“What is your SDory, Mike Radzicki?” Artwork

SD-cast

Podcast to promote system dynamics and systems thinking. The "What is your SDory?" series will be interviews of system dynamics and systems thinking practitioners. There may be more series on various topics depending on interest and time. Saeed Langarudi, PhD created the podcast artwork.

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“What is your SDory, Mike Radzicki?”

March 02, 2021 • Christine Tang • Season 1 • Episode 4

Michael “Mike” Radzicki is a professor in the Social Science and Policy Studies department at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. He teaches economics and system dynamics courses. He has a PhD in Economics from Notre Dame, is a past-president of the System Dynamics Society and founded the WPI System Dynamics program.

Link to transcript: http://bit.ly/SD-cast-Ep4-Transcript

I would also like to thank Prof. Radzicki for advising me and hiring me to create and manage media for WPI System Dynamics. Check out the links below for the first SD paper Prof. Radzicki wrote and the Feedback Economics book. Stay tuned for Prof. Radzicki’s book chapter. We also provided a link to a short YouTube video with extra material from the interview. Now, as with the custom of SD-cast, here is a poem I wrote about Prof. Radzicki

Prof. Michael “Mike” Radzicki

No need for an extra mic

You can hear him loud and clear

Never fear, for Mike is here

To teach you martial arts

Or about René Descartes

He is an economist

And wants you to get the bang for your buck

Whether that is college or a truck

Let's be honest and transparent

And help teach and mentor

To fix structure that is errant

Institutional Dynamics: An Extension of the Institutionalist Approach to Socioeconomic Analysis
https://doi.org/10.1080/00213624.1988.11504801

Feedback Economics
https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783030671891

Bonus material: Check out the WPI SD YouTube Channel for a short video of Prof. Radz and my chatting about recording SD history https://systemdynamics.org/oral-history-of-the-sd-society/

and the SDory behind SD-cast https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCg3AD1IqQP7EGSNRDzNkIYQ

Thank you for listening to SD-cast. Please subscribe to SD-cast to hear more SDories.

Email me, ctang@wpi.edu, if you would like to be on SD/ST-cast or recommend someone who would be.

See below for the WPI SD Social Media accounts:

https://twitter.com/WPISDclub

https://www.linkedin.com/groups/1916314/

https://bit.ly/WPIsdMailForm

Music:

Intro and End

“Limelight” by Podington Bear is licensed under the Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 International License. I cut and moved the music track to fit the intro and ending.

https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Podington_Bear/Haplessly_Happy/Limelight

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/

Hello, SD-cast listeners. My name is Christine Tang. I am an Interdisciplinary PhD Student in System Dynamics (SD) at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) and am the WPI SD Social Media Manager. In this podcast, I will interview someone in the System Dynamics or Systems Thinking community. This series is called “What is your SDory?”

This is Episode 4. Titled: “What is your SDory, Mike Radzicki?”

Biography

Congratulations on your 30 year anniversary at WPI and thank you for joining us today, Professor!

Mike: Well thanks for having me. I'm very glad to be here.

Interview

Christine: When and how did you ‘discover’ System Dynamics (SD) or Systems Thinking (ST)?

Mike: Right, well it was a long time ago. It was probably 1981 and I was taking an advanced econometrics class as a PhD student in economics and when we got towards the end of the the course we had a homework problem that involved what turned out to be system dynamics and I had never heard about it before what have you and it was it was quite different from the system dynamics [that you are used to today] and it was a single homework assignment and of course I dutifully did the homework and and turned it in.By the way, this was in the era where we were using punch cards so you know we had to build a our system dynamics models as it turned out with IBM cards and run the cards through a big card reader and so forth and a big mainframe, but at any rate the reason this guy--this teacher had us do this was when he, I think at the time he was still an untenured assistant professor. So I got to Notre Dame for graduate school in 1980 so this would have been my, the beginning of my second year so there was a three-course sequence statistics, econometrics I and econometrics II so this is econometrics II. And the teacher (I ended up being his TA and I ended up having him direct my dissertation),he was untenured at the time and he said, “well...one of the senior guys in the department wanted to work with him on this simulation thing he was doing” and so he did. It wasn't really his thing. He was an econometrician but he was untenured and he said “well...I better do what the senior people want” sohe got involved a little bit with what turned out to be system dynamics and as long as he was doing that he included a very basic um homework assignment in this advanced class so we knew what it was.And I didn't really know the name of it. It was just some kind of simulation thing we had to do. It was a very simple model--deer being born and dying and maybe there's a coyote eating the deer or something kind of a predator prey thing.

