PREDICTIONS – 10 Years Later - Santa Fe Institute

11. FORECASTING DESTINY
end up not planning enough time to drink it! Perhaps people
are not happy with too little inconvenience.
• • •
Many people claim that they must spend all the money they make in
order to cover their needs. Yet this becomes the case again soon after
they get a sizable salary increase. The usual rationalization is that their
needs also grow so that they still spend their entire income. The fact,
however, that they always spend just what they earn, no more, no less,
points to an equilibrium in which the needs grow only to the extent that
there is more money. The same may be true of work, which expands to
fill the time available. Some people, for example, continuously find
things that need to be done around the house or apartment, independently
of whether they went to work that day or spent the whole day at
home.
The concept of an invariant was introduced in the beginning of this
book to describe an equilibrium of opposing forces, or a tolerance level.
It can also be seen as the ceiling of a niche that has been filled to capacity.
If the growth is natural, the process should reach completion
because niches in nature do not normally remain partially filled. One
has to be open-minded about what may constitute a niche. In the office
situation described above, there was a “niche” of inconvenience in getting
a cup of coffee. This niche remained intact. When the company
took action to lower its ceiling, employees became more negligent so
that the level of inconvenience rose again, as if the old level was not
only well tolerated, but in a way “desirable.” Still, the action taken by
the company eliminated one activity: stockpiling exact change.
Equilibrium levels, such as those represented by the level of a niche
filled to capacity, are regulated by some mechanism. Therefore, at
close examination they always reveal oscillations. For example, the
very first invariant mentioned in Chapter One, the annual number of
deaths due to automobile accidents, oscillates around the number
twenty-four per one hundred thousand population in most Western
countries. When the number rises to twenty-eight, social mechanisms
are activated to bring it back down; if it drops low enough, attention
drifts to other concerns, allowing it to rise again.
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