Bombs

Abstract

Can the next big event be predicted? It is possible to detect the next bomb before it goes off? World events are not random—they may be long-tailed, but not entirely unpredictable. Take population as an example. It is exploding. And it is on the move: from East and South to North and West. Global migration follows wealth, freedom, and opportunity. More over, massive migratory patterns foretell an impending tipping point—a nonlinear consequence of a tilted world. As the North and West gets richer and its labor force diminishes, it also edges closer to a socio-economic tipping point. And, as the East and South becomes overpopulated with working age youth, it becomes hungrier for consumer goods like automobiles, cellular telephones, vacations, and fashionable clothes. This tension is accelerated by the “natural” tendency for wealth to accumulate according to Pareto’s long-tailed distribution. And to make things even more stressful, ownership of most wealth is concentrated in a handful of mega-corporations—largely financial organizations—that rule the economic world from within the shadows of highly interconnected financial webs. The imbalance between the “have’s and have not’s” is widening, because of preferential attachment—the simplest form of self-organization.