The story behind it was--we used a software program called NDTRAN for Notre Dame translator and my recollection waswhen The Limits to Growth came out in what...1972, I think it was,and the World3 model,it became very well known, controversial and so forth and some of the faculty at Notre Dame wanted to run the World3 model and play with it and such. Again, my recollection is that in order to do that back then, you needed DYNAMO. DYNAMO was written in like IBM 360 assembly language which meant you needed an IBM 360 to run it and to run the World3 model and at the time Notre Dame didn't have that brand of mainframe.I don't know what they had--it was before I was there--but so they couldn't run it, so Bill Davisson, who was an economist---the senior economist who was having my boss if you will my teacher work with him.He partnered with an electrical engineer named John Uhran and they got a grant from, again from memory, the Fleischmann Foundation and they proposed making their own version of DYNAMO which they called NDTRAN but they would write it in Fortran so it could run on any computer that had a Fortran compiler and so it was DYNAMO like but they had their own twists and turns on it. Then he roped my uh teacher into helping him as an assistant professor do some papers and things and so I ended up using this thing called NDTRAN make this little system dynamics model and turned it inand that was that. It didn't dawn on me that it was anything special. I just thought it was a little it was like very different from the econometrics. It's almost like weird like well why is this in an econometrics course but then it's kind of like okay the guy had to learn to do it as a junior faculty member, so as long as he was doing it he threw one in.

So ironically, at the same time that this was happening, I was taking a class in essentially economic methodology.I didn't know what that was but it was a required class and Notre Dame's program at the time--it's very different now--but when I was there, I selected it for my PhD because I thought it was the most interesting program that was out there at least to the ones I applied to for graduate school. Basically what happened was in the first year you took all the classes that taught you the orthodox or the traditional stuff and in the second year they introduced heterodox or alternatives--alternative ways of doing economics and then for yourdissertation you can kind of pick.Did you want to do a traditional thing or a heterodox thing?

So in the second year they started with the heterodox stuff and one of the first required classes was this methods course and basically what happened was the prof came in on the first day and we're all chatting as you know graduate students sitting around a table.There's probably 12 to 15 of us, something like that. He walks to the front of the room and he had a giant pile of books and papers and stuff and we're sort of ignoring him because the class hadn't started yet...chit-chatting and he just drops the giant pile of books and papers on the desk, at the front of the room and it goes BANG! and everybody suddenly stops and looks up and he grabs the lectern that was on the table and he leans out over it and he says “How do you know if an explanation for something is true?” and everybody's like the class didn't even start yet and you're like giving us a test [laughter] but a second later I thought well that's a good question: how do you know if an explanation for something is true? Well, that's what the whole class was about. It was about how do scientists explain things? How do economists explain things? And are there different ways of doing it and what have you so this was all new to me. As an undergrad (I was an undergraduate econ major) it was kind of like this is econ learn it and spit it back. I was good at it and I enjoyed it so there was econ and I just figured it was what it was. Well, here we are [in] graduate school finding out there's differences of opinion on how to do economics. It was a really interesting course and I was taking notes furiously because I never heard any of this stuff before. It was basically the philosophy of science and we went all the way back to Plato and Descartes and Hume and what have you. There's a whole you know lineage here and the philosophy of science. Basically, in a nutshell and I'm oversimplifying here but--you would boil down the debate and economics between what the orthodox economists [and]how they explain and the heterodox economists [and] how they explain.

Orthodox economists use deductive logic like René Descartes advocated so you start with logic. You start with the mind. You start with a theory of how something works and then you derive testable hypotheses and then you go out and collect data or measurements from the real world and see if the measurements confirm or not the underlying theory right so it's top down. You go to the mind or theory first and then you go to the real world second.

