Systemic change aims at the structures that keep producing those outcomes: the rules, markets, institutions, relationships and beliefs underneath. On the depth scale it is the work of level 3, structure, and level 4, source.
Where to push
The systems thinker Donella Meadows described leverage points as places in a complex system where a small shift can produce big changes. In a 1999 essay she ranked twelve of them, from least to most effective. At the bottom are constants and numbers, such as subsidies, taxes and standards. Further up come feedback loops, the structure of information flows, the rules of the system, its power to reorganize itself, its goals and the mindset it grows from. At the top is the power to transcend paradigms altogether. She observed that almost all attention goes to the numbers, where there is little leverage.
In 2018 John Kania, Mark Kramer and Peter Senge, writing for FSG, described six interdependent conditions that hold social and environmental problems in place: policies, practices and resource flows, which are the most visible; relationships and connections, and power dynamics; and, deepest, mental models, the beliefs people take for granted.
Both maps inform Charitology’s scale. They are frameworks for reasoning about change, not evidence that a deeper intervention always achieves more.
The debate
Whether giving should aim at systems is a live argument. Iason Gabriel summarized a critique of effective altruism along these lines: that its language of charity can hide the structural causes of poverty, and that a movement which changes its priorities as the evidence changes may lack the constancy of purpose that movements such as abolitionism and civil rights relied on. He also noted that effective altruists were increasingly interested in systemic change, and argued for a division of labor and partnerships with committed advocacy groups.
The case for caution is just as real. Systemic bets are slow, their credit is shared and they can fail. Some do harm: a reform can backfire, and charity can crowd out or delay the public action that would have helped more. That is Open Problem 20, When Charity Harms.
How Charitology sees it
Charitology does not treat systemic change as better than direct help. It treats the line between them as a scale rather than a wall, and every level as needed. Its working hypothesis, the Symptom Trap, is that the system as a whole underfunds the deep end of the scale, partly because systemic change is so hard to measure. Measuring it is Open Problem 3. The eradication of smallpox is a useful case of a lasting change. Its proposed source-depth classification is Charitology’s hypothesis, open to challenge: see the case study.