PREDICTIONS – 10 Years Later - Santa Fe Institute

7. COMPETITION IS THE CREATOR AND THE REGULATOR
“They are crying from joy,” says Mom.
“The second and third don’t seem joyful,” objects the little
one.
• • •
It may well be the case. Second and third places are usually not coveted
by competitive individuals. Everyone competes for the first position.
The nature of competition is such that there is always one front-runner,
and everyone runs against him or her.
Charting this phenomenon, the generalized substitution model
with its logarithmic scale gives rise to the image of a mountainous landscape
similar to Figure 7.5. Crisscrossing straight lines denote natural
substitutions, and a curved peak designates the front-runner of the period,
someone who was aspiring to be first only a short time ago and
who will not stay first for long.
Detailed below are two examples of this process: means of transportation
and primary energy sources. They use yearly data from the
Historical Statistics of the United States 9 spanning more than one hundred
and fifty years.
TRANSPORT INFRASTRUCTURES
Means of transportation have evolved toward an ever higher performance.
Increasing speed is one obvious improvement, but significant
jumps in performance must be seen in terms of productivity (speed
times payload) measured in terms of ton-mile per hour or passengermile
per hour.
The first major improvement in the United States transport system
was the construction of canals aimed at connecting coastal and inland
waterways in one infrastructure. Canal construction started about two
hundred years ago and lasted almost one hundred years. By the end of
the nineteenth century some links were already being decommissioned
because traffic began moving to railroads. The first railways were constructed
in 1830, increasing speed and productivity. The railway’s
prime lasted until the 1920s when trains started losing market share
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