On the other hand, a heterodox economist uses inductive logic as advocated by Hume. So you start by observing the real world and experiencing the real world and you're looking for patterns or things you can generalize from. You have to use a systems approach because you're like a detective at a crime scene. You're trying to piece together why something is happening. Piece together an explanation or a pattern like you have puzzle pieces scattered all over the floor possibly with different puzzles mixed together and you're trying to figure out what's going on here so you're using a systems approach. All the pieces and isolation have to be put together into a coherent whole in an interacting whole. If generalities are found--if the same pattern appears at different crime scenes, then those generalities are collected into what are called real typologies and if there are any similarities or commonalities among the real types those are fundamental principles of economics or the theory, so it's bottom up. You build up to the theory and the most important principle we learned was circular and cumulative causation whichGunnar Myrdal won the Nobel Prize for in economics for applying it to developing countries.

Well, I'm in the library then while this is all taking place and I find a book by Jay Forrester. I wasn't looking for it. It was just on the shelf. It was actually a book of readings. Forrester was one of the editors but he had the first paper in the book. It was an introduction to what system dynamics was and I'm reading it kind of killing time in the library and I'm like this sounds a lot like what we're learning about the heterodox economists do. You're using a systems approach. You're hooking the pieces of the puzzle together into a coherent whole. If there are commonalities they're called generic structures and the fundamental principles of system dynamics are stocks and flows and feedback loops--circular and cumulative causation. Right? So I'm like this, you know, I better bring this to the attention of the professor [laughter] and the other thing was I didn't quite put it together yet but it turned out to be this thing that Bill Davisson and John Uhran were making NDTRAN for. I didn't make the connection yet. So I go in and I tell the professor “hey, I found this thing and you know” and he looked a little horrified that I was trying to kind of mathematize the heterodox--because the heterodox economists back then didn't think you could use math to do economics.That it sterilized everything. Right? and so and they meant, in that era, linear math--closed form solutions. Simulation was not widely used in economics [back then]. To his credit the guy said to me “well, you got to write a paper for the class so write it up” which I did and I researched it then and I said you know there's this thing where the economists and the heterodox economists and these system dynamics people probably are doing the same thing just the economists aren't using math and they should be. So anyway so that's how I kind of pulled it all and it dawned on me that the Bill Davisson and John Uhran thing was also system dynamics. That's how my participation in all this began.

Christine: You actually answered my next two questions: What was the first model you encountered and what was the first model that you built?

Mike: They were super super simple models of course...I mean that's how you start anybody. Right? One stock and one flow and what have you. Now back then, we were using, as I mentioned punch cards, and you know mainframe and what you had to do was you had to conceptualize your stock-flow, feedback loop structure on a piece of scratch paper. And then you had to say alright each of these icons I've drawn here is an equation. So what would the equivalent equation be? Right? And you'd either you use the NDTRAN or the DYNAMO nomenclature. Then, you'd have to translate each of the icons into a line of code and then you have to go to the computer center. You'd have to wait in line and get to a card punch machine and each card was a line of code and you had to type in the the code and it punched holes in the cards. If you had a program that was 107 lines of code, you had 107 cards. All with holes punched in them. And of course if you just hit the wrong key, if you made a typo, it punched the holes in the wrong place and you had to redo it [laughs] and you dare not drop your pile of cards and they get all mixed up on the floor because now you have to put them back together in the right order and then you have to wait in line in another machine. It was a card reader and it run the stack of cards through the reader and then your program would go into a line, a queue, to get into the central processing unit of the mainframe.It would run the simulation and then it would wait in line to get printed out and there'd be a giant continuous stream of green paper getting spit out of the mainframe and there'd be student workers who were trying to find the end of one program and the beginning of the next and tear them apart and hand you the output. What I'm getting at is that even though the models were quite simple, it was a heck of a thing [laughs] so just to make one simulation run. Of course, invariably your first try, there was some mistake somewhere so then you had to rinse and repeat the whole process. You were very thoughtful about running your programs because it was such a hassle to do one simulation run that you didn't just flippantly say “Oh, let's just quickly try this or that.” You really thought hard before you went through that whole process. And then when you're done, like to turn in your homework assignment, you had to use a template to draw the stocks. Now, instead of scratch paper, you're doing it very nice using vellum or some nice typing paper or something and you're taking a template and a very sharp pencil and drawing the stocks and flows and and what have you and of course invariably you didn't start at the right place on the page and you got to the edge of the page and you still needed more more room [laughs] so you had to start again and you have to make the stock smaller use a smaller little rectangle on your template and whatever before you could fit it all in so it was really quite the archaic process relative to what we do today.

