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"I am an assiduous reader of John Casti's books. He is a real scientific intellectual." -Nassim Nicholas Taleb, New York Times bestselling author of Fooled by Randomness "Casti is at his best in presenting difficult philosophical ideas enthusiastically and lucidly, and in presenting everyday examples to illustrate them." -New York Times Book Review In his highly provocative and grippingly readable book, X-Events, author John Casti brilliantly argues that today's advanced, overly complex societies have grown highly vulnerable to extreme events that will ultimately topple civilization like a house of cards. Like Nassim Taleb's The Black Swan meets Jared Diamond's Collapse, Casti's book provides a much-needed wake-up call-sounding a fascinating and frightening warning about civilized society's inability to recover from a global catastrophe- demonstrating how humankind could be blasted back into the Stone Age by a meteor strike, nuclear apocalypse, worldwide contagion, or any number of unforeseeable X-Events.

"Mood Matters" makes the radical assertion that all social events ranging from fashions in music and art to the rise and fall of civilizations are biased by the attitudes a society holds toward the future. When the 'social mood' is positive and people look forward to the future, events of an entirely different character tend to occur than when society is pessimistic. The book presents many examples from every walk of life in support of this argument. In addition, methods are given to actually measure the social mood and to project it into the future in order to forecast what's likely

In the paper, I introduce the concept of social mood. It may be defined as the collective feeling/belief a social group or population has about its future on different time scales. On a given time scale, say, a year, the social mood is positive if the population feels that things will be "better" one year from now than they are today; if they believe that things will be worse, then the social mood is negative on that time scale. The social mood is an example of "internal ideology" of a social group that transforms beliefs and expectations of a set of individuals into different beliefs and expectations that cannot be deduced from individual feelings. Within the socionomics paradigm, there is a logical dependence: herd instinct → social mood (beliefs/feelings) → social behaviour and collective events. This flow is the central hypothesis of socionomics. Considering various examples of social moods and events (e.g., collapse of Enron Corporation in 2001; history of US presidential elections from the foundation of USA up to the present, building the world's tallest skyscrapers; Middle East military conflicts in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; terrorist attacks and state leader's assassination), I demonstrate the central hypothesis in action. In the paper, I suggest using the national stock market indexes as the sociometer. To be more specific, stock market index behaviour does not follow positive or negative social events; it often anticipates them. Moreover, I show that the stock market index is an almost universal indicator of the social mood of population. It works not only for the American realities but everywhere in the world. I describe examples of Brazil, BRICS countries and Turkey to underlie this assumption. These examples provide ample evidence to support the notion that the mood of a population, i.e. its social mood biases the types of social events and behaviours that we can expect to see on all time scales. I argue that the social mood may beget a specific social behaviour and a set of social ...

Die "extremen Ereignisse", die im Grossen und global "unsere