Social Change and Modernity: "The second reason for the underdevelopment of the study of social changes is those who accept the necessity of multicausal explanations face a formidable task in arranging the great arsenal of determinants, mechanisms, processes, and consequences into sufficiently complex interactive and predictive models. Simple theories are easier to create but are more likely to be inadequate, whereas complex theories are more likely to be realistic but are more difficult to construct formally. "

Social Change and Modernity: "As an introduction to this idea, consider the following example, or 'paradigm.' We can say that an organism that needs a constant internal temperature even when the temperature in its environment changes is in a more improbable state than an organism that adapts its own temperature to the variations of its environment. Organisms that are in a state of higher improbability can afford other differences between the system and its environment. Such a difference is not a sharp one; it can evolve gradually. But once there is a sufficient guarantee of bodily temperature and blood circulation, other improbable states of being can develop and stabilize. This means that more and more variables can be controlled by the system in relation to its environment. The 'range of correspondences,' to use a term of Herbert Spencer, grows. As the complexity of the relevant environment increases, new forms of complexity emerge within the system. "

Social Change and Modernity: "The identification of decisive events was replaced by the concept of evolution a mechanism that produces increasing differentiation and complexity. "

Characteristics of Long Distance Trade Before1500 Long distance trade was slow-moving, whether seaborne or overland. Carts were drawn by animals; ships were propelled by wind or by human rowers. 2. It moved in small batches. Vehicles did not have a high freight capacity. In the case of ships, capacity did increase in the 1600s; but the first real increase in freight capacity came only with railroads in the 1800s. 3. It follows logically that such trade would concentrate on high-priced luxury goods....

MIT OpenCourseWare | Media Arts and Sciences: "If anything can be certain about the future, it is that the influence of technology, especially digital technology, will continue to grow and to profoundly change how we express ourselves, how we communicate with each other and how we perceive, think about and interact with our world. "

Averting Catastrophe: "We are surrounded by potentially catastrophic threats from civilian technologies and yet there has been no catastrophe. To what do we owe our good fortune? In examining five types of technological risks that pose a potential for catastrophe, it appears that our good fortune was due in part to luck, in part to delayed consequences yet to be faced, and in part to jerry-rigged solutions. A not insignificant part of the explanation, however, is that regulators have coped with risky technologies in a surprisingly intelligent manner. That is not to say that the outcomes are fully satisfactory; nonetheless, each risk has been approached using one or more sensible strategies. Moreover, the individual strategies at times cohere well enough to seem almost like a system. "

summary2 People adjust their aspirations to their objective means. That is, “Human motivation is led in general by the strive for self-expression or growing choice. ... people with higher education and higher incomes (i.e., greater physical and cognitive resources) put stronger emphasis on self-expression. These people have greater means to unfold their potential which makes it perfectly rational that they put stronger emphasis on self-expression. This is the micrological origin of the relation between resource mobilization and expressive values. In addition, there is a micrological origin of the relation between expressive values and democratic institutions. When people gain an increasingly self-expressive orientation it becomes perfectly rational that they support democracy, since democracy is the regime that enlarges their formal opportunities for self-expression. Exactly for this reason we will see that people tend to be the more supportive of democracy the stronger they emphasize expressive values”

summary2: "A source of growth is 'a high rate of accumulation of useful knowledge and of technological innovations derived from it' . This knowledge and technology, though, can only be used along with the appropriate conditions, such as financial and legal systems which allow mobilization of savings and investment, and with a stable government, which can deal with social or economic disruptions which may occur during periods of change. Thus, the rapid growth of Europe and Japan in the 1950's was due to the relative peace and stability following WW II, which allowed those countries to restructure their organizational systems, so to take advantage of newer technology, to rebuild, and so forth, in other words, to achieve high growth rates. Once they 'caught up', or organized around the newest technology, their rates of growth would naturally slow down. The slowdown in Europe and Japan is simply the result of those countries catching up to their technological potential, rather than to problems in distribution of surplus. "

summary2: "In general, economists emphasize technology or growth in knowledge as sources of growth, along with social and institutional conditions that allow knowledge to be applied. Thus, slowdown in economic growth is the result of slowdown in technological growth. "

summary2: " We have more options in creating our identity, rather than accepting what is given in our traditional culture. "

summary2 Globalization, or “the rapid increase in cross-border economic, social, technological and cultural exchange”

summary2: "The second process in change is social acceptance. That is, in order for an innovation to become part of the culture, it has to be accepted by more than the innovator. Thus, the innovation has to be socially shared. Whether the innovation is adopted by others largely depends on the prestige of the innovator and of the initial adopting group.
The third process is selective elimination. Those innovations which are more rewarding than their alternatives are more likely to be picked up, while, consequently, those which are less adaptive are likely to be dropped, and disappear. Murdock mentions through that many innovations, even when they become less effective or adaptive, are retained, but with a change in function. For example candles were replaced by electric lights, but were retained for ceremonial or other purposes.
The final process of change is integration. The shared habits that are accepted become adapted with other shared habits, such that they all form, more or less, an integrated whole. The adopted habit both is modified as it is adapted, and modifies the social situation, or culture, to which it is adapting. "

summary2 Since each society develops under different geographic and social conditions, the collective habits of each society differs for each society. Consequently, changes in social behavior, or culture, generally has its origin in “some significant alteration in the life condition of a society”. If the situation of the society changes, old behavior patterns may be discouraged and new patterns are encouraged. Typical events that result in change may include changes in the population, in the geographical environment, movement to a different environment, contact with people of different culture, natural or social disasters, wars, discoveries, even particular leaders.

summary2: "Culture is a system of collective habits. The collective habits may be habits of actions, ie, customs, or habits of thoughts, ie, collective ideas. These habits are learned, collectively. Some of the habits, for example language, may be shared throughout the society, while others may be limited to certain classes or groups. Habits are shared because some people are in similar situations, so would learn similar habits. More importantly, each generation is socialized to adopt the habits that previous generations found to be adaptive and satisfying. Further, social pressure is exerted in order to ensure that people conform to the habits which the social group consider to be right and appropriate. Adoption of the appropriate habits equips the individuals to deal with the various social situations, and to develop reliable expectations of how others may respond. "

summary2: "Further, only some kinds of institutions support sustained economic growth, basically those institutions which reduce costs of transactions. 'Sometimes they (institutions) are created to facilitate exchange, encourage technological change, and induce human capital formation and in consequence reduce transaction and/or transformation costs; at other times they are created to support monopoly, prevent technological change, thwart human capital development, and generally raise the costs of transacting and/or transformation'. "

summary2: "However, organizations are a product of their society's institutions. The form, structure and even competitive behavior of organizations depends on the institutions of society. Thus, competition is the immediate determinant whether organizations innovate, but the institutions determine how and what kinds of innovations occur (North, 1996b, Section I). For example, under certain conditions, it may happen that innovation involves improving productivity, but innovation can also involve creating monopolies or blocking further competition. The form that innovation takes, as mentioned, depends on the existing institutions. "

summary2: "The broad process of economic change is that organizations - economic, political and social - are the actors, and will 'introduce new institutions or technology when they perceive that they can improve their competitive position by such innovation.' For example, when there are secure monopolies, there is little incentive to innovate. On the other hand, when there are competitive markets, there are more incentives to innovate. "

summary2: " Institutions are created to reduce uncertainty in pursuit of goals in economic, political and social exchanges and to provide the underlying structure to exchange and human organization. "

summary2: "capitalism is an inherently unstable system, built upon antagonisms"

summary2: "In the search for profit, technological improvement and increasing mechanization are the major means used by each individual capitalist to compete with other capitalists. More mechanization and technology can help each entrepreneur to produce at cheaper rates and to increase his share of profits. However, each entrepreneur will similarly use more technology, so that all will eventually have higher ratios of capital expenditure on constant capital (e.g., technology, etc.), and less workers to expropriate surplus value from, so the average rates of profits for all will decline. "

summary2: " In contrast, western Europe could continuously accumulate capital and raise productivity over a very long time period, because it did not have to deal with continuous disasters. Western Europe had rainfall throughout the year, and thus rarely had periods of extreme drought or flooding, and did not need centralized authority required to maintain complex irrigation systems. Western Europe also did not have adjacent dry zones with nomads, hence far fewer major invasions and disruptions than the earlier civilizations. Western Europe, unlike earlier centers of civilizations, also was composed of many small river valleys, and thus difficult to unify, which meant more possibility of internal competition, and less bureaucratic roadblocks to innovation. "

World Values Survey The list of characteristics that would define the Islamic culture is very consistent. First and foremost, for Muslims their faith is important –more so, it seems, than those who belong to other religions. Our analyses provided strong evidence of this. Another very significant characteristic of Islamic culture is its outlook on women and sex. Islamic values are less supportive of gender equality and less tolerant of sexual liberalization.

