Breaking the Cycle: How Feedback Loops Shape Humanitarian Work

In 1970, MIT professor Jay Forrester made a startling observation about urban poverty programs: many well-intentioned interventions were actually making the problems they sought to solve worse. Housing programs designed to help the poor were concentrating poverty and creating urban decay. Job training programs were pulling the most capable people out of struggling communities, weakening them further. Good intentions weren't enough—the systems themselves were creating cycles that perpetuated the very problems they aimed to fix.