A project called the Living Earth Simulator (LES) plans to look at recording and modeling all aspects of society.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-12012082

Their quote:

"Revealing the hidden laws and processes underlying societies constitutes the most pressing scientific grand challenge of our century."

Laws of cities

Can cities be predicted? Or is each city unique and incomparable?

Here's one (retired) physicist that says there are simple equations that describe cities:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/19/magazine/19Urban_West-t.html

Warming or cooling?

Many people have tried to forecast societal change through a "Newtonian" model. They think they can use historical trends, contextual understanding of those trends, and guesses about future influences. Combine all that into a complex model and -- voila! -- instant prognostication.

The poor record of predictions doesn't stop new predictions. If such predictions were true, humanity would be over, the planet wasted, oil and resources at an end, et cetera.

And yet populations keep increasing. The medical problems are from over-eating and living long enough that cancers spread.

Is predicting possible or useful? Maybe lessons learned in meteorology can be applied in social science areas.

Philosophers have looked at societies and individuals without agreeing on the effects.

To greatly simplify, three views have formed:
1. people are not perfect, but society can be perfected
2. people are not perfect, but society can prevent people from regressing
3. people are not perfect, but people are capable of greatness

The first reflects Rousseau and utopian writers who see society as order-able and suited to defining individuals' behaviors, beliefs, and character. Communist theoreticians sought to have a "scientific" society constrained by laws. Socialists adopt this view.

The second reflects natural law philosopher Thomas Hobbes and religious writers who see society as required to control the baser tendencies of natural people.

The third elevates people to self-rule. Here, society is dynamic and emerges from autonomous individuals.

How a society changes depends on its expression. No society purely expresses just one of the models. Elements of all three appear in every nation and conflicts between the models is endless.

What is "society"?

Society is made up of individuals but, like fish in water, do the individuals know they are in a society? How many societies can one individual be in? With the web, societies can form without regard to physical location.

Legendary football coach Vince Lombardi describes society as "Individual commitment to a group effort -- that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work."

Philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau called the rules that a society lives by "the social contract."

Birth of social trends

Where do new social trends come from?

Who originates fads or fashions? Who creates memes or trends?

After one is created, how does it spread and grow?

Most trends are created at the edge of society. The edge might be defined by wealth, location, life-style, or other dimensions. From, the edge, it is eventually transferred to the center.

Like an infectious disease, society is continually assailed with many new social trends. Most trends are ignored or rejected but a minority enter the society where they may briefly blossom or, rarely, become part of the society. The parallels to processes in biology are notable.

Throughout human history, societies have feared the outsiders who have strange customs and barbarous languages. Walled countries (Han China, imperial Japan, modern Cuba, Soviet Russia, etc) succeed in slowing the influx of social change but change is rapid when the barrier breaks.

How quickly does a society change?

There are many ways to measure change:
- propagation speed of fads or memes
- language migration
- acceptance time of new ideas or mores
- establishment of new technology or science

While everyone today thinks technology changes rapidly, major changes take a long time. Looking at the "industrial revolution", the time from basic tool-making to assembly lines was thousands of years.

Why has Marxism been widely believed?

Marxism as a testable theory has been repeatedly debunked, disproved, and dismissed. But many people still believe it.

A possible reason is that Marx told a simple and compelling story. Like many religious stories, Marx's story gives a purpose to humanity. The story frames a "big picture" view to those confused by the world's randomness.

Marx used Hegel's framework of linear progression to describe steps to a social utopia.

It's not useful to point out Marxism's failures or fallacies if the believers accept it on faith.

How will a new theory be developed that captures the faith of the average person? In a world of seven billion people, a movement of a small minority, say 10%, is still huge.

factors in change

Change in large system often starts gradually.

After a period where a factor influences the system but no change is observed, suddenly the effect becomes obvious. Why the sudden switch? If a change cannot be detected until it erupts, can the influence be detected?

These questions appear in complex systems of all types -- biological, human, financial, and others.

One possibility is that the normal spectrum of a system will show a difference in its statistical variance before there's a noticeable difference in the average.

Prologue

So far this blog has mused on predictions and historical info.