World Values Survey The real difference between the Islamic world and the West has nothing to do with political values but rather with attitudes towards women and sex.

: "100 Events That Changed the World"

Spielvogel Interactive Maps: "Interactive Timeline Index"

Duiker/Spielvogel Interactive Maps
The Ancient Near East,The Spread of Homo sapiens sapiens,The Assyrian and Persian Empires,The Development of Agriculture,The Expansion of Islam....

Interactive MapThe Spread of Homo sapiens sapiens.

Human Development sequence Human Development sequence in which economic development leads to cultural changes that are conducive to the emergence and survival of democratic institutions.

Effective democracy Effective democracy is much more an evolutionary phenomenon than something that can be simply created through intelligent constitutional engineering. The emergence of effective democracy is deeply embedded in mass-level changes, and it is closely linked to these changes by the emancipatory logic of Human Development. Indeed, effective democracy is an inherent element of Human Development.

Human Development Human Development is an integrated syndrome, and the underlying theme of its three components is the growth of human choice: socioeconomic development widens human choice by enlarging people’s individual resources; cultural change increases mass emphasis on selfexpression values, which lead people to place greater emphasis on establishing an institutional basis that secures human choice; and institutional change towards effective democracy extends human choice by granting legal rights and keeping them effective.

Corruption It translates into powerful mass pressure on corruption-seeking elites; and (since elites are recruited from the public and tend to reflect prevailing norms), it gradually gives rise to elites whose own beliefs reflect mass values, so that violating basic civil rights, political liberties and bureaucratic norms increasingly becomes excluded from their calculations.

Theory Our theory argues that growing resources at the individual-level tend to shift a society’s value system toward greater emphasis on self-expression. Growing mass-emphasis on self-expression then gives rise to increasing demands for effective democracy at the societal level.

Richest and the poorest nation 200 years ago the income ratio between the richest and the poorest nation in the world was approximately 5:1. But, because of uneven economic growth during the past 200 years, this ratio has risen enormously, reaching 400:1 today.

variation in value orientations Thus, the difference in mean income between the richest state in the U.S. and the poorest state, is about a 2:1 ratio. By contrast, there is a ratio of about 400:1 between the GDP/capita of the richest country and the poorest country in the world. Consequently, there is much larger variation in value orientations between citizens of different countries, than among citizens of the same country.

CorruptionFrom a rational choice perspective, there is no reason to expect that elites will refrain from maximizing their incomes through corruption, unless their own values or popular pressure eliminate this option.

CorruptionFrom a rational choice perspective, there is no reason to expect that elites will refrain from maximizing their incomes through corruption, unless their own values or popular pressure eliminate this option.

Mass demands for democracy The exhaustion of a regime’s moral resources increases the probability of an intra-elite division in which one faction of the elite may split off in an attempt to regain legitimacy by liberalization and institutional reforms. Under the right circumstances, this can mobilize mass demands for democracy that eventually overthrows the authoritarian regime.

Self-expression Growing emphasis on self-expression leads to increasing demands for civil liberties, freedom of speech and political rights—which provide institutional guarantees for the kinds of private and public activities that self-expression requires.

Higher levels of interpersonal trustAccordingly, relatively rich societies show higher levels of interpersonal trust, greater tolerance of diversity, higher life satisfaction, more emphasis on political participation and greater respect for individual autonomy as opposed to community authority.

Webster Putnam (1992), reaches similar conclusions in his analysis of the differences between Italians of the affluent North and the poor South, finding that Southerners tend to distrust their fellow citizens and support rigid community discipline. They emphasize social control, public order, hierarchy, moral rigidity and strong authority—survival values that tend to prevail underconditions of insecurity.

People’s value orientations People’s value orientations reflect the restrictions that their social conditions put on human autonomy. Usually, people tend to adapt their aspirations to the restrictions posed by the environment. This mechanism, known in social psychology as “aspiration adjustment” , emerged through human evolution, because it was conducive to survival.

Relations Economic Component --> Means
Cultural Component --> Motives
Political Component --> Rules

Cultural change Cultural change is the second key subprocess relevant to human choice. Growing individual resources enable people to move beyond a narrow focus on obtaining the means to survival, leading people to place increasingly high priority on self-expression and human choice. Indeed, growing emphasis on self-expression is the central motivating force that leads people to demand broaderchoice. For choice is not only a matter of one’s means but also of one’s mind and motivation.

Human choiceIn short, socioeconomic development provides individual resources that constitute the means component of human choice.

Economic development Economic development brings urbanization, social mobilization and occupational differentiation. This increases social complexity and multiplies social transactions between human beings (Bendix 1964; Durkheim 1988; Simmel 1984; Blau 1994). These effects tend to emancipate people from clientelistic ties and replace vertical authority relations with horizontal bargaining relations.

Human choice Economic development, changing values and democracy work together to expand human choice.

Human choice “human choice,” or the capability of human beings to choose the lives they want, should be the ultimate measure of social progress.

Theory of social change We do not yet have an integrated theory of social change. Modernization theorists have argued that there are close relations between socioeconomic development, value change and degrees of democracy, without specifying any common theme underlying these three phenomena.

Survival values But one point seems clear: if socioeconomic development, cultural change and democratization do occur, they tend to go together. Impoverished societies, suffering from scarce resources, tend to be characterized by survival values. And these societies usually have autocratic political regimes, being “formal democracies” at best and rarely “effective democracies.” At the other end of the continuum, literally all of the OECD-societies have high levels of economic development and, as has been demonstrated (Inglehart, 1997; Inglehart and Baker, 2000), their value systems are characterized by relatively strong emphasis on self-expression. Moreover, in virtually every case, their political systems function as effective democracies.

Socioeconomic development, value change There is broad consensus that socioeconomic development reflects a set of closely linked changes including productivity growth, improving health and life expectancy, increasing material prosperity, expanding education and communication, and increasing social complexity.
The second process, value change, is linked with socioeconomic development, that brings rising life expectancies and rising levels of existential security. Moreover, expanding markets and social mobilization increase human interactions and horizontal networks among societies, that tends to transform authority relations into bargaining relations, emancipating people from rigidly hierarchicalties that restrict human autonomy...Whatever
the terminology, most theories of value change converge in the notion that traditional-deferential orientations, that subordinate the individual to the community, tend to give way to growing emphasis on autonomous human choice and individual self-expression. Following Inglehart and Baker (2000),
we characterize this process as a shift from survival values to self-expression values.

Human Development as a Theory of Social Change This article demonstrates that socioeconomic development, cultural change and democratization constitute a coherent syndrome of social change— a syndrome not properly specified by classical modernization theory. We refer to this syndrome as Human Development, arguing that its three components have the common theme of broadening human choice. Socioeconomic development broadens peoples’ choice by providing them with individual resources; cultural change gives rise to greater emphasis on self-expression values that lead people to give higher priority to having autonomous choice in society; and democratization provides people with increasingly effective rights, giving legal guarantees for human choice in politics.

Women In 1945, only 3 percent of the members of parliaments around the world were women. In 1965, the figure had risen to 8 percent, in 1985 to 12 percent, and in 2002 to 15 percent.

Economic development generates changed attitudes But economic development generates changed attitudes in virtually any society. In particular, modernization compels systematic, predictable changes in gender roles: Industrialization brings women into the paid work force and dramatically reduces fertility rates. Women become literate and begin to participate in representative government but still have far less power than men. Then, the postindustrial phase brings a shift toward greater gender equality as women move into higher- status economic roles in management and gain political influence within elected and appointed bodies. Thus, relatively industrialized Islamic societies such as Turkey share the same views on gender equality and sexual liberalization as other new democracies.

Democracy At this point in history, societies throughout the world (Muslim and Judeo- Christian alike) see democracy as the best form of government.

