PREDICTIONS – 10 Years Later - Santa Fe Institute

11. FORECASTING DESTINY
The “naturalness” of a process can thus be evidenced in two ways:
by an unambiguous S-shaped pattern of growth, but also by persisting
oscillations around a constant level. In fact, the latter is a partial manifestation
of the former, since it is what happens at the beginning and at
the end of the natural-growth S-curve. One way or another, at any given
moment of the process, there is a clear indication about what projections
into the future can be made.
All along the trajectory one can find superimposed fluctuations resembling
chaotic phenomena, themselves claiming a right to
naturalness. One could debate endlessly about which one is more natural,
the S-shaped growth pattern or the random fluctuations. But from a
practical point of view it must be pointed out that chaos studies have not
demonstrated improvements in forecasts. Then, too, deviations from the
natural-growth pattern may result from wars, governmental actions, and
fads. But such deviations can be characterized as unnatural; they are
relatively short-lived, and the growth process soon regains its previous
course. It might be revealing to examine some cases of these unnatural
deviations, the individuals who are responsible for them, and the consequences
of their actions. 1
DECISION NON-MAKERS
A country’s government is a typical decision-making body which sets
courses of action for an entire nation. Enforcement of a new policy may
seem desirable and feasible in the minds of the country’s leaders, but
when policy decisions are made with no respect for the natural processes
already established, the results can be negative and provoke
embarrassment if not violent opposition. I will give two such examples,
both of them concerning the important subject of planning for primary
energy sources. 2
The first example takes us to the United Kingdom, one of the
world’s major coal producers. In the substitution between primary energy
sources presented in Chapter Seven, we saw that the relative
importance of coal has been declining in favor of oil (and to a lesser
extent natural gas) since early in this century. This substitution is natural
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