Allocation Dependence

Why do people reshape themselves to fit systems even if they know are unhealthy?

🔍 What Is Allocation Dependence?

Allocation Dependence describes how people and institutions become reliant on externally allocated resources—such as degrees, income, funding, titles, permissions, or social validation. To gain or retain access to these resources, agents (whether individual or collective) must conform to allocation measures: standardized tests, performance rubrics, bureaucratic criteria, cultural norms, or digital algorithms.

When survival or success depends on passing through such allocation filters, agents adapt through:

Assimilation: Adopting traits and behaviors that are externally rewarded and measurable.
Trimming: Discarding or suppressing personal qualities that don’t fit the expected mold—even if they are meaningful, valuable, or regenerative.
Monetize and instrumentalize their identities and labor for performative recognition.

These adaptations often feel rational, inevitable, or even moral, but they quietly shift the logic of action from value regeneration (creating meaning, care, or coherence) to value redemption (extracting validation from metric systems or gatekeepers).

⚠️ Emergent Structures and Consequences

Allocation Dependence gives rise to a range of secondary effects that are fractal (appearing at all scales) and transfactual (emerging across different domains regardless of specific contexts). These include:

Control and Internalized Fetishism External metrics gradually dictate self-worth, values, and decision-making. The individual becomes a proxy for the allocation system, reinforcing its logic even without conscious coercion.
Perpetuation of inequality through the unequalization of uniqueness Agents whose strengths, timing, or values don’t match dominant allocation criteria are systematically marginalized or deemed inferior — not due to inherent lack, but due to epistemic misfit.
Alienation and Deterioration Just as excess and deficiency of nutrients or activities lead to physical deterioration, incompatible molds lead to the excess and deficiency in both the agent's development (e.g., over-trained in problem-solving yet under-trained in empathy) and the resources allocated (e.g., taking extravagance for granted or causing prolonged unmet needs), alienating and deteriorating the whole agent. Such alienation and deterioration are worsened through instrumentalization, as means subjugate ends.
Waste and Pollution Human potentials and other resources are misallocated, discarded, or deployed in environments where they degrade or produce harm—mirroring ecological pollution but also on a psychosocial level.
Resource Exhaustion Because value is no longer regenerated but redeemed through conformity, systemic depletion of emotional, ecological, and cultural resources occurs, leading to linear, extractive dynamics.
Fragility and Cascading Risk Agents and systems become fragile when every step of life depends on successful passage through narrow, layered contingencies. A failure in one layer (e.g., test score, job title, income source) can collapse the whole.

This generative mechanism describes how people, when dependent on externally allocated resources, begin to reshape themselves to fit into the allocation measures — be they exams, performance rubrics, economic criteria, or norms.

🧪Empirical Foundation: Diplomaism in Taiwan

This mechanism first revealed itself through my ethnographic work in Taiwan — 🎬 If There is a Reason to Study (2009–2016) — particularly in an alternative high school during an era when higher education had already been universalized. I expected that with reduced competition and a learner-centered approach, students would freely explore their unique potentials. But to my surprise, they voluntarily maintained the same credentialist behaviors—internalizing performance rubrics, trimming their passions, and aligning themselves to what “counts.”

This pattern persisted even among those with access to unpressured, high-agency environments—including myself. It became clear that Allocation Dependence is not driven solely by structural scarcity or cultural legacy (e.g., Confucianism), but by a deeper logic of survival dependence on allocated opportunity.

This research became a “natural experiment,” forming the empirical basis for the Allocation Dependence mechanism and related models like Learning by Caring and Care–Passion–Talent.

🌍 Transfactual Manifestations Across Domains

Allocation Dependence manifests in numerous arenas beyond education:

Workplace performance indicators (e.g., KPIs) steer behavior toward optimization and performativity, rather than meaningful contribution.
Global South conformity to Global North standards in order to receive aid or access international platforms—often at the cost of abandoning indigenous practices.
Domestication in animal species, where survival through human allocation causes the erosion of wild traits and ecological resilience.
Attention and visibility on digital platforms are algorithmically allocated. Users internalize engagement logic, reshaping content and self-presentation to fit invisible metrics.

🧠 Case: Today's Epistemic Crises

Viewing the epistemic crises of our time through the lens of Allocation Dependence, we see, for instance:

Epistemic Inequality Those lacking dominant forms of capital (e.g., language, pedigree, networks) are excluded from legitimate knowledge production, even if they hold valuable lived insights.
Alienated Qualification An 18-year-old may spend roughly a decade just to try to “qualify” to study the very pressing issues they already experience intimately—only to lose the nuance or urgency that lived experience once offered.
Precarity in Academia Despite many having diligently followed and met the allocation processes and criteria, the expected redeemable resources (e.g., funds, job openings) turn out to be in short supply. Having spent roughly a decade assimilating and trimming themselves to fit the academic mold, many become unfit or unadaptable to other opportunities.
Post-Truth and Distrust When people recognize that truth is mediated by institutions of allocation (e.g., media, academia), but feel shut out or deformed by those same systems, widespread epistemic breakdown ensues.

These insights, in particular, fostered the developments of Learning by Caring, Reflexive Media, Education as Ecosystem Weaving, and Academia as Distributed Knowledge-Ecosystems for Collective Transformation.

🗺️ A Map of Intervention Points

Many reforms seek to address these effects—but without recognizing common underlying mechanisms such as Allocation Dependence, they remain partial:

Circular economy can help with resource exhaustion but doesn’t necessarily resolve fragility.
Holistic admissions diversify filters but still reproduce the logic of gatekeeping.

Allocation Dependence offers a diagnostic lens to see where interventions are compensatory versus transformative.

🔁 Moving Toward Regeneration

To transcend Allocation Dependence, we must cultivate practices that prioritize value regeneration over value redemption—a shift in the simple rules at the agential level for redirecting the self-organization of a system. One agent-based alternative I’ve developed is Learning by Caring , where individuals grow not by competing for credentials or metrics, but by caring deeply for real-world issues, people, or ecosystems.

🎞️Discovering "Allocation Dependence" in the Persistence of "Diplomaism" in Taiwan: An Attempt to Uncover Common Mechanisms Underlying Wicked Problems

🎞️What If the Disadvantaged Are Already the Most Resource Abundant? A Case for Shifting from "Forecast-based" to "Agent-based" Talent Incubation

🎞️[in Mandarin] Does Taiwan Already Have a "World-Class Education System?" Why Don't Most of Us Feel So? – Exploring the Key Shift in Mindset Required for the Next National Curriculum Based on If There is a Reason to Study and the Admissions Disputes

📰Under the Shadows of Popular Systems Change: How a Prestigious University Failed a Disadvantaged Student, or the Case for a Critical Realist Agent-Based Approach

📚[in Japanese] Allocation Dependence : A Generative Mechanism that Inhibits the Pursuit of Holistic Development

📝[in Japanese] Connecting the Compartmentalized Civilizational Predicaments: A Complex Adaptive Systems-Based Approach Through the Allocation Dependence Theory