Christine: I would also like to go back to what you talked about with the real typologies and generic structures. You wrote a paper on that correct?

Mike: So what happened was the professorrunning the methods course,Chuck Wilber. He ended up giving me an A on the paper and he said “you know...you should really write this up for a journal.” I ended up doing that and it got published as a lead article in a pretty good heterodox journal. That led to, as you might guess, more papers. In fact, to this day, I get requests periodically to write something about that stuff. It resonated with a lot of people because back then, as I mentioned earlier, the heterodox economists objected to the way that economics was done by the mainstream or the people who dominated the profession. And I believe...I'm not sure if I can prove this but my understanding is that it all started kind of after World War II when people like Paul Samuelson were mathematizing economics. Prior to World War II, economics was not very mathematical and they were inspired by physicists to do economics like physicists did physics to make it a science so they were looking for laws like the law of gravity or Newton's laws. We had the law of supply and demand and so forth. So they removed institutional details--time and space. The law of demand should hold in 1901 or 2001. Should hold in China or the United States. Right? So you removed all of the sort of institutional detail and kind of boiled it down to these very simple laws and the heterodox peoplesaid “That's crazy. That might work in physics but we got people here and time matters and place matters and habits and customs and what have her. So they objected to that but they didn't have tools--equivalent set of mathematical tools back then to represent their stuff so they got picked on. So they essentially ended up doing Harvard Business School case studies. It was a lot of words and maybe a graph or something or a table but not highly mathematical models and so they were picked on by the mainstream as being unable to do the math, not smart enough to do the math or very loosey-goosey and non-rigorous. Right? Whereas the heterodox people were eager to find out...I found out that there was this tool called system dynamics that came from engineering that could be used to represent all of their soft variables. But the problem back then, this is in the 1980s, was (when people would ask me to come and give a talk about it or you know be on a panel or something at a conference...people who became interested were typically the younger people who were looking for something new to do for a dissertation or something) there was no way to learn how to do it really, other than go to MIT. There was no internet [laughs]. There was Industrial Dynamics and then George Richardson and Jack Pugh's book came out so there are a few books and papers but it's very hard to figure out how to do it on your own.

Heterodox economists were trying to adopt what I was suggesting but trying to learn it on their own. It was very very tough sledding so that's why I came to WPI by the way. I concluded we needed a place to develop the curriculum and then to teach people--how to teach economists or econ students how to utilize system dynamics properly and WPI said “Yeah, it's like an engineering thing so come on over to WPI.” So that's why I came in 1990.

Christine: So my point was I would like your paper so I can include it in the links that people can look at.

Mike: There's one that I just wrote for a book chapter that kind of represents my current thinking on all of this that I think we can share. It'll be coming out in a book later this year.

Christine: That's not the Feedback Economics [book] that you were an editor [for]. This is another book?

Mike: Yeah. Different. It's edited by a heterodox economist

Christine: Okay the next question is what are you currently working on?

