening the veil, agencies addressing the needs of individuals in crisis are often not also charged with strengthening the communities that are disproportionately vulnerable to such crises.

Not unique to financial systems or to mending social harm, in healthcare, the US spends 3x the OECD average but ranks 33rd in infant mortality. Yet, hospital administrators invoke 'patient-centered care' while optimizing for bed turnover and revenue.

The very complexity we've created can become a veil preventing us from seeing when we've drifted from our original purpose. Progress requires the humility to question not just our methods, but the systems we've inherited and the orthodoxies we've internalized.

Early Warning Signs: When Models No Longer Fit

Housing serves as a sensor where multiple social fault lines intersect and first register tremors. Seattle Times reporters Greg Kim and David Kroman recently revealed that the city's affordable housing sector has reached "a breaking point." Thirteen buildings containing over 1,100 low-income units went up for sale in just a few months—like dominoes lined up for inevitable collapse. The number of subsidized properties losing money has surged since before the pandemic as rapidly rising operating costs collide with lagging rent payments. The math no longer adds up.

This recent tremor was not the first. King County's Regional Homelessness Authority, established in 2019 to unify fragmented responses, became itself an illustration of how well-intentioned restructuring creates new dysfunction when it fails to adapt to environmental and implementation realities.

These aren't abstract market forces. They're the reason Marcus cycles through temporary shelters while affordable housing crumbles around him.

But acknowledging these failures would be incomplete without naming deeper tectonic forces undermining social health and repair efforts.

The culture:

• Asks social workers to stabilize individuals while economic practices extract wealth and dignity.

• Funds mental health programs while algorithms fragment young minds.

• Builds affordable housing while financial instruments treat shelter as commodity speculation.

Human services in some ways operate like emergency brakes on a runaway truck, while far more powerful forces keep pressing the accelerator, undermining shared human dignity.

For over half a century, each technological wave - industrialization, digitization, financialization, globalization and perhaps most powerfully, atomization - arrives with promises of shared prosperity. Yet benefits increasingly concentrate among fewer while social costs disperse among many:

• Maternal-infant bonding becomes a luxury working families can't afford when economic anxiety demands constant attention.

• Children navigate dopamine-hijacked algorithms designed to capture, not cultivate, their developing minds.

• Communities that thrived for generations watched their local economies hollowed out, not just by offshore production but also by on-line protocols optimized for consumption.

As if the levers of capital are not sufficiently powerful, the spoils of the 2008 federal rescue plan accelerated wealth transfer while exacerbating housing fragility among the most vulnerable.

What if the very force we need to more substantially address homelessness, addiction, and isolation is the same force that would invite participation among those driving these larger systems? What if durable well-being must include the irresistible pull of human connection across differences?

Perhaps we can weave into the social safety net a shared dignity trampoline.

What Humans Actually Want: Higher Order Interests

Despite decades of evidence that our current approach isn't working, we keep adding programs like adding banks to a poorly regulated financial system. But the solutions are incomplete.

Recent research by More in Common reveals something profound: 70% of Americans feel responsible to engage across differences, and 66% believe they can learn from such interactions. When asked to envision their ideal America, the most common response was "united."

The most cited barrier to connecting? Simply "lack of opportunity."

We don't need to convince people to want connection. We need to create conditions where their existing longing can flourish. This research reveals our opening - the crack where light gets in.

The Path Forward - Boldness

A brighter future for “our grandchildren” (future generations) requires:

1. An understanding that healthy economies, environment, communities, families, and personal joy are interdependent.

2. High levels of trust and collaboration to design and manifest that future.

The financial crisis taught us that complexity without coherence leads to catastrophe. We can continue adding programs to systems that unintentionally fragment the very communities they aim to serve. Or we can choose intentional transformation over inevitable collapse.

The path forward demands bringing strategic rigor to human flourishing. Paradoxically, the same intentionality that transforms corporations into powerful enterprises.

Just as successful businesses align their market understanding, operating model, and core capabilities into what Peter Drucker called the theory of the business, our human services need coherent models that match the moment.

Consider Costco's Drucker-esque transformation from discount retailer to membership ecosystem. Rather than measuring transaction-by-transaction success, they tracked how members engaged across their entire value proposition, strengthening relationships between customers, suppliers, and employees with each interaction. Applying network effects through membership loyalty, they optimized for lifetime relationships over quarterly metrics, proving that treating employees well, maintaining ethical supplier partnerships, and building community trust creates sustainable competitive advantage.

What if our systems operated with similar intentionality. What if we designed for civic connectedness rather than perpetual crisis management? Different infrastructure, identical principle: optimized for relationships, not transactions.

The New Architecture of Connection: Opportunities for Transformation

The structural reinforcements we need are already being tested, scattered across communities like earthquake retrofits proving their worth. These aren't feel-good fantasies, they're proof that another way is possible. Each successful installation can better withstand tremors and strengthens the foundation for the next innovation:

• In Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood (community), something remarkable happened when residents gained genuine agency over their collective future. Crime dropped 40%. High school graduation rates climbed. But the real transformation was deeper—neighbors who'd lived in parallel for decades began solving problems together.

• The U.S. Chamber of Connection (civic entrepreneurship) tackles the "lack of connection opportunity" problem head-on, creating missing bridges between isolation and belonging.

• Mayor Harrell's One Seattle (city) demonstrates integration at the local government level, breaking down silos to make residents' lives more coherent.

• Washington's Fair Start for Kids Act (state) tackles interlocking challenges holistically—improving childcare quality while supporting professionals, strengthening future adults’ mastery while guarding against exploitations we repeatedly attempt to repair, and laying the foundation for more diverse and resilient future economies.

• Challenge Seattle (business), led by former Gov. Christine Gregoire, is building the Cascadia Innovation Corridor (CIC). The CIC aims to connects the peoples of British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon in a spirit of common endeavor, with a specific focus on becoming the world’s first sustainable mega-region.

Together, these examples offer hope and guidance. In each case, the transformation first required the courage to question inherited orthodoxies and the skill to align diverse stakeholders around a shared vision. Like building a strong immune system rather than constantly treating symptoms, when systems are designed to strengthen the underlying community resilience, they naturally reduce the burden on crisis response mechanisms.

The alternative is managed decline toward our own "Lehman moment," a systemic collapse where Marcus's story is not the exception, but the rule. Where 13 buildings become hundreds. Where fragmented services buckle under compounding demand while the root causes accelerate unchecked.

The Choice Before Us: Conclusion

Marcus is still out there tonight, navigating the same fractured systems. But across the country, communities are choosing a different path. Like prairie grasses that bend with storms while their deep roots prevent erosion, rather than abandoning crisis management, they're weaving emergency response into coherent systems.

The question isn't whether change is possible but whether we'll choose transformation. On the other side isn’t just better policy, it's the ability to cocreate the America most of us already long for. Accountable. United. Vibrant.