Muslims and Western Samuel Huntington was only half-right. The cultural fault line that divides the West and the Islamic world is not about democracy, but sex. According to a new survey, Muslims and their Western counterparts both want democracy, yet they are worlds apart when it comes to attitudes toward divorce, abortion, gender equality, and gay rights.

World Value Survey, Introduction: "The World Values Survey is a worldwide investigation of sociocultural and political change. It has carried out representative national surveys of the basic values and beliefs of publics in more than 65 societies on all six inhabited continents, containing almost 80 percent of the world's population. It builds on the European Values Surveys, first carried out in 1981. A second wave of surveys, designed for global use, was completed in 1990-1991, a third wave was carried out in 1995-1996 and a fourth wave took place in 1999-2001. This investigation has produced evidence of gradual but pervasive changes in what people want out of life, and the basic direction of these changes is, to some extent, predictable. This study has given rise to more than 300 publications, in 16 languages."

Webster: "Traditional and religiously-based value-systems persist in the context of economic modernization. This remains so despite the decline of traditional and religious practice and the use of related institutions such as temples and churches. The assumption that modernization will automatically bring a secular Western civilization style is now widely questioned. The cultural mindset is deep-rooted in the habits of a country."

Webster: "The Postmodern shift includes democratic political institutions and such values as women's rights, euthanasia rights, acceptance of divorce and abortion, equality, representative legislation, free speech, individuality, self-expression, political freedoms and human rights, and so on. "

Webster: "Modernization is a culture-shift arising from the interaction of Traditional to Rational-Legal systems and Scarcity-Wellbeing conditions. These coalesce as postmodern, bureaucratic, secular, democratic, 'wealthy' countries and hierarchical, authoritarian, traditionalist, absolutist, 'poor' countries."

The Next Thousand Years | Overview: "Can we predict the future? No. But perhaps, for the very first time, we can make an attempt to look at the past and the current trends in human cultural development and gain some insights into the possible directions that humanity might take in the next thousand years. Advances in scientific fields as varied as medicine, genetics and genetic engineering, biology, ecology, nanotechnology, robotics, space exploration, and cosmology continue to push back the frontiers of human knowledge. These advances are allowing scientists to project trends and speculate about the future with a greater degree of confidence than ever before."

Welcome to Future Survey Abstracts: "The model that provides perhaps the best match to the observed changes in the history of science and mathematics is the phenomenon that physicists call a phase change. A classic example of a phase change is the change from liquid water to ice. Many events in the history of science and math have had the critical property identified with phase changes, such that 'the previous behavior of a system does not give a clue to the future behavior of the system.' When a system is subject to a phase change, very little happens for a relatively long time. Then a very large change occurs very quickly. This property means that any attempt to extrapolate the behavior of a system across a phase change is doomed to failure."

Welcome to Future Survey Abstracts: "The explosive growth of computer technology has transformed every field of research in ways that are fundamental and important.'"

Welcome to Future Survey Abstracts: Looking back from 2020, three changes regarding transparency proved crucial: 1) New Transparency in Government: citizens demanded, and got, new laws entitling them to access to information about their governments (overall, as norms of government accountability and citizens' right to know spread, the incidence of corruption decreased substantially); 2) Transparency in Intergovernmental Organizations: the IMF, World Bank, and WTO began disclosing information they and their member governments had previously kept secret; scrutiny by NGOs quickly improved the performance of those organizations, as they were forced to defend their policies to an ever larger and more attentive public; 3) New Transparency Norms at the Global Level: based on Europe's Aarhus Convention, which set out to change the process of environmental decision-making by laying out ground rules for civil society participation, an Economic Information Convention was negotiated in 2010. Also, the bewildering array of corporate codes of conduct was winnowed down to a handful of relatively well-designed and widely adopted codes, making it easier for stakeholders to monitor corporate behavior."

Welcome to Future Survey Abstracts: " 'We live in an extraordinarily fluid time, when choices made today will have massive consequences for tomorrow.' The difference between rosy and gloomy global scenarios boils down to a single word: governance, or the ways in which groups of people collectively make choices. Governments are obviously a big part of global governance, but corporations are playing an increasingly larger role, as well as a vast and growing array of nonprofit groups. The current system for running the world is based on rules set in the mid-20th century, in the wake of WWII, based on assumptions that a handful of great powers will make most of the decisions. The world of the early 21st century is quite different, with humanity facing many threats, but responses largely adding up to unimaginative muddling through."

Range of potential terrorist attacks The model employs state-of-the-art methods for quantifying the impact of a range of potential terrorist attacks, from conventional weapons to chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) weapons.These attack modes are modeled at potential terrorist targets across the U.S. Attack frequency includes consideration of the potential for multiple synchronous attacks -- a signature of Al Qaeda.

Terrorism and Liberty: "Aggressive antiterrorism policies, the report suggested, when combined with increasingly sophisticated surveillance technologies, could have a 'chilling effect' on the right to privacy and other fundamental civil liberties. To prevent that from happening, the commission recommended that the White House establish a bipartisan panel to review how constitutional guarantees would be affected by all new laws and regulations aimed at enhancing national security."

Man-made events Regardless of the plausibility of a specific scenario, the fact is that the industry’s view of its PML prior to September 11 is now a lower bound estimate. In addition to natural hazards, there exist a class of man-made events, some intentional – such as terrorist attacks – and some accidental, which can result in loss rivaling or even exceeding those that occur in major earthquakes and hurricanes. Going forward, a comprehensive understanding of risk must account for these possibilities.

Risk management However, the World Trade Center (WTC) disaster, as the industry’s first super-CAT, has illuminated the risk management landscape and has challenged all parties to revisit many long-held assumptions about catastrophe and enterprise risk management. Current estimates by Risk Management Solutions (RMS) indicate that the total insured loss from the disaster may approach or even exceed, $52 billion. This level of loss is unprecedented for any single event, exceeding Hurricane Andrew ($18 billion, 1992) and the Northridge Earthquake ($15 billion, 1994) by as much as a factor of three.

“Donor” countries Actions by countries that have supplied personnel (“donor” countries) form the other part of this development. If they can build indigenous S&T infrastructures and economies to exploit the fruits of S&T, domestic labor market needs may entice more of their scientists and engineers to stay at home rather than to seek work abroad. They may also attract investments from foreign firms seeking access to their labor and markets. Thus, traditional donor countries may be able to moderate the outflow of their scientists and engineers.

The United States has long relied heavily on scientists and engineers who were born abroad, and increasingly so in the closing years of the 20th century. Many of them earned their highest degrees in the U.S., others entered the country with degrees earned abroad. This reliance rises the more advanced the degree. In the United States in 1999, 10 percent of those holding baccalaureate degrees in S&E were born abroad. This figure was 20 percent for master’s degree recipients and 25 percent or greater for doctorate holders (much higher in some engineering and computer science fields).

Innovative products, processes, and servicesThe sine qua non of a modern economy is a well-educated, versatile workforce able to conduct R&D and to convert its results into innovative products, processes, and services.

Research and development As the 21st century begins, the United States occupies a position of strength in the support and conduct of research and development (R&D). U.S. R&D expenditures equal the combined total expenditures of Japan, the United Kingdom, Canada, France, Germany, and Italy. U.S. scientists and engineers produce nearly one-third of the articles published in the world’s most influential technical journals. U.S. researchers participate in a wide range of international collaborative research efforts, and the results of these efforts are widely cited by scientists in other countries, attesting to their quality and usefulness.

Technology and science Technology and science are among the most potent forces transforming life on earth in the new millennium.

Dynamic processes The scientific investigation of systems where human actors and other dynamic systems are involved. The aim is to find out, describe, and explain the dynamic processes of these systems. Understanding the dynamic processes inherent in the reality forms the basis of all scenario thinking and action.

TimeTime poses a major difficulty for decisionmakers, whether lay or expert. Especially accumulating costs that will be realised in far future, are difficult to assess in decision-making.

Worlds Our knowledge-base is enriched and our
technological skills are sharpened, and thus the worlds that were beyond reach at earlier times, become accessible.

Harmful fictions Humans tend to construct all kinds of harmful fictions like national identities, punishing gods, astral bodies and adult education...