Mike: Oh well that's a different [answer]...so one of the things I've always wanted to do is take my macro economics or macro dynamics class--macroeconomic dynamics class and turn it into a book. So I guess that's my current project. I've started it. I've got the introduction written. I've got the book outlined. What I want to do is take all the models in the book and present them with...currently, I think STELLA is probably the software package of choice these days and use the gaming interface and storytelling capabilities and what have you and put the models from the book up on the isee systems collective site so that people can access the models. You kind of read about them in the book but it's a static presentation and then they can go and play around with them. The nice thing about it is you kind of tell the story of macroeconomics along the way and you're able to compare and contrast the great thinkers and the less well-known thinkers...their models whether they were presented with words or static math or difference equations or differential equations because everything's translated into system dynamics and so you have a fighting chance of seeing how one thinker differed from the other and what's the same and you can see kind of how macroeconomics evolved over time so there's some interesting things like...for example, in the early days of mathematical modeling macro modeling, economists were certainly aware there was a trend and a cycle and they interacted but they had linear tools. Their models generate a trend or a cycle but not both that interacted. They needed non-linear math and then they needed of course computers to simulate the solutions. I believe what happened was that led to a split of macroeconomics into growth theory and business cycle theory which are different sub-disciplines of macroeconomics...neither of which yields models that look like the data [laughs] because they remove one of the other elements of it. And I think it's just a historical artifact. By the time they figured out they needed non-linear modeling and they needed computers and computers were available widely available...it's path dependent you know you're locked into these sub-disciplines of macroeconomics. But it's kind of interesting to see all that you know looking at the historical models and what they could and couldn't do and as the models in the course and the book evolves you start to see more realistic models being developed because the tools are better.

That's what I'm working on and there's a lot going on there. I hope to have that done over the next let's say year or so depending on the number of distractions I have [laughs]

Christine: Thank you for letting us be a distraction but you find this valuable so you agreed…so what wisdom do you have for students and those new to system dynamics?

Mike: Wisdom. Well...what I tell students is you probably should have a domain area of expertise and a tool that you're really good at. So if your tool is...let's say system dynamics if that interests you or systems thinking, whatever [your tool(s)] then you should have a corresponding domain area to which you apply system dynamic/systems thinking and the like. My back of the envelope sort of mental model about all this is that 90% of the people you encounter in the world are interested in the domain area and only 10% in the tool because people have problems in whatever neck of the woods they work in. If we're talking healthcare policy and you're talking to somebody who has a healthcare policy issue, whether that person is a hospital administrator or somebody who's frustrated with their insurance or whatever the case may be and they're turning to you because you know about healthcare policy or whatever the domain area is, not because you're a system dynamicist or a systems thinker. Every once in a while you encounter a tools person but the domain people assume if you're an expert that you use cutting edge tools to do whatever you do. So you know develop a tool let's say it’s system dynamics and develop an area and then you know go with those and as you get more experience you could you know maybe add a second tool and a second domain area. It's hard to be an expert at everything. Right? So at some point you hit kind of your limits...so that's the first thing I would do.

The second thing is there's no substitute for doing proper system dynamics modeling and it's not easy. Jay Forrester used to always point out to us that if it was so easy everybody could do it and it would be like no big deal. So it's hard to do it well. It's easy to do poor system dynamics. It's hard to learn how to do good system dynamics. Now, it's not impossible but it takes practice and it takes patience to learn to do it well. You want to have the mindset that this is not going to be an overnight thing. You have to be in it for the long haul and systematically go about learning how to build ever more sophisticated models.

Christine: Yes and if people are in a place where they don't have others to talk to they can either join the System Dynamics Society and network with people there who can help them build their models or they can join the WPI Collective Learning Meetings.

Mike: I agree with that. In the best of all worlds, every new system dynamics modeler would have a mentor who helps them learn how to do proper system dynamics or they would have just really good instruction. More specifically, what I mean by that is-a typical introductory course in system dynamics tells you the history of the field introduces you to stocks and flows and feedback loops, and to little molecules, into various software packages and you learn how to run little models and build little models and acquaint yourself with all that stuff. If that's where you stop, then you're probably not going to be able to build very good system dynamics models and you'll never become sort of a senior person.

What you need to do is have a mentor or at least take a second class--where now you know all the basics and you are confronted with hearing about a problem and in a systematic way building a model from that. When you're working with experts and stakeholders who have a problem, they know a lot about it but they don't know about the modeling so they just tell you stuff and you have to have a very filtered ear to figure out what's important and what's not for the purpose of building a model, from an original model, from what you're being told. And then the model has to be insightful. If you build a giant model that doesn't tell them anything new [laughter], people question “like what's the point of of doing this?” So that's a big skill set but learning how to do that properly you have to go beyond a single class where you're introduced to the basic stuff. In the best of all worlds, like I said a couple times, is you'd have a mentor who would show you the way to go about doing this but in the absence of that you know good coursework that is more advanced I think is important if somebody wants to be a PhD level modeler in system dynamics

Christine: And you help provide that at WPI.

