Ceteris paribus
What if the very tool we use to understand reality is what prevents us from seeing it clearly?
The Latin phrase ceteris paribus — ”all other things being equal”— emerged from classical economics as a methodological assumption. When economists wanted to understand how price affects demand, they needed to isolate that relationship from the thousand other forces acting on markets. So they invented a thought experiment: imagine everything else stays constant.
It’s an analytical tool that creates artificial simplicity where none exists.
This assumption reveals something fundamental about how we think.
Thought experiments and scenario planning depend entirely on our ability to hold variables constant, to create controlled environments in our minds where cause and effect become visible. We build mental laboratories, sterile spaces where one input produces one output, uncontaminated by context.
This is the scientific method’s great gift: isolation enables understanding.
But it’s also a profound distortion.
The experimental mindset treats uncontrolled variables as contamination to be eliminated.
In reality, isolation is nearly impossible. Markets don’t pause while we test one hypothesis. Organizations don’t freeze their culture while we implement one change.
The variables we bracket off don’t politely wait their turn. They continue acting, interacting, producing effects we’ve defined away.
Ceteris paribus thinking stands in direct opposition to systems thinking, which insists that relationships matter more than isolated components. Where ceteris paribus decomposes, systems thinking integrates. Where one seeks control through reduction, the other seeks understanding through connection. Systems thinking recognizes feedback loops, emergent properties, and the irreducible complexity of wholes.
Ceteris paribus expresses our desire to make reality legible by transforming confusion into something we can map and predict. But perhaps what we most need to understand is precisely what we’re trying to hold constant.