Cultural models Cultural models are about anything you can imagine. We have cultural models of marriage, models of teacups, models of illnesses, and even models of the possibility of getting stuck in the rush hour traffic.

C omprehensive review of possible risks Scenarios provide detailed descriptions of the contexts in which projects may come to fruition, and so enable us to take a more comprehensive review of possible risks before the decision to proceed is taken. Scenarios also embody factors that are not easily quantified. Therefore, we are able to see a broader range of risks more clearly. For example, the scenarios may highlight new political risks, changing customer preferences, and new critical success factors.

Scenarios are alternative stories Scenarios are alternative stories of how the world may develop. They are not predictions, but credible, relevant, and challenging alternative stories that help us explore 'what if' and 'how'. Their purpose is not to pinpoint future events, but to consider the forces that may push the future along different paths. They help managers understand the dynamics of the business environment, recognise new possibilities, assess strategic options, and take long-term decisions.

Scenarios Scenarios are a tool for helping managers plan for the future—or rather for different possible futures. They help us focus on critical uncertainties: the things we don't know about that might transform our business, and the things we do know about that might involve unexpected discontinuities. They help us understand the limitations of our 'mental maps' of the world—and to think the unthinkable, anticipate the unknowable, and utilise both to make better strategic decisions.

Civilizations: "we realize clearly this possibility of civilizations being based on very different sets of moral ideas and upon different intellectual methods"

Birth control: Birth Control is no new thing in human experience, and it has been practised in societies of the most various types and fortunes. But there can be little doubt that at the present time it is a test issue between two widely different interpretations of the word civilization, and of what is good in life and conduct. " There have been many definitions of civilization. Civilization is a complexity of count less aspects, and may be validly defined in a great number of relationships...We are beginning to realize that in the past and under different conditions from our own, societies have existed with systems of ideas and with methods of thought very widely contrasting with what we should consider right and sane to-day.

The Scientist :: Swiss nanotech predictions On the other hand, the experts predict that using nanotechnology to treat illnesses could still be more than a decade away. It will also be restricted to specific illnesses, such as cancer and viral infections. The study by TA-SWISS also addressed fears about the safety of nanotechnology. “One area we do not know enough about is how nanoparticles impact on the immune system,” Indermühle said, identifying nanotoxicity in particular as a potential risk. He also emphasized the importance of holding a public debate on nanotechnology. “We don't want to repeat the mistake made with biotechnology and genomics. The way these technologies were communicated to the general public was arrogant. People's fears need to be taken into account when it comes to deciding how nanotechnology will develop,” he said.

The Arlington Institute > The Future > Wild Cards: "But now, with the advent of nuclear weapons, global industrial development that has geometrically increased environmental pollution, an unprecedented population explosion, and potential scientific discoveries that could result in the manipulation of life itself, the implications of human activity have taken on a new, potentially ominous scale. There are also externally initiated events, such as a comet or asteroid strike that have dire global implications "

The Arlington Institute > The Future > Wild Cards: "One Wild Card can set off more Wild Cards. Because there are so many systems within the huge system that makes up human activity, one big event can spark a chain of events that exponentially magnifies the impact of the initial Wild Card. An event that might be manageable in isolation can, in concert with other factors, create a cascading effect that is chaotic, unpredictable, and intrinsically out of control. The first event makes the second one more likely, and the snowball starts rolling. For example, a major environmental disaster could seed a global epidemic that results in quarantines of nations, leading to greatly reduced air travel, which in turn causes the collapse of the global airline industry. Each event builds on the other, creating unmanageable implications. "

The Arlington Institute > The Future > Wild Cards: "It is very valuable indeed to understand the dynamics of this change. There are long periods defined by one fundamental level of development (vertebrates, early man, etc.) that are rather suddenly displaced by the insertion of a radically new level of complexity, which in turn becomes the basis for the new era. In systems this is called punctuated equilibrium: periods of relative equilibrium punctuated by major changes to a higher level of development. The length of these periods of equilibrium are getting shorter and shorter while the jumps to new levels of knowledge are growing higher at an exponential rate. "

The Arlington Institute > The Future > Wild Cards: "We can get a sense of what is happening at the present time by examining how our actual understanding of human life has developed and progressed to this point. As each succeeding age of development has evolved, a regular relationship has emerged: each new era is about one-tenth of the length of its predecessor. Starting with single-celled life, moving to multiple-celled organisms and step-by-step through mammals, early man, and finally the age of enlightenment and industry, it seems as if time is accelerating. In fact, it is only the amount of knowledge that is exploding, lifting each succeeding period of time to a new, much more complex version of reality in shorter amounts of time. "

The Arlington Institute > The Future > Wild Cards: "The historical implications of past trends and Wild Cards have produced a human system that responds relatively well when events come at predictable rates. Trends and crosscutting effects have always been with us - we have generally learned how to adapt to them. We have a problem, though, when big surprises start to roll in.
In the past century there haven't been many Wild Cards. The crash of the stock market in 1929 followed by the Great Depression was probably the last unanticipated, fast-moving event that rocked the world in a significant way. If the threat of a nuclear war had been realized, then that certainly would have qualified as a Wild Card event. Our current planetary environmental crisis could easily produce a variety of Wild Cards, but right now most people perceive it as gradual and regular in its development. We are now exiting the 500-year-long age of enlightenment and industry, transiting into the information era and accelerating toward a new world on the horizon that promises to be quite different from even the recent past."

The Arlington Institute > The Future > Wild Cards: "Wild Cards strike fast, they aren't what are usually called 'unintended consequences.' Large numbers of women moving into the workforce in the 1950s was a major, unexpected surprise that had great impact on families and economies. But it came gradually enough for the social systems to reconfigure to the changes. "

Forecasts Main PageTwo-thirds of the world's population will be chronically short of water by 2050. "Water wars" are now imminent in places like Kashmir, where Pakistan's water supply is controlled by India. —Cetron and Davies, Jan-Feb 2003,

WFS-Current Forecasts: "The fish (prices) are jumping. The world's appetite for fish is increasing even as fish catches have leveled off and overfishing imperils future supplies. The inevitable result of growing demand and dwindling supplies is higher prices. By 2020, prices will rise by 18% for fishmeal and fish oil, making them 20% more expensive than poultry."

NCSE Resource: "In fact, for most people living in tribal, non-industrialsettings, there is not the division between the natural world and the spiritual world that we find in western culture: the two realms are blended. "

NCSE ResourceThe broad definition of evolution is “change through time.” Not all change through time, however, is evolutionary; the water cycle, the rotation of the earth around the sun, the metamorphosis of insects and other invertebrates likewise involve change through time, but these should not be confused with “evolution.” Evolution must refer to a specific kind of change -- cumulative change through time. As such, we can talk about the evolution of a white dwarf to a supernova, or of the stars in a galaxy from gas clouds, or of the evolution of land forms on Earth. In all of these cases, there is a change through time, but a cumulative one, differentiated from the cyclical or fluctuating changes that are characteristic of other changes through time....Biological evolution is a subset of this larger cumulative change through time. By biological evolution, we mean cumulative changes in groups of living things through time. It is the concept that living things have diverged in form from common ancestors. Darwin called this “descent with modification.” Biological evolution is a genealogical relationship among species which in the past shared common ancestors.

New Scientist | Web Links | Current picks: "Biomes are the great communities of the Earth - the aquatic, the deserts, the forests, the grasslands and the tundra. They are not static, they are forever changing, sands shifts, seas wax and wane, grasslands desiccate and forests are flooded. These changes usually take place over many millennia, but human intervention can accelerate destruction with no recourse to the restoration of balance. "

New Scientist | Environment Report | Population: "The detailed projections for individual countries show 33 countries with smaller populations in 2050 than today. Japan is expected to be 14 per cent smaller; Italy 22 per cent; and a slew of eastern European countries, including Russia and Ukraine, will see their populations crash by between 30 and 50 per cent."

New Scientist | Environment Report | Population: "Newly released satellite imaging data has revealed a 40 per cent jump in deforestation in Brazil's Amazon rainforests.
The massive leap is the worst acceleration in the loss of the tropical jungle since 1995 and is in sharp contrast to the drive to preserve the world's largest area of continuous rainforest. The forest harbours enormous biodiversity and plays a significant role in the world's climate."

