There are many good reasons to reject predictions. But might it be that we are more
capable of doing something in that direction than we let on? I met
John Casti for the
first time at the European Futurists Conference Lucerne 2006.
He is an American
mathematician who now lives in Vienna, Austria. In his presentation "The Decline and
Fall of Globalisationi" Casti predicted that the boom would soon come to an end and
give way to a deep recession. In addition, Casti was very concerned about the future of the EU and of the Euro.
Think back: In 2006 we were in the midst of a long-lasting
boom. His predictions were met with vehement skepticism by many of the futures
researchers present. John Casti presented as basis for his forecasts a theory
heretofore unknown to me that he called Socionomics. It is based on the
counterintuitive assumption
that social moods are not the result of events but rather
their cause. The mood of the stock brokers is therefore not negative because the
markets dip dramatically, but the markets dip because of a pessimistic collective moodof the brokers.
The father of Socionomics is Robert R. Prechter Jr. His theory is itself
deeply connected with ElliottWaveTheoryiii, developed by Ralph Nelson Elliott (1871-
1948) for the prediction of trends in the financial markets. Yet, the social mood
paradigm is not necessarily linked to the ElliottWaveTheory, as John Casti states. Put
simply, the social mood fluctuates between optimism and pessimism following a
pattern, which may or may not be characterized by Elliott waves. Depending on
whether the social mood is swinging one way or the other, certain types of social
behavior and events are simply more likely than others.
http://www.european-futurists.org/wE...ofinalDEF1.pdf
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