I am skeptical about the application of statistics to the history of
countries. One of the big problems here is that it is impossible to do
controlled experiments, changing only one variable at a time, in order
to investigate its impact on the future of a country. Furthermore,
there is the trouble in defining just what is meant by "decay" or
anything else. We can measure things like population, economic output,
employmenht, saved wealth fairly reliably, but intangibles like
international influence and any other things you might be thinking of
that can decay are much harder to get a handle on.
Nonetheless, there is quite a large sampling of different
civilizations which have come and gone over the millenia. Each one is
different in its own way, with different geograpical and political
environments, different technologies, and different internal
structures. One can investigate samples of different countries over
time to try to find correlations between factors and outcomes, but the
results will usually lack the level of proof required by the scientific
method. Sometimes it's pretty obvious what does a country in (say, a
natural disaster can wipe out a small country, as is suspected of the
Minoans and the eruption of Thera). Other times, it is a large
collection of interrelated factors. You can read Gibbon's "The Fall of
the Roman Empire" to find out all the kinds of things which caused that
state to decay. Not all of these suppositions may be true of course,
and one must read history with a mind that is simultaneously open and
critical. One big problem with history is that it is written by
historians, and historians often introduce their own ideas and cultural
biases into their work, obscuring sometimes very important things.
I would suggest talking with your history teachers, and reading a
variety of books on world history to find out about the large variety
of countries that have come and gone over the ages.
The "butterfly effect" is a fancy name for the idea that the
behavior of complex systems is very dependent on initial conditions,
making prediction of future behavior difficult or impossible. The claim
comes from people trying to predict the weather -- even a small
disturbance in local wind patterns, even tiny ones as the flapping of a
butterfly's wings, can affect weather patterns far in the future. This
may be a bit of an exaggeration, but there are systems in which minute
local variations can be magnified exponentially over time.
It's a way of saying that even small events can have a profound
and unpredictable effect on future actions. I don't worry about this at
all in the actions of humanity, though, since we have many stabilizing
forces built into our behavior already. Most small actions don't have
large-scale consequences because we automatically correct for things
when they get out of whack (we put criminals in jail before they cause
too much harm, we regulate prices in monopolistic industries, and the
market system corrects much of human behavior on average automatically
anyway). Some people may think the stock market flutters around
randomly, but there are big forces at work behind stock prices, and
while the prices really do have a random component to them, it is not
because of small transactions but because of large ones. I wouldn't say
the "butterfly effect" is all that important in the study of human
history, but I could be wrong.
Tom
(published on 10/22/2007)
