Europe will be funding long-term studies on social forecasting.

How good are experts at predicting the future?
Answer: Horrible.

Beginning in the 1980s, Tetlock examined 27,451 forecasts by 284 academics, pundits and other prognosticators. The study was complex, but the conclusion can be summarized simply: the experts bombed. Not only were they worse than statistical models, they could barely eke out a tie with the proverbial dart-throwing chimps.

NY Times

Will dictators beat democracies?

Will the future be a world of dictatorships? Will central-planning beat free markets?

It looked like this area of questioning was resolved when the Soviet Union collapsed. But
this paper finds that democracies have less than half of the growth variance of non-democracies.

In the long run, the countries with the highest growth will accumulate wealth.

How do social fads/trends/memes form?

The initial cause is likely from multiple sources. Once formed, they are sustained and expand like a disease. Outbreaks occur periodically and grow in semi-predictable patterns.

The following shows the re-occurrence of crop circles:

Talkin' 'bout a revolution

Why don't social revolutions occur?

There are revolutions against governments, against religions, and against taxes. But there aren't revolutions against social rules.

The answer seems to be that social rules are flexible or forgettable so they aren't rigid enough or permanent enough to require a revolution. Individuals can avoid social rules. Change to social patterns occurs a person at a time and does not require a massive synchronized change for eveyone.

Cliometrics and cliodynamics

This blog has mused about historical and social trends. In particular, how can those trends be understood or predicted.

Two academic fields have emerged -- cliometrics and cliodynamics. These fields attempt to measure and model human historical phenomena and processes.

Both fields start with economic history but now look to widen their study.

Where does complex phenomenon come from?

Most people believe complex phenomenon requires a complex origin.
(Yes, that's an assumption.)

The common belief is that a complex phenomenon implies a designer (an old argument for the existence of God). But very complex systems are based on simple rules. Physics is replete with examples, such as gravity controlling everyday objects and distant galaxies. Economics has the "invisible hand" law. Natural Selection is well accepted in biology. Medicine has revealed how life depends on one molecule, DNA.

Another common mis-perception is that change is linear. From the simple rules, change can be exponential. From the emergence of a small start, growth can be rapid as the rules lead to repeated doublings.

On a societal level the spontaneous emergence of an phenomenon will proceed like biological event. Both are undesigned and unplanned. Both need resources to maintain and grow. Both result in unintended consequences. Both change their environment and intermingle with the old structures.

The hardest task is to recognize which social phenomena are dangerous before the threaten.

Macroeconomics studies the behavior of an economy as a whole. This differs from microeconomics, which concentrates more on individuals and how they make economic decisions.

Sociology hasn't split like economics into a group vs individual focus. Perhaps psychology could be said to be the field that looks at individual behaviors. But that is not likely a view shared by many in those fields.