Mike: Yeah, I hope so. There's always the question of “well...okay great, Mike. How...so what are the details? How do you do that? [laughs] and uh different people learn in different ways and on and on but yeah. We try and do that and take people systematically from this is a stock, this is a flow to the point at which they could do a PhD dissertation in system dynamics.

Christine: Okay. Thank you for sharing that. The last question is do you have any fun or funny SD stories that you're willing to share?

Mike: Fun or funny SD stories. Well, I was trying to think about that a little bit in terms of what I might be able to share so one is... it involves my good friend and colleague Khalid Saeed, Professor Saeed, who I've known since 1983 so that's going on 40 years [laughs]. So back in 1996, we were moving the System Dynamics Society's headquarters from Jack Pugh's garage and dining room table because his wife, Julia Pugh, was the executive director. And she just did it [on] a volunteer basis. Jack was Jay’s original, one of his original three students who started system dynamics. He wrote DYNAMO. But now Albany was going to have a professional executive director who was Roberta Spencer and they were going to have a whole professional operation. They said to me (at the time, I was secretary of the System Dynamics Society) “Well, Mike you're the secretary. You have a truck and you're young and strong so you can move all the stuff to Albany.” So I had to go to Jack Pugh's house and move all the stuff out of his garage and attic and dining room and whatever and I took it to my house and put it in my kitchen. And then there was stuff at MIT so I went to Building E40 that's the same building where John Collins was given an office, former mayor of Boston the whole Urban Dynamics story and the loading dock with the ramp and all that that was still there and I backed my truck up there and we used the freight elevator and Nan Lux, Jay's administrative assistant, and I went to the basement and we sorted through big bins, finding all the Society's stuff and it was amazing. We found old original templates from Industrial Dynamics and World Dynamics like just tossed in boxes. I told Nan “You know...you should really get that to the MIT Museum or something not just you know down here in the basement of a building.” But anyway and I took all that to my house, put it in my kitchen, sorted everything through and then drove it to Albany. So what happened was...here's the funny part. So while this was happening, by chance Khalid Saeed was visiting from Thailand. He was a professor at the time at the Asian Institute of Technology and he was visiting and of course he came the next year as department head [of WPI Social Science and Policy Studies] and I can't remember why he was visit[ing]...it might have been part of teeing that up. You know getting him acquainted with the school and everybody acquainted with him as a candidate for department head. But anyway, I said “I got to take all this stuff to Albany. Do you want to come?” And he goes “Of course!” so we get in the truck and we get onto the Mass Pike and I'm talking to him about this, that and the other and I look over and he's unconscious. Well, he was of course jet lagged [laughs] so he sleeps all the way to Albany. And we get there and Roberta Spencer comes out. She has like a hand truck and everything and kind of things like you get at Home Depot to move stuff around. We unload my truck and Khalid wakes up and he goes “Is there a couch I can lay on?” [laughter] so he goes sleeps on the couch in one of the offices so Roberta and I unload the truck and load it into the Society's office rooms and stuff. So then he wakes up and he says “I'm hungry.” So we went and had some dinner which was good and then it was time to go back to WPI and we got in the truck and we got on the Pike and I look over and he's out like a light again. Slept all the way back. So he was awake for dinner [laughs] while Roberta and I did all the work but uh yeah i mean he's jet lagged that was understandable.

