PREDICTIONS – 10 Years Later - Santa Fe Institute

5. GOOD GUYS AND BAD GUYS COMPETE THE SAME WAY
was defined as an organized set of people with a definite common purpose,
such as making a profit via manufacturing and selling a product,
or providing a service. A criminal organization can be defined similarly
even if it has different objectives. In the company’s case, the revenue
made is one measure of its performance. In a terrorist organization, such
as the Italian Red Brigades, the number of victims killed may be taken
as a measure of the organization’s growth. I have drawn the curve of the
Red Brigades by plotting the cumulative number of its victims (Appendix
C, Figure 5.1). The data points grow in strict accordance with the
natural-growth law. The process is almost complete. The Red Brigades
have killed ninety out of the ninety-nine people estimated as the ceiling
by the fitted curve.
The activities of this terrorist group began in 1974, reached a peak in
1979, and slowed by the early 1980s. The lifetime of the group was
nine years. They seem to have disbanded or been annihilated when they
realized 90 percent of their “potential.” An alternative interpretation of
their end may be that the group was weakened by “old age” and became
more vulnerable to police action. Old age in this context must be interpreted
as approaching exhaustion of the number of operations they had
as a final target throughout their existence as a group.
This way of looking at criminality can throw new light on the effectiveness
of police operations. Criminal “successes” by the “bad guys”
are tantamount to police failures, and complementary curves can be
constructed for the “good guys” from the same set of data. The critical
interpretation concerns the assignment of cause and effect. Is it the
criminals who become weaker or the police who become stronger? In
such a tightly knit cat-and-mouse interaction it is difficult to separate
cause from effect. A good S-curve description indicates, however, that
there is a living entity behind the process observed. Whether it is the
criminal organization or the police depends on who is dominating the
situation.
KILLER DISEASES
Criminality claims a relatively small percentage of the total number of
deaths in society, as do suicides, accidents, and victims of combat ac-
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