Decisions are arbitrary and this makes me hopeful

I have never believed that systems are incapable of change. I have had moments of overwhelm when I felt that the unfairness and inequities in the world are woven so intentionally into everything, from what children are taught in school to what gets reported on the news, that it would be impossible to detangle. Trying to address what seems an obvious problem - like the hegemony of neoliberal economics in the policy curriculum of countries in Africa, for example - would require understanding and undoing years of entrenched systems in local and global political economy, education, media, and the institutions that shape what counts as legitimate knowledge in the first place. The sheer weight of it is enough to make hope feel naive.

But I also cannot imagine living without hope because pessimism is paralysing. And I have found a more concrete reason to believe that systems can change: they are built on arbitrary decisions. The decision to make Greenwich, London, the zero line of longitude - essentially because Britain had the most ships at sea and the most navigational charts already used it - when there was, and still is, nothing geographically special about Greenwich. Now, the global system of time zones, GPS coordinates, and international navigation follows from this one call. The decision to make train stations so unintuitive that getting to a new place sometimes requires prayers, deep breaths, and the kindness of strangers. The decision to put steering wheels on the left in Nigeria and on the right in the UK.

That is all it is. Decisions, often not based on something objective, but on subjectivities of traditions, politics, whims, time constraints, limited knowledge.

I have found that there’s theoretical backing for this. The economist Herbert Simon, who won the Nobel Prize for his work on decision-making, argued that real-world decisions are never as rational as we assume. Rationality is bounded, that is, limited by the difficulty of the problem, the cognitive capacity of the mind, and the time available to decide. Within those limits, individuals satisfice (satisfy+suffice) rather than maximise. They cannot evaluate all potential alternatives, so they stop at the option that is good enough, rather than the best one. So, the first problem is that the best answer is often not adequately or even considered. Case in point: the decision of the Allied nations to make the USD the global reserve currency at the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944, despite John Maynard Keynes’ far more sensible proposal for a neutral international currency that would settle trade balances without handing one country permanent economic leverage over the rest of the world. The decision at COP 30 not to adequately discuss a roadmap to phase out fossil fuels, despite knowing that it is both dire and the only solution to avoid catastrophic climate change.

Second, even when decision-makers are thorough and have data, research, and consultation at their disposal, there is still the problem of underdetermination because data rarely point to a single correct answer. One piece of evidence can be used to support multiple conclusions, and the same set of facts can justify very different policies. So, someone still has to make the call. And that call is often shaped by factors unrelated to objectivity. But are instead defined by subjectivity, including intuition, institutional habit, mood, and whoever happens to be in the room when the decision is made.

Thirdly, in instances where decisions are based on some sort of utilitarian factor or principle, they are still arbitrary because goals and desired outcomes vary. For one person, creating a world free of wars and hunger would be the best outcome. For another, wars and hunger advance their interest.

All this is not to say that arbitrary means wrong. It means contestable, even at the highest level of decision-making. And if that is the case, then we do not have to accept, as permanent and inevitable, systems built on decisions that have proven unfair and serve only a few.

Consider how the single decision at Bretton Woods screws up African economies.

Firstly, most of Africa’s external public debt - more than 70% - is denominated in USD. And when the US Federal Reserve raises interest rates to manage the American economy, African countries’ dollar-denominated loans become more expensive to service because the same debt now requires more naira, or more whatever-local-currency, to repay. When debt servicing costs rise, governments borrow more, increase taxes, and/or cut spending, and the shortfall lands on hospitals, schools, public infrastructure, and already economically-disadvantaged people.

Secondly, higher interest rates pull dollars out of emerging markets and back towards the US because investors will take their money where it yields the most. This creates dollar shortages, which hit manufacturers who depend on imported raw materials particularly hard. It was reported that 800 factories in Nigeria shut down due to dollar shortages in 2023/24. That’s several job losses. So, because of that arbitrary decision at Bretton Woods in 1944, decisions about healthcare spending in Abuja and whether a factory in Lagos stays open are shaped, in part, by what the Federal Reserve decided to do about inflation in Washington.

To be fair, Africa’s public debt challenges are not solely a product of the dollar system. Most domestic financial markets were never built to mobilise local capital at scale, partly because colonial and post-colonial financial systems were designed to move wealth outward rather than inward, and partly because the global financial architecture was built without meaningful input from the countries most exposed to its costs. Corruption, poor governance, and the mismanagement of public resources by African governments and institutions have compounded these inherited disadvantages. And decades of constrained public investment, much of it imposed through IMF structural adjustment conditions, have made it harder still to build the foundations that might have reduced dependence on external borrowing in the first place.

It’s one unfair, arbitrary decision piled on another, until we have a system so deeply unjust and unequal that it requires both to persist.

Perhaps this analysis is a little simplistic, and there are more sophisticated frameworks for explaining how we ended up with systems this unfair and this entrenched. But I find it oddly comforting because things are not as they are because that is the best or most objective way they could be. Poverty and injustice and all the mess that the world is in do not exist because that’s the only way the world can be. They are not inevitable. They are as they are because people decided that is how they would be. Which means the world can exist in other ways, through other decisions.

I find this discomforting, too, because the minds of decision-makers are often hard to change (because of self-interest and inertia). And most people become so embedded in systems that they cannot conceive of a different world. But these are problems of imagination and will, not of fate. And problems of imagination and will are, at least in principle, solvable.