Thread by @conways_law

Hello, system-aware people, particularly social scientists, here come a
Phase Transition Hypothesis
and a
Conjecture.

If the hypothesis has merit our understanding of history and politics will be changed.

cc: @EurasiaGroup @ianbremmer @sfiscience @necsi
1/13

But first, some preliminaries.

We are noticing social disruption now. We are using words like:
--Inequality (“the 1%”)
--Populism, fascism, the rise of the Right
--Political polarization, loss of the center
2/13

Introductory assertion:
We are blind people telling different stories about this thing we are touching. There is an elephant.

Historical background:
Around the 1960’s-1970’s multiple large changes occurred within the coupled Western industrial societies:
3/13

1)Technology: Massive US Government spending on R&D driven by the Cold War, which produced (among other things) the microcircuit industry, which led to the personal computer and restructuring of manufactured goods, and the software industry when IBM unbundled in 1969.
4/13

2)The Nixon Shock in 1971, and the removal of the gold standard, leading to a change in the general use of money from hard currency to debt.
5/13

The BankAmericard "Visa", which pioneered the general use of the bank-organization-based credit card, was introduced in 1958. It was international by the 1970s. (creditcards.com/credit-card-ne…) (Does anybody remember traveler’s checks?)
6/13

3)A break in the correlation between industrial productivity and personal income around 1970, perhaps associated with the rising input of technology into production (melconway.com/research/inequ…).
7/13

Manufacturing labor unions were losing membership because their locals were losing the value of the input that they could withhold from employers. (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_uni…).
8/13

4)The injection of conservative economic thought into Government policy, leading to, for example, airline deregulation (1978), and the introduction of economic growth as a key policy metric (e.g., see Binyamin Appelbaum, “The Economists' Hour”)
9/13

--I assert this

>>Phase Transition Hypothesis:

The gross characteristics of a society, such as its politics, economics, and social cohesion, are *emergent properties* of its social system. Changes in these emergent properties can be understood as phase transitions.
10/13

This application of the phase-transition model to societies doesn’t yet exist, but it must come into existence. When it does we will have a different understanding of history.
11/13

(The concept of phase transition originated in Physics but has been generalized into an abstract structural concept. See web.mit.edu/8.334/www/grad…, and its Home page.)
12/13

--And this conjecture:

The disruptions we are experiencing now, such as economic inequality, and political polarization and populism, are aspects of a phase transition that occurred in the coupled industrial societies of the West in the 1960-1980 time period.
13/13