PREDICTIONS – 10 Years Later - Santa Fe Institute

5. GOOD GUYS AND BAD GUYS COMPETE THE SAME WAY
simple rule for what makes optimists and pessimists, I would say that
it is the relative position on the growth life cycle. Before the peak
one is optimistic; after the peak the very same events take on a pessimistic
hue.
There has been controversy about the future of the United States. Its
power is said to be on the decline, attributable to a variety of social economic,
and political causes, including degenerating morals, a thesis
which can provoke chicken-and-egg arguments in response, questioning
which is the cause and which the effect.
I would like to propose an observational approach toward decline
without trying to explain the reasons that cause it. The only justification
for it would be an existential one: Decline must follow because growth
preceded. The when and how are details to be estimated through close
examination of whatever observables may correlate to the life cycle in
question. One such observation is the intellectual strength of a country
as it can be measured by the number of its citizens who excel; for example,
the number of Nobel prize awards.
We saw in last chapter that the growth of an individual’s achievement
is capped. We also saw that companies learn and innovate like
individuals. The next level of generalization is to consider a whole
country as one organism that grows, competes, and eventually loses to a
newcomer. This would imply that the country’s collective intellectual
achievement must also be capped. I am aware that such a hypothesis
may be stretching the analogy, but final judgment should not be passed
before a confrontation with the real data.
The United States can be seen as a niche for Nobel awards, and we
can map out the growth of the number of prizes it has received over
time. The graph at the top of Figure 5.1 shows the cumulative number
of Nobel prizes won by Americans since their conception. Details for
this study can be found in an article I published in 1988. 1 All disciplines
are put together, and each Nobel laureate is counted as one even if he or she
shared the prize with others. An S-curve is then fitted to the data.
The agreement between data and curve is good. After determining
the function, taking a derivative yields the smooth bell-shaped curve
superimposed on the yearly awards data in the bottom of Figure 5.1.
This curve depicts the life cycle of the process. At the turn of the
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