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Predicting Riots and the Fall of Dictators
- skmurphy 16y agoSome key grafs The key to predicting regime shifts, says Marten Scheffer of the University of Wageningen in the Netherlands, is to look beyond individual behaviour to seek simple laws that describe a population's collective behaviour. "All complex systems exhibit certain symptoms before a regime shift," he says, including slower responses to small changes, and a tendency for all players to behave similarly. In the past, Scheffer says, analysts focused on the trigger that sparks change, rather than the underlying system. "We cannot predict the spark," he says, "but we can say when a forest has accumulated dangerous levels of kindling." Repressing revolution is not the way to achieve stability, he adds. It would be like preventing small forest fires, allowing kindling to accumulate until a big fire breaks out. But uncovering the symptoms of instability may warn societies to reform themselves before revolution happens.