There's other stories. Another quick one is Jim Hines was out at WPI. I forget why he was here but Jim was the guy who brought from MIT to WPI the online program. He was the original--originator of that program at MIT. MIT didn't want it for some reason. I don't remember why and we competed for it and we obviously got it. And so he was visiting with us. It was the dead of winter and we had our meeting and then he left and he said goodbye. It was almost lunchtime about noon. 10 minutes later, he's banging on my door again and I said, “Jimmy, what's up?” and he said, “Mike, do you have an ice pick?” and I said, “An ice pick?” He says, “Yeah, I need an ice pick.” I go “Why? Why do you need an ice pick?” and he goes “Well...when I parked here...” He parallel parked and what he did was...when he backed into the spot he like ramped his car up onto a big giant ice mound--snow mound and the back wheels were slightly off of the pavement when he did that. He kind of horsed it on to get into the spot [Christine: Oh no] so his car was on this ice slab and his wheels weren't getting any traction and he needed to sort of chop the ice out from underneath it. And I'm like “Oh.” I go “Jesus, that's probably...you know, we got to go to the plant and equipment people--the maintenance people.” So we go down. He and I walked down to the office and I explained what we needed and they said, “Ah, you got to ask Paul T.” So Paul T was the head of the whole maintenance stuff at WPI and it was noon but to talk to Paul T at noon, he would always go in the WPI sauna at noon. [Laughter] So he would preside in the sauna that was kind of like his noon office and so we walked down to the WPI sauna. I don't think it's there anymore. It was in between the old gym in the new gym or the Harrington Gym that was a (Christine: Alumni) now that's the old gym but there was an older older gym.

Mike: Go ahead.

Christine: Alumni Gym.

Mike: Alumni Gym. Yeah and so we look through the little window of the sun and there's Paul T. in there sauna-ing away and so we opened the door and we said, “Can we talk to you?” and he goes, “Come on in.” So we're of course fully dressed [laughs] and it's hot in this sauna, as you can imagine, so I explain it--the situation. We need some picks or whatever and Paul T is looking at us. Of course, we're sweating now because we're in our clothes in the sauna and he's got like a towel on and he looks at Jim Hines and he goes, “They let you teach kids?!” [laughter] and then he said, “Alright, I'll let you have a you know whatever you need go and tell whoever it was that I said it's okay to take what you need just bring it back.” So we went, we chopped him out. We got him going and all was well in the end.

So yeah I don’t know...system dynamicists, I don’t know how funny we are.[laughs]

Christine: Pretty funny based on the small sample size I have.

Mike: One last story I'll give you. And this was...so one time I'm sitting with Forrester in his office. He used to have this very nice office and then a conference room attached to it so you'd enter into his conference room which was very large, a corner office, very nice and then you could go through the conference room into his office office if you wanted. He'd have all his meetings in the conference room but anyway, I don't know why I was talking to him or why I was there...and Nan Lux, his administrative assistant, brings in this giant pile of mail and dumps it on his conference table. It had to be like a foot and a half thick! And I go to Jay, I say, “You get that mail every day? That amount of mail?” He goes, “Yeah.” I go, “You do?!” He goes, “Yeah” and he starts sort of sorting through it. You know like junk, junk, whatever and then in this pile was a book manuscript by some guy he never heard of before. It was

Dear Professor Forrester,

I'm [so-and-so]. I've written a book. Would you please review it for me and give me your comments?

And Jay's like “I don't...you know I get this kind of stuff all the time.” And he says “I can't...I've never heard of this guy. I can't. I don't have time to do all this.” So he would have his administrative assistant send a polite letter saying he appreciates it but he really doesn't have the time. So I said, “Well, what's the weirdest thing you ever got in the mail?” He goes “oh…” he goes “after World Dynamics came out” he said, “I received one day a...like a movie tape in the mail and it was from Germany.” And he said, “Some guy was inspired by the World Dynamics book and wrote and starred in an opera about World Dynamics. It was just him and he sang the whole thing.” Jay said, “He sang in German.” and he goes “I don't speak German! I didn't know what he was singing!” but he said “at some point, he was like showing despair so you assumed that was an overshoot and collapse mode or something in the opera so yeah there's a lot of a lot of stuff like that.

Christine: Thank you for your time and we're actually past the hour so I don't know if you had another meeting after this…

Mike: No, no problem. I cleared the schedule this morning. I thought this was going to be a very fun thing so I was looking forward to it.

Ending

I would also like to thank Prof. Radzicki for advising me and hiring me to create and manage media for WPI System Dynamics. Check out the links below for the first SD paper Prof. Radzicki wrote and the Feedback Economics book. Stay tuned for Prof. Radzicki’s book chapter. We also provided a link to a short YouTube video with extra material from the interview. Now, as with the custom of SD-cast, here is a poem I wrote about Prof. Radzicki