Why Are So Many Important Events Unpredictable? Self-Organized Criticality as the ‘Engine of History’

Japanese Journal of Political Science

Volumn 3, Issue 1, 2002, Pages 25-44

  Brunk, Gregory G ^a  

^a NONE   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 9744241246     PISSN: 14681099     EISSN: 14740060     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S1468109902000129     Document Type: Article

References (79)

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4. The best-known writer on the more general concept of ‘self-organization’, as opposed to the mathematical law of self-organized criticality is Ilya Prigogine. A few of his works include: Nicolis Gregoire and Ilya Prigogine, Self-Organization in Non-Equilibrium Systems: From Dissipative Structures to Order through Fluctuations (New York: Wiley, 1977)
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7. There are literally hundreds of books and articles in economics that deal with the potential for chaos, and are much to numerous to cite here. Two of the most relevant works on chaos and complex dynamics for political scientists are Alicia Juarrero, Dynamics in International Behavior as a Complex System (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999)
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41. Recently, economists have become increasingly interested in such phenomena, which should not exist in a linear, equilibrium-seeking world. Examples include Richard H. Day and Weihong Huang, ‘Bulls, Bears, and Market Sheep’, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 14 (1988): 299–329
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49. The macro-level pattern of wars has been analyzed using three different data sets and various levels of aggregation. All analyses found an identical fractal dimension, which confirms that conflict is a SOC process. See Brunk, “Why Do Societies Collapse?’
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51. This figure is adapted from Gregory G. Brunk, ‘Self-Organized Criticality: A New Theory of Political Behaviour and Some of Its Implications’, British Journal of Political Science, 31 (2001): 427–445.
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58. Mandelbrot pointed to these patterns 4oyears ago, but never was able to explain them in a simple, substantive way. Benoit B. Mandelbrot, ‘The Variation of Certain Speculative Prices, Journal of Business, 36 (1963): 394–419
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60. A multifractal walk is the summation of two or more fractal processes. See Brunk, ‘Why Do Societies Collapse?’ for examples of multifractal walks generated by bullish and bearish market sentiments. Such a simple model provides a good approximation to the actual behavior of the S&P 500.
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73. See Brunk, ‘Self-Organized Criticality: A New Theory’, p. 432, Figure 2.
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