A Consultant's View

Prairie Trail Software, Inc. ............................................................. Sept 2007

Tremendous Skill Needed

As any mother knows...
...the longer a mess exists, the more it becomes: difficult...harder to clean. The same effect is true in policing, maintenance, politics, geology, and economics.

For example, there are areas along San Andreas Fault that are fairly active. Small earthquakes happen along those areas on a regular basis, releasing tension. But the sections that are not active have rare major earthquakes.

A number of years ago, Catastrophe Theory was in vogue because it purported to show what happened, mathematically, in catastrophes. But there was a problem. Although the math was good for looking at past events and demonstrating how those events connected, it was nearly worthless in forecasting what might happen in the future.

Today, we see similar efforts to use the mathematics of chaotic systems to forecast economics. A recent book, The Black Swan, (written by a refugee from Lebanon's war) builds the case of why we need to look at catastrophes and why thinking about "Normal Distributions" is great for averages, but not for dealing with rare, major events.

Our typical science can't handle these events. Thus, assassinations of rulers, crazy terrorist attacks, or major earthquakes are all events that can not be accurately forecast.

Because human cultures have evolved with wars, terrorist raids, corruption, and criminal activities, we all live with some kind of fear. Politicians love to tell people that they can get rid of what they fear, but, trying to totally stamp out such activities back fires.

A mother who tries to keep her children from making messes will raise children who are either unable to live on their own, or who go through a terrible rebellion. Cops that try to totally stamp out illegal behavior build such resentment against their methods that many more will support the behavior. For example, prohibition exalted the "bootlegger" into a respectable person.

Likewise, one of the goals of Marxism and Leninism was to rebuild society into a much better place– yet many people risked their lives to leave that "better society". Economies that try to reach a stable plateau will actually build a much more fragile system.

The prophet Amos told people, "they push off a day of trouble only to bring near a reign of terror" (Amos 6:3). In the same way, Tsar Alexander II tried to reform his society and later tried to limit those reforms, but only set in motion the forces that would destroy the Russian rulers.