New Scientist: "The findings could be good news on climate as soot emissions may be easier to cut than carbon dioxide. Hansen says technology exists to more cleanly burn fossil fuels without releasing large quantities of soot. The 'payback' in terms of climate would be faster by cutting soot than carbon dioxide gas emissions. But Hansen cautions: 'It does not change the need to slow down the growth rate of carbon dioxide and eventually stabilize the atmospheric amount.'"

JWSR - Volume III, Number 2 - Book Review War in the agrarian world, Snooks tells us, was all about economics, because conquest was the most cost-efficient strategy of material gain.

JWSR - Volume III, Number 2 - Book Review: "People usually do not struggle for power for its own sake, but rather seek it because it will promote
the realization of material advantage. "

EH.R: Additional Thoughts on Graeme Snooks' _The Dynamic Society_ (fwd):the driving force is provided by an overwhelming desire to maximize material advantage. Ideas ... do not constitute the driving force.

G.D Snooks: " Uncovering the laws of global history": "The actions we need to take in order to survive and prosper are often so repugnant to the intellectual image we have of ourselves that we are unable to face them openly, certainly not on a daily basis. The truth could, and sometimes does, lead to self-destruction, which frustrates the central human objective of survival and prosperity. Accordingly, over millions of years we have learnt to deceive ourselves with such facility that we are usually unaware that we are doing so. We compartmentalize our lives and build barriers between what we do and what we think we should do. Just compare man’s inhumanity to man throughout the world today with our conviction that we are altruistic beings! Existential schizophrenia is a normal rather than a pathological condition, because it is required in the universal struggle by mankind to survive and prosper. Yet, while it is a psychological condition essential for the continued survival of our species, it prevents us from understanding the nature of ourselves and our societies. Human society is no more complex than the physical world around us. Only our reactions to it and to ourselves are complex. It is, therefore, easier to be objective about the natural world and its laws than about our human world and its laws."

G.D Snooks: " Uncovering the laws of global history": "Whereas in hunter-gather societies most of their populations were strategists, in conquest societies the landowning warriors constituted a tiny ruling elite, in commerce societies their ruling class was extended to include the mercantile middle class, and in technological societies the ruling class embraced, once more, the bulk of the population who invested funds and/or skills in the modern dynamic strategy."

G.D Snooks: " Uncovering the laws of global history": "The only reason modern societies possess democratic sociopolitical institutions is that their entire populations have been drawn into the ruling strategic group. "

G.D Snooks: " Uncovering the laws of global history": "The central mechanism of institutional change in the dynamic-strategy model is the competitive struggle between various groups in society for control of the dominant dynamic strategy. "

G.D Snooks: " Uncovering the laws of global history" "Institutional change has no life of its own. It cannot evolve in isolation from what is happening in the real economy. It is reactive not proactive, facilitating not initiating. It has no evolutionary logic and, therefore, no laws of its own."

G.D Snooks: " Uncovering the laws of global history" Societal rules (or ‘institutions’), both formal (laws) and informal (customs), are established and altered to facilitate the dynamic strategies by which decision makers attempt to maximize their chances of survival and prosperity, and to impose the dynamic tactics by which competing groups attempt to control the distribution of society’s wealth.

G.D Snooks: " Uncovering the laws of global history": "Failure to generate a new strategy will lead a society to stagnate and, possibly, collapse. "

G.D Snooks: " Uncovering the laws of global history" The first historical mechanism to drive a technological paradigm shift was the great dispersion of the palaeolithic era. This involved the adoption of the extremely slow but very effective dynamic strategy of family multiplication (of procreation and migration) to enable greater family control over unused natural resources, which were utilized through a hunter-gatherer technology. This great dispersion probably began in Africa about 100,000 years ago. By 40,000 years ago modern man had reached most parts of the globe, and by 11,000 years ago in the Old World and 7,000 years ago in the New World all resources had been fully utilized — the palaeolithic ceiling of potential GDP per capita had been reached. This pressure on resources was most intense in those narrow necks of land — which I call ‘funnels of transformation’ — through which relatively large numbers of people passed and where competition was relatively high. In the fertile crescent of the Old World and the Mesoamerican isthmus of the New World the incentives for adopting new ways of using scarce resources were greatest. These were the cradles of the Neolithic Revolution.

G.D Snooks: " Uncovering the laws of global history" The force constraining the expansion and growth of human society is not the supply of resources, natural or otherwise, but the exhaustion of its dynamic strategies and the inability to replace them with new strategies. This operates through the declining rate of return on investment of time and resources in the dominant dynamic strategy. Unless new strategies are adopted, or old strategies rejuvenated, a society will eventually grind to a halt — at least temporarily. This will occur when the marginal return to the dominant strategy is equal to its marginal cost. In other words, when an extra unit of investment in conquest, commerce, or technology only just pays for itself. At this stage in strategic development there is no incentive to undertake any further investment. This is what I have called a ‘strategic crisis’, which may lead to societal collapse if, as in all ancient societies, a nation develops to a size that greatly exceeds its technological base.

G.D Snooks: " Uncovering the laws of global history" Within a particular society, individuals and groups of individuals will employ a range of tactics to capture as much as possible of the gains made by the dynamic society, from the pursuit of their dynamic strategies. Those in power will attempt to impose order on their economic rivals (both internal and external), whereas those ambitious individuals without economic and political power will attempt to create chaos in order to topple the ruling elite. These are the ‘dynamic tactics of order and chaos’ that are employed in the strategic struggle for control of the sources of society’s wealth. The order category includes various tactics aimed at maintaining and exploiting the status quo, ranging from rent-seeking to the imposition of restrictive regulations and ideology; and the chaos category includes tactics aimed at disrupting the existing order, ranging from deregulation and reform to protest and rebellion (including radical ideology such as Marxism or fundamentalist religion such as Islam). Those who are best able to handle competitive conditions tend to opt for chaos, in which they have a comparative advantage, and those who are least able to handle competition opt for order. It will be clear that the forces of order and chaos are tactics employed by materialist man to influence the distributional outcomes of the dynamic strategies. A healthy society is able to achieve a balance between these forces.

G.D Snooks: " Uncovering the laws of global history" Where natural resources are relatively abundant and, hence, relatively cheap, the family-multiplication strategy will be employed. This involves extending the family influence by reproduction and migration to adjoining areas. If, however, all natural resources are fully utilized at the prevailing level of technology and there is growing competition for these resources, a society has three dynamic options. It can pursue the dominant strategies of technological change, conquest, or commerce, often supported by one or more subsidiary strategies. The technological strategy involves increasing productivity by applying ‘new’ ideas to production and economic organization; the conquest strategy involves acquiring private and public income, land, and labour supplies (slaves) through systematic military activity; and the commerce strategy involves capturing a disproportionately large share of the gains from trade through monopoly pricing.

G.D Snooks: " Uncovering the laws of global history" Once an open society decides to opt for a dynamic strategy, there is a finite range from which to choose. This choice, which is influenced by the implicit benefits and costs of the alternatives, operates from the grassroots upwards. Individual investment projects are transformed into dynamic strategies for entire societies through the mechanisms of ‘strategic imitation’, by which less innovative economic agents imitate the investment activities of pioneering dynamic strategists in order to share in the supernormal profits.

G.D Snooks: " Uncovering the laws of global history" If the society in which we are interested is at the highly competitive end of this global scale, it will employ the most effective of the four dynamic strategies, whereas if at the non-competitive end it will choose either the family-multiplication strategy if unused resources are abundant, or the family-planning strategy — a static rather than a dynamic strategy — if all natural resources are fully employed.

G.D Snooks: " Uncovering the laws of global history" The driving force in human history is the overwhelming desire to survive and prosper. To achieve his objective, materialist man adopts the most effective available dynamic strategy. The framework of implicit costs and benefits involved in adopting a dynamic strategy is determined by the degree of external competition.

"General model"
The general model consists of four interrelated elements and one external and random force:
1. the competitive driving force of ‘materialist man’, which provides the model with its self-starting and self-maintaining nature;
2. the dynamic strategies — family multiplication, commerce, conquest, and technological change — which, in a competitive environment, are employed by the strategists (or entrepreneurs) to achieve their fundamental objective of survival and prosperity;
3. the competitive dynamic tactics of order and chaos, which are used by individuals and groups in the ‘strategic struggle’ to capture the gains made by the dynamic society;
4. the constraining effect provided by the eventual exhaustion of dynamic strategies, which for individual societies will lead to stagnation, downturn, crisis and, even, collapse; but which at the global level leads to technological paradigm shifts (the Palaeolithic, Neolithic, and Industrial Revolutions);
5. a system subject to random shocks, both minor (droughts and floods) and major (wars and disease).

