PREDICTIONS – 10 Years Later - Santa Fe Institute

7. COMPETITION IS THE CREATOR AND THE REGULATOR
important deviations from the natural paths in the evolution of the market
shares of Figure 7.6. In fact, the recent data-trend deviations
discussed earlier go the wrong way by aggravating the missinghydrogen
problem. One more reason that raises the pressure, which is
slowly building up from the delay of hydrogen’s introduction.
Interestingly, there is all ready a herald of the approaching hydrogen
era: fuel cells. This technology is rapidly picking up momentum and is
often mistaken for a solution to the energy question. But fuel cells need
hydrogen to run. If hydrogen were readily available, we could just as
easily put it in our cars. They would run faster and would produce no
undesirable emissions whatsoever.
THE DISEASE “MARKET”
Here is yet another example of successive substitutions along natural-growth
curves. I mentioned earlier that diseases can be seen as
competing for the biggest share of all deaths. Young diseases are on
the rise while old ones are phasing out. Charting this phenomenon I
obtained a simplified but quantitative picture in which diseases were
grouped into three broad categories according to prevalence and nature
(Appendix C, Figure 7.2). One group contained all
cardiovascular ailments, today’s number-one killer. A second group
was called neoplastic and included all types of cancer. The third
group comprised all old, generally phasing out, diseases. Hepatitis
and diabetes were not included because their share was rather flat
over time (no competitive substitutions) and below the 1 percent
level (not visible in the usual picture). Cirrhosis of the liver also represented
too small a percentage, but being of an intriguing cyclical
nature, it is reported separately later in Figure 8.4.
The disease “market” presented the classic mountainous landscape of
the dynamics of natural competition. From the turn of the century, cardiovascular
ailments have been claiming a progressively increasing
share, making them the dominant cause of death by 1925. Their share
reached a peak in the 1960s with more than 70 percent of all deaths and
then started declining in favor of cancer, which had also been steadily
growing at a comparable rate—parallel line—but at a lower level. All
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