The direction and goal is to examine social predictions. Can a society's evolution be predicted? Could a child's life be predicted? What is unpredictable? Could a simple rule be enough or would any useful prediction system require many complex rules?

Trees and forest

When individual objects are grouped, new behaviors emerge, some good, some bad, many unexpected.

Who could foresee the behavior of an entire anthill by looking at one ant? Or traffic at an intersection by looking at a single car? Or the beauty of a lake by examining a molecule of water?

Trying to simplify the model by ignoring single objects helps to an extent, but, when the objects are complex (eg, cars, stock traders) the simple model misses critical details.

Similar to the use of Marxism for "explaining" how societies must change, Freudianism became dominant in the 20th century. For a few decades it was, anyway.

Freudianism was used to attack all established societies. Its proponents defined anything they didn't like as “repressed”. In the middle of the 1900s, academic writing was filled with Freudian references and concepts.

But when medical science provide psycho-therapeutic treatments, Freudiannism faded away.

And yet, it's the widespread willful belief of "scientific societies" that's interesting. Why do educated people eagerly accept such claims?

This blog will return to this theme again. Why thy pseudo-religious acceptance of socialism?

Is Philosophy dead?

Religions have condemned Science as crowding them out. A fair claim.

The same claim can be made by philosophers. Centuries before the rise of scientific empiricism, philosophers published their qualitative beliefs about all topics - natural events, astronomy, psychology, and social.

As the scientific method looked at natural events and discovered laws of physics that described events better than invoking a theological cause, science also has crowded out philosophers.

Bubbles

In economics, bubbles repeatedly occur about every 15-20 years in the US. From the first in 1793 to the current one, speculation in land or housing slowly builds up and up until the bubble becomes reaches a manic peak and then eventual pop.

Bubbles occur in other areas but are most visible in real estate because everyone needs a place to live. Bubbles in music don't affect as widely or as deeply.

Predicting the social trend should be easy but evidence is easily neglected. Many people believe government promises.

Forever blowing bubbles

A typical expectation is a linear trend. In general, people extrapolate a trend as a straight line. Once a direction is established, it seems to be human nature that the belief is a trend will continue indefinitely.

This belief is surprised by changes in direction but not as much by intensity. A strong trend can quickly become a bubble that explodes. Bubbles are not just financial but can be in many social areas such as music, food, and ideas.

The most examined bubbles are financial. These date back to Roman times and include the infamous tulip mania in the mid-1600s, the South Sea Company bubble in mid-1700s, and the modern "dot-com" bubble of 2000.

Bubbles seem to be a natural outcome. Random variations in any market may be misinterpreted as changes in direction and then accepted as a permanent change. Small movements grow into big changes if the difference pleases people.

Many questions arise:
- are bubbles good or bad?
- can bubbles be predicted?
- are bubbles independent, or does one bubble affect later bubbles?
- is there a mathematical model of bubbles?

Man-made vs made-man

What shapes mankind vs what does mankind shape?

Looking around at modern cities one sees many objects. Nearly all have been made or modified by humans. Obviously, humans built the buildings, vehicles, and other tools. But even the plants, animals, and food have been affected by humans.

So are humans in control or are they controlled? The materialism of Marx and Engels said humans are driven by the material forces of the mechanical societies. Marx and Engels missed the fact that machines come from human mind. Machines are created for a purpose. As tools, they are improved or discarded.

Some machines appear to be more than tools and they take on metamorphic or symbolic roles. Trains expressed territorial conquerors or powerful draft animals or inspirations for songs. Same with automobiles, airplanes, and computers.

For social predicting, tools will continue to evolve and will, in turn, affect societies. It's tempting to proclaim that tools are symbiotic to societies like memes. Those two need groups, not individuals, to spread. But neither succeed by dominating like Marx and Engels thought.

This blog will be a forum for predictions based on social trends.

Can society be predicted? Mostly yes, but as Isaac Asimov's "Foundation" series dramatized a "Mule" can arise that changes the trend.

Gerard O'Neill's book "2081" showed how resilient society is, despite big changes in technology.

Welcome to a blog about technology, society, and investing.

How's that for a narrow focus?