PREDICTIONS – 10 Years Later - Santa Fe Institute

10. IF I CAN, I WANT
First commercialized in the 1930s, plywood started filling a niche in
the American market. From 1970 onward a pattern of significant (plus
or minus 20 percent) instabilities appeared, which Montrey and Utterback
tried to explain one by one in terms of socioeconomic arguments.
Given a certain pattern one can always correlate other phenomena to it.
This type of pattern, however, could have been predicted a priori by
chaos formulations.
Billions of
square feet
25
PLYWOOD FILLED A NICHE IN THE CONSTRUCTION INDUSTRY
20
15
10
5
0
1935 1945 1955 1965 1975 1985 1995 2005
FIGURE 10.2 Annual plywood sales in the United States. Significant deviations
from the S-curve appear when the ceiling is approached. The small circles show
what happened in the last twenty years. ∗
∗ Adapted from a figure by Henry Montrey and James Utterback in “Current Status and
Future of Structural Panels in the Wood Products Industry,” Technological Forecasting
and Social Change, vol. 38 (1990): 15-35. Copyright 1990 by Elsevier Science
Publishing Co., Inc. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. Recent data points
come from the Statistical Abstract of the United States, U.S. Department of Commerce,
Bureau of the Census.
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