Professor Frank Wayman

Department of Social Sciences – University of Michigan–Dearborn

Predicting the Future in Science, Economics, and Politics

Frank Whelon Wayman, Paul R. Williamson, Solomon W. Polachek, and Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Eds.

This unusual collaborative endeavor of high-level scholars from across the sciences offers a new view into predicting the future.

What does the future hold? Can we sustain prosperity? How? Are we likely to have less war and genocide? Are nuclear weapons destined to spread to dangerous places? What are the best ways to think about these questions? Are there threads connecting the questions to each another? Limits and possibilities of scientific prediction and explanation of the global system's properties, from physical to biological to social, are the concern of this book, with prominent scholars developing new techniques to forecast global conditions for business and world leaders. Each essay is built around cause and effect relationships based on empirical evidence to create a unified predictive model to project global economic and political conditions. Original contributions range from the two-time Pulitzer-prize winning Edward Wilson (named one of Time Magazine's twenty-five most influential Americans) to Bruce Bueno de Mesquita (named one of Foreign Policy's top one hundred global thinkers; History Channel's "Next Nostradamus").

Table of Contents

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PREFACE
    PART I: THE PROMISE OF GLOBAL FORECASTING
    • Chapter 1. Scientific Prediction and the Human Condition – Frank W. Wayman
    • Chapter 2. Organizing diverse contributions to global forecasting – Paul R. Williamson
    PART II: HUMAN NATURE AND PREDICTION
    • Editors' Introduction to Part II
    • Chapter 3. Consilience: the Role of Human Nature in the Emergence of Social Artifacts – Edward O. Wilson
    • Chapter 4. Darwin's challenges and the future of human society – Richard Alexander
    PART III: THE VALUE OF THE FUTURE
    • Editors' Introduction to Part III
    • Chapter 5. Properly Discounting the Future: Using Predictions in an Uncertain World – J. Doyne Farmer and Jean Geanakoplos
    • Chapter 6. Long-Term Policy Problems: Definition, Origins, and Responses – Detlef Sprinz
    • Chapter 7. Explaining and Predicting Future Environmental Scarcities and Conflict – Urs Luterbacher, Dominic Rohner, and Ellen Wiegandt
    PART IV: SOME PROBLEMS ADDRESSED VIA MODELING
    • Editors' Introduction to Part IV
    • Chapter 8. Forecasting nuclear weapons proliferation: a hazard model – Atsushi Tago and J. David Singer
    • Chapter 9. Forecasting Political Developments with the Help of Financial Markets – Gerald Schneider
    PART V. THE GLOBAL SYSTEM AND THE POSSIBILITIES OF PREDICTION
    • Editors' Introduction to Part V
    • Chapter 10. Glimpses of the Future – John Holland
      • Tables, graphs and charts for Chapter 10
    • Chapter 11. Forecasting the Evolution of Cultural Collisions Using Annealing-Nucleation Models – Myron S. Karasik
      • Tables, graphs and charts for Chapter 11
    • Chapter 12. Power Structure Fluctuations in the "Longue Durée" of the World System – David Wilkinson
    • Chapter 13. From Altruism to the Future Frequency of War: How Consilient Explanation Differs from Prediction – Frank W. Wayman
    • Chapter 14. System Change and Richardson Processes: Application of Social Field Theory – Paul R. Williamson
      • Tables, graphs and charts for Chapter 14
    • Chapter 15. Computational Dynamic Modeling of the Global State Space – Paul R. Williamson
    PART VI. NEW APPROACHES
    • Chapter 16. Scientific Revolutions and the Advancement of Explanation and Prediction – Frank W. Wayman
    • Chapter 17. Innovations in Forecasting the Future that One Can Learn from Prediction – Solomon Polachek
    • Chapter 18. Predicting the Future to Shape the Future – Bruce Bueno de Mesquita
    • List of Contributors

    Link to the book at Edward Elgar Publishing  |  Edward Elgar Publishing

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