PREDICTIONS – 10 Years Later - Santa Fe Institute

5. GOOD GUYS AND BAD GUYS COMPETE THE SAME WAY
formance. At the peaks in award-winning where Americans distinguished
themselves brilliantly in the 1930s and the 1950s, the average
ages of the recipients were 51.1 and 49.1, respectively.
With this in mind I attempted a fit to the overall number of Nobel
awards. I obtained a world potential of 1089 laureates over all time, a 64
percent penetration in 2000, and a yearly rate of less than two by the end of
the 21st century. Thus, a declining annual number of Nobel laureates may
at first glance be indicative of an “aging” standard for excellence rather
than a loss of intellectual power. To obtain a deeper understanding of
American competitiveness, we must look at the performance trend of
Americans relative to the rest of the world, which we will do in
Chapter Seven.
Ten Years Later
The thin dotted lines in Figure 5.1 are from an S-curve fit
made in 1988. The peak in the rate of American Nobel awards
was then estimated to be around 1978 instead of 1985, and the
ceiling for the total number of all Nobel prizes to be 923 instead
of 1089. While the latter discrepancy falls within the
expected uncertainty from the fitting procedure (see Appendix
B), the 1988 forecast for American laureates is unjustifiably
pessimistic. It may have been my fault. My experience had
shown that S-curves tend underestimate the final ceiling. To
guard against this bias I had made it a habit to assign heavier
weights on recent data during the fitting procedure. But in
1988 recent data happened to describe a slowdown in American
Nobel awards (see years 1982-1987), which resulted in too
low an estimate for the ceiling.
CRIMINAL CAREERS
Having dealt with outstanding contributors to the benefit of humanity,
let us now turn in the opposite direction, to the criminals. We can do
that because the careers of many of these individuals have been well
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