The ‘great steps of human progress’ Global dynamic mechanism of ‘technological paradigm shifts’ (or economic revolutions):the palaeolithic (hunting), the neolithic (agriculture), and the modern (industrial).

G.D Snooks: " Uncovering the laws of global history" What is the new existential method? Basically, it involves a four-fold system of analysis — the ‘existential quaternary method’ — which consists of the discovery of historical patterns (or ‘timescapes’), the construction of a general dynamic model, the derivation of specific historical mechanisms, and the construction of a model of institutional change.

G.D Snooks: " Uncovering the laws of global history": "There is a degree of constancy in the way human society changes, just as there is a degree of constancy in the way the physical world is transformed. Without this it would be impossible to plan for the future and, accordingly, human civilization would have failed to emerge."

G.D Snooks: " Uncovering the laws of global history" The scientific revolution during the two centuries following 1500 was a response not to changing social attitudes and institutions as most historians argue, but to the ‘strategic demand’ of Western Europe for new ideas in shipping, land transport, communications, finance, distribution, and war. This was driven by the new dynamic strategy of commerce, which followed more than 150 years of economic difficulties owing to recurrent plague. This new learning was further enhanced when the dynamic strategy of technological change (ushered in by the Industrial Revolution) progressively replaced the exhausted commerce strategy from the late eighteenth century. The dynamic strategies of both commerce and technological change provided the material incentives for the scientific revolution.

Sorrows of Empire - Empire? - Global Policy Forum: "Aside from the financial cost, there is another constraint. The American people are totally unwilling to accept large numbers of American casualties. In order to produce the 'no-contact' or 'painless dentistry' approach to warfare, the Pentagon has committed itself to a massive and very expensive effort to computerize battle.(5) It has spent lavishly on smart bombs, battlefield sensors, computer-guided munitions, and extremely high performance aircraft and ships. The main reason for all this gadgetry is to keep troops out of the line of fire. "

Sorrows of Empire - Empire? - Global Policy Forum: "The U.S. undertook its second war with Iraq with no legal justification and worldwide protests against its actions and motives, thereby bringing to an end the system of international order that existed throughout the cold war and that traces its roots back to seventeenth century doctrines of sovereignty, non-intervention in the affairs of other states, and the illegitimacy of aggressive war. "

Sorrows of Empire - Empire? - Global Policy Forum: "The United States has been inching toward imperialism and militarism for many years. Disguising the direction they were taking, American leaders cloaked their foreign policy in euphemisms such as 'lone superpower,' 'indispensable nation,' 'reluctant sheriff,' 'humanitarian intervention,' and 'globalization.' However, with the advent of the George Bush administration in 2001, these pretenses gave way to assertions of the Second Coming of the Roman Empire. 'American imperialism used to be a fiction of the far-left imagination,' writes the English journalist Madeleine Bunting, 'now it is an uncomfortable fact of life.'"

Environmentally unfriendly production Grimes and Kentor suggest that transnational corporations relocate more environmentally unfriendly production to countries with relatively less environmental controls. This claim is further supported by the previous research of Timmons Roberts (1996), which indicates that semiperipheral and peripheral countries are less likely to participate in international environmental treaties. Moreover, according to Grimes and Kentor foreign investment in less-developed countries is more likely to be concentrated in industries that use relatively higher levels of energy consumption; power generation techniques employed in foreign capital dependent countries are likely to be less energy efficient; and with the ever increasing expansion of global production, the transport of inputs and outputs is relatively more energy intensive in non-core countries with poorer infrastructures.

Rapid expansion of the modern world-economy Human societies have long experienced the increasingly rapid expansion of the modern world-economy, an economy that has existed since at least the middle 1400s, meeting crisis after crisis in accumulation. Rapid technological growth has been part and parcel of this expansion that has tightened the global division of labor and importance of distant events for all humans. This division of labor permits further expansion in rationalized production, and it reaches everywhere to expand markets and off er up cheap labor and material resources to increase surplus value...In recent decades, global capitalist economics, technology (including communication), and global military reach have worked together to remove a major political-military, economic and ideological challenge to capitalism, that is, Eastern bloc-style socialism (it could be argued that we now are working on the next challenge, Islam). While these dynamics have stunted any nascent challenges to market expansion, the latter has created other contradictions. One of these is that “globalization” now threatens the human race with environmental disasters.

Sabre-rattling among thirsty nations.: "The only recorded incident of an outright war over water was 4,500 years ago between two Mesopotamian city-states over the Tigris-Euphrates in the region we now call southern Iraq. Since then, you find water exacerbating relations at the international scale. But you also regularly find hostile states such as India and Pakistan or the Israelis and Palestinians�resolving water conflicts even while disputes rage over other issues.
We also analyzed every reported water incident between two states that we could find anywhere in the world s 261 international river basins in the past 50 years. Two-thirds of a total of 1,800 events involved cooperation, like conducting joint scientific investigations or signing over 150 water treaties.
Turning to the negative events, we found that 80 percent consisted of verbal threats and posturing by state leaders, which was probably aimed at their own internal constituents. In 1979, Egyptian president Anwar Sadat said: The only matter that could take Egypt to war again is water, in reference to the Nile. King Hussein allegedly said the same thing for Jordan in 1990.
Yet in the last 50 years, there have only been 37 events in which people actually shot at each other over water. Of those, 27 were between Israel and Syria over the Jordan and Yarmouk rivers. "

JWSR - Volume V, Number 1, Spring 1999: "As far as Britain's dynamic strategists were concerned, the essence of the Industrial Revolution was that it devised cheaper ways (both technically and institutionally) of producing old products, such as cotton textiles, and new products such as consumer durables, and cheaper ways of transporting those products to markets at home (by canals and railways) and abroad (by steam-driven steel ships). . . . By providing ways of achieving favoured access to resources and markets other than the exhausted traditional ways of force, diplomacy, and physical proximity, the British Industrial Revolution imparted a new impetus to commercial expansion. But this time commercial expansion was the outcome of the technological rather than the commerce strategy"

Oil giant ChevronTexaco was brought to court in Ecuador this October for allegedly dumping toxic waste in the Ecuadorian Amazon. In "ChevronTexaco on Trial," author Kevin Koenig describes how Texaco saved $4.5 billion by dumping up to 4.3 million gallons of toxic waste water in the Ecuadorian forest. The company also wasted the homelands of thousands of indigenous Amazonians by neglecting to clean up pipeline oil spills and hundreds of toxic waste pits near local communities and streams.

JWSR - Volume V, Number 1, Spring 1999: " There is no world-system, he argues, and the global economy is merely the outcome of dynamic strategists operating within the institutions of individual societies. "

JWSR - Volume V, Number 1, Spring 1999: "The future, he says, will be dominated by the clash of four megastates because small nations, though they may fare reasonably well, can never be economic or political hegemons. European countries have increasingly recognized this, and thus have created the European Union. Snooks is optimistic that Russia, now that it has shed communism and embarked on the technological strategy, will, within a generation or so, emerge as a megastate. He also foresees China as one of the megastates; along with the EU and Russia, it will join the United States as one of the four megastates of the twenty-first century. What is the possibility that a global state will eventually succeed the megastates? "

JWSR - Volume V, Number 1, Spring 1999 Snooks argues that the key to understanding US society is that it was the world’s first megastate and the first society to create a megamarket. Prior to the Civil War the US was really made up of two subsocieties that were committed to different dynamic strategies.

JWSR - Volume V, Number 1, Spring 1999: "A few agrarian societies have been fortunate enough to use the commerce strategy rather than the conquest strategy. This strategy involves the creation of wealth by producing and trading goods over as large an area as possible. It depends on favorable geographical and other circumstances that give a society the necessary access to markets and trade routes. Since commerce societies could not coexist peaceably with conquest societies, the former had to be beyond the reach of the latter. The greatest commerce society in all of human history was, of course, ancient Greece. The Greeks were not only geographically suited for the commerce strategy, but since they were divided into a number of small and independent states that were equally matched militarily the conquest strategy could not be successfully employed. "

JWSR - Volume V, Number 1, Spring 1999: "The Aztec conquest strategy was cut short by the Spanish conquerers early in the sixteenth century before it had a chance to spread and ultimately to exhaust itself. Snooks speculates that had this not happened the Aztecs would soon have embarked on the conquest of much of North and South America."

JWSR - Volume V, Number 1, Spring 1999: "At the base of every society is its dynamic economic strategy, and political and social institutions rest on this strategy and function to promote it. Social change occurs by virtue of the unfolding and eventual exhaustion of a dynamic strategy, at which point the leaders of the society shift to the next-best strategy. As the dynamic strategy changes, new social and political institutions emerge."

JWSR - Volume V, Number 1, Spring 1999: "Neoclassical economics goes wrong, in assuming that humans are primarily cognitive beings who intellectualize about the world, whereas sociobiology goes wrong in being too genetically deterministic and in giving pride of place to the struggle for reproduction rather than to the struggle for survival. Human social life is governed by passions, not intellect, and the most important passion is the struggle for material advantage, i.e., for wealth and power. To realize material advantage humans adopt one or more of four dynamic strategies, which Snooks calls the family multiplication strategy, the conquest strategy, the commerce strategy, and the technological strategy."

All the problems are connected Now you can see how all the problems are connected. Since every row is filled with one or more X's, every problem has consequences; since every column is filled, every problem has antecedents. This shows that the process of tracing 1st, 2nd, and higher order consequences can go on forever; every problem is part of an infinite string of causes and effects involving the other problems. Thus one cannot solve them one at a time; one can only solve them together, so we must consider them together.

Sabre-rattling among thirsty nations. You maintain that the “red flag” for international water is not water scarcity but one country’s attempt to dominate an international river. Most of these conflicts usually revolve around plans to build a major dam. But this kind of project generally requires assistance from organizations like the World Bank, which evaluate proposals according to environmental and ethical criteria. By pulling the purse strings, can’t these organizations prevent water conflicts from arising?
What you’re suggesting has been the case. But as more private capital takes over investment in these projects, the ethical and environmental criteria of the development banks is no longer an issue. Turkey, for example, is diverting private and public capital to fund one of the most contentious projects, known as GAP, which envisages the construction of 22 dams and 19 power plants on the Tigris-Euphrates and its tributaries. The same is true for the Narmada dam in India and China’s Three Gorges project.

Sabre-rattling among thirsty nations. That’s a totally different issue, which happens all the time. During the Gulf War, Iraq destroyed most of Kuwait’s desalination plants and the Allied coalition intentionally targeted Baghdad’s water supply and sanitation system. Serbian engineers reportedly shut down Pristina’s water system in Kosovo before Nato arrived in 1999.
Yet you must distinguish between water as a source of conflict, as a resource and as a weapon. We’ve gone to war over oil. Yet you wouldn’t put that event in the same category as the military use of a flame thrower or even napalm.

Sabre-rattling among thirsty nations.Strategically, water wars don’t make sense. You cannot increase your water resources by going to war with a neighbour unless you are willing to capture the entire watershed, depopulate it and not expect a tremendous retaliation.

Snooks - The Dynamic Society: "For 'materialist man is the same yesterday, today and forever. Only the underlying economic conditions facing him have changed' (197). Human 'dynamic society' can and will come up with the necessary and therefore economically rational dynamic strategy to face and overcome these new conditions -- if only its intellectuals will wise up and let it do so . ."

Snooks - The Dynamic Society: "The real life or motor force of this long and still ongoing process, the author is at pains to demonstrate, is economic -- or more precisely materialist -- competition to use scarce resources for survival. The author himself refers to the simile of a great game of life on earth. The gameboard and the rules of the game represent the constraints of universal chemistry and terrestrial geology. However, 'man [sic] makes himself.' "

Snooks - The Dynamic Society: "Charles Darwin's natural selection hypothesis was, in fact, influenced by Adam Smith. Evolution is, then, an economic rather than a physical problem - the struggle by species to gain access to scarce natural resources in order to survive."

Snooks - The Dynamic Society: "War in the agrarian world, Snooks tells us, was all about economics, because conquest was the most cost-efficient strategy of material gain . . "

Snooks - The Dynamic Society: "This model assumes that both genetic and social change are driven by a similar mechanism, which is the desire to gain control over resources so as to maximize the probability of survival and material prosperity. Applied specifically to humans, Snooks's model holds that humans have an innate desire to increase their wealth and power. Indeed, he claims that they have an insatiable desire to accumulate material possessions. The history and prehistory of human societies is therefore a complex tale in which humans have adopted one or another of four basic strategies in order to achieve their objectives: family multiplication, technological advance, conquest, and commerce. "

Snooks - The Dynamic Society: "The book presents an empirically based argument that life has developed in great evolutionary waves. These waves have not so much culminated as continued during the relatively brief, though prolific, period of human life. Just as life in general has evolved in a wave-like process of genetic transformation, human life has progressed in very long waves of technological development. The duration of these waves has tended to shorten while their amplitude has risen around an exponentially rising trend of material progress. The period since the industrial revolution has been the latest of these waves of genetic/technological evolution. The author uncovers a contradiction between the life-long struggle for survival and material well-being and the barriers to progress threatened by environmental thinkers."

Six Degrees (Main Page): "In this remarkable book, Duncan Watts, one of the principal architects of the new science of networks, lays out nothing less than a new way to understand our connected planet. Between the Internet and email, cell phones and satellites, friends and family, highways and airports, we are continuously surrounded by and subjected to a world of networks-often bewilderingly so. Whether they bind computers, economies, or terrorist organizations, networks are everywhere in the real world, yet until recently the fundamental nature of the networks themselves has remained shrouded in mystery. "

Bowling Alone, by Robert Putnam: "Declining Social Capital: Trends over the last 25 years
Attending Club Meetings :-58%
Family dinners : -33%
Having friends over :-45%

Bowling Alone, by Robert Putnam: "The thesis of Bowling Alone is that a variety of technological, social, and economic changes over the last three decades have 'rendered obsolete' a stock of social capital. Shorthand for saying that things like television, two-career family, generational changes have made fewer of us go on picnics, join the Rotary or hang out at the bar.
Approximately one century ago, Americans faced a similar pattern. Rapid industrialization, immigration, and urbanization brought waves of populations from a farm in Appleton Wisconsin to Chicago or from a shetl to the Lower East Side of Manhattan. In the process millions of Americans left friends, families and social institutions behind. "

Bowling Alone, by Robert Putnam: "Putnam warns that our stock of social capital - the very fabric of our connections with each other, has plummeted, impoverishing our lives and communities. Putnam draws on evidence including nearly 500,000 interviews over the last quarter century to show that we sign fewer petitions, belong to fewer organizations that meet, know our neighbors less, meet with friends less frequently, and even socialize with our families less often. We're even bowling alone. More Americans are bowling than ever before, but they are not bowling in leagues. Putnam shows how changes in work, family structure, age, suburban life, television, computers, women's roles and other factors have contributed to this decline."

Research on planning Research on planning has examined three different environments in which we plan: simple and static; complex and static; and complex and dynamic…

New Trends in Public Diplomacy Twice in 2002, the executive director of the Washington Center for Complexity and Public Policy was invited to make a two-hour presentation, as part of the Institute’s weeklong course, New Trends in Public Diplomacy. The purpose of these presentations was to discuss complexity and nonlinear thinking as new ways to think about the war on terrorism and the function of public diplomacy in a changing world.

Strategic Plan “Strategy can be described as the evolving pursuit of a central mission through changing circumstances.

News leader The terrorists attacks on September 11, 2001 demonstrated clearly the urgent need to develop the skills of complexity thinking—to recognize changes in the larger context; to take a big picture approach to intelligence-gathering and national security; to develop a deeper understanding of the system dynamics influencing regional politics and conflicts; and, most importantly, to enhance our understanding of complex sociopolitical human systems. To successfully meet the challenges of the future, we will need leaders who are courageous enough to expand their thinking beyond the conventional wisdom, and smart enough to understand the importance of complex systems thinking.

Vulnerabilities of interdependent systemsThe August 14, 2003 blackout, the worst in U.S. history, is another example of how complexity thinking has become critical to our understanding of events and infrastructure interdependencies. On that day twenty percent of the North American power grid, including parts of the midwest and most of the northeastern United States and Ontario, Canada, went down. This happened in part because no one had a real time big picture view of the entire system, which could have alerted engineers to problems in time to prevent or minimize the blackout. (Iwata) Source: Iwata, Edward. “Blackout Experts Struggle to Shed Light,” USA Today, 10/13/03, p. A1. As investigators work to sort out the causes and make recommendations, it seems clear that this enormous power outage was the result of many interacting and interdependent smaller events. That it didn’t spread further, because engineers in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania were able to isolate other parts of the system from the cascading collapse, raises some interesting questions about the vulnerabilities of interdependent systems, including the rapidly globalizing world economy.

Complexity thinkingInstead, complexity thinking—the ability to understand the dynamics of the big picture context in which your decisions are being made—has quickly become the most essential 21st century leadership skill. A basic understanding of complex systems combined with the ability to think broadly, to take a wide-angle big picture approach, will give you a deeper understanding of complex situations and lead to more effective questions, options and strategies.

Complexity science Complexity science is providing us with information about the underlying structure and patterns of interaction that create strong systems, support healthy adaptation and the ongoing evolution of a system over time. It has created a major shift in how we must think about, organize, plan for and lead 21st century organizations. You can no longer be an effective leader nor build an effective organization without understanding the basics of complexity science and developing the skills of complexity thinking.

Complexity science Most of the world is comprised of complex adaptive systems—open evolutionary systems such as a rain forest, a business, a society, your immune system, the World Wide Web and the rapidly globalizing world economy—where the components are strongly interrelated, self-organizing and dynamic. Each of these systems evolves over time and in relationship to the larger environment in which it operates. The system as a whole must adapt to change in order to survive. Complexity science has moved science away from a linear mechanistic view of the world to one based on nonlinear dynamics, evolutionary development and systems thinking. It’s a dramatic new way of looking at things; it’s not just looking a more things at once.

complex adaptive systems In the last twenty years, a revolution has occurred in the scientific understanding of complex systems. And complexity science represents a growing body of interdisciplinary knowledge about structure, behavior and dynamics of change in a specific category of complex systems known as complex adaptive systems.

Complexity Stated simply, complexity can be defined as a situation where an “increasing number of independent variables are interacting in interdependent and unpredictable ways” (Ilachinski 2001: xxvii). Traffic is a good example of complexity as is the weather, the stock market and the United Nations.

Education delivery system Now, as never before, we have the knowledge and the tools to create a 21st century education delivery system that prepares today’s students and future generations of students to be lifetime learners, workers and citizens in a rapidly changing, complex and interconnected world.

We need to push our thinking in new directions The challenges of the 21st century will require new ways of thinking about and understanding the complex, interconnected and rapidly changing world in which we live and work. And the new field of complexity science is providing the insights we need to push our thinking in new directions.

Global Policy Forum: "For 300 years, nation-states grew and prospered. They waged wars on an increasingly destructive and global scale (the national security state) and they assumed broad tasks of social and economic management (the welfare state). Their ubiquity was taken for granted. But for the past 25 years or so, states have been in retreat -- weakening, shrinking, sinking as globalizing capital undermines their tax base, erodes their regulatory apparatus, stymies their policy machinery and questions their legitimacy. "

Global Policy Forum: "Throughout history, adventurers, generals, merchants, and financiers have constructed an ever-more-global economy. Today, unprecedented changes in communications, transportation, and computer technology have given the process new impetus. As globally mobile capital reorganizes business firms, it sweeps away regulation and undermines local and national politics. "

Global Policy Forum The United States is the most powerful nation in the world and it often acts unilaterally, but is it an Empire? Though some insist that “empire” means only direct rule over large-scale conquered territory, the idea of a US empire has long been popular in the global South. Recently, the concept has found wide usage in the North as well, not only by critics but also by advocates of muscular US policy and global superiority. Oxford economist Niall Ferguson has written about the British Empire as a lesson-book for contemporary US power. Influential Washington neo-conservatives are now using the E-word freely, insisting that the United States is the world’s most benevolent nation and that it should use its power robustly to expand “freedom” across the globe. This section considers not only the utility of the Empire concept but also the way in which the United States (empire or not) deploys its economic, political and military power globally, limiting the force of international law, shrinking the capacity of international organizations, and reducing the possibility of multilateral action and democratic self-governance in an increasingly interdependent world.

Global Policy Forum: "The United Nations and all its agencies and funds spend about $10 billion each year, or about $1.70 for each of the world's inhabitants. This is a very small sum compared to most government budgets and it is just a tiny fraction of the world's military spending. Yet for over a decade, the UN has faced a debilitating financial crisis and it has been forced to cut back on important programs in all areas. Many member states have not paid their full dues and have cut their donations to the UN's voluntary funds. At the end of August 2003, members owed the UN $2.332 billion, of which the United States alone owed $ 1.226 billion (53% in total and 72% of the regular budget). "

Likud Debates a Palestinian State to Save Israel: "The figures are striking. About 5.2 million Jews and 1.3 million Arabs are Israeli citizens, while roughly 3.5 million more Arabs live in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The Arab birth rate exceeds the Jewish rate.
'If we don't have a border within a short period of time, one day we will get up and hear Arafat or his successor say, `I don't want a Palestinian state. I want just one thing: Annex me,' ' Mr. Meridor said. Put another way, he said: 'The problem now is not that we lose. The problem is that we might win.'"

Excite -: "A gap could develop, which, if it became too large, could mean that the new markets that the developed world will need to maintain its economic growth may not emerge. There is also the problem that they risk the economic and political stability of these poorer nations as the financial imbalance swells, which could have dire social and political ramifications for the entire globe."

Excite -: "Unable to take advantage of the research done in the high-income nations and lacking the resources for investment or the requisite infrastructure to attract foreign capital, impoverished nations will find themselves stuck in a vicious cycle in which they are unable to reach the critical mass of technological prowess needed to break through into the world scene."

Excite -: "The business community will need to embrace two major impacts of technology for the next quarter century: First, the spread of technology will drive the more developed nations of the world and their businesses closer together. Second, this same spread of technology will leave less developed nations behind unless action is taken."

BBC - Gene Stories - Genes and history - Population DNA: "Explaining cultural changes in a group of people can also be problematic because it is impossible to know if the change resulted from a movement of people or merely a movement of ideas. Whilst archaeology can provide some of the answers by unearthing evidence of changes in material culture, only genetics can complete the picture telling us whether cultural transitions were accompanied by changes in the blood of the people."

BBC - Gene Stories - Life is a Lottery: "Recombination: Before chromosomes are distributed into a sperm or an egg, genes are shuffled between matching chromosome pairs in a process known as recombination. Because of recombination, every chromosome in every sperm and egg contains a unique mixture of genes. "

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Humans' 10,000-year warming habit: "Over timescales of thousands of years, the Earth goes through a natural cycle of warmer and colder periods, driven by changes in heat coming from the Sun.
Professor Ruddiman has now calculated that if the Earth had followed its natural cycle over the last 10,000 years, it should have got steadily colder. "

WMAP Cosmology 101: Beyond Big Bang: "The Big Bang model is not complete. For example, it does not explain why the universe is so uniform on the very largest scales or, indeed, why it is so non-uniform on smaller scales, i.e., how stars and galaxies came to be.
The Big Bang model is based on the Cosmological Principle which assumes that matter in the universe is uniformly distributed on all scales - large and small. This is a very useful approximation that allows one to develop the basic Big Bang scenario, but a more complete understanding of our universe requires going beyond the Cosmological Principle. Many cosmologists suspect that inflation theory, an extension of the Big Bang theory, may provide the framework for explaining the large-scale uniformity of our universe and the origin of structure within it."

BBCi - Space - Big Bang: "The Big Bang theory tells us how the Universe began and is evolving. In essence, it is a theory that was created to explain two facts that we know about the Universe - it is gradually expanding and cooling. In the 1920s, Edwin Hubble found that galaxies far from our own Milky Way are moving away from us. In fact, the further away galaxies are, the faster they are receding. So he concluded that the whole Universe must have been expanding. Working backwards this means that at one stage the Universe must have come from a single point."