Historical Psychology

Patrick Henry:

[Following a discussion about the price of copper.] Have you ever read the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov, with the concept of Historical Psychology or something - the science ofpredicting the future, which was hopelessly inaccurate when used on individuals but became more accurate the more people were involved, so that you could accurately predict the fate of civilisations? I wonder if there is something to it, and the price of copper can be predicted by some sort of mass psychometrics?

Doctor Thomas:

Modern chaos theories do not support the causal premiss on which the idea of historical psychology in the Foundation series was based. The gross macro-behaviour of complex dynamical systems can bifurcate in future possibility space. The premiss behind the Foundation series idea was of stable systems dynamics which result in reversion to a mean trajectory. Nonlinear system in general don't display this sort of stability. I can't remember the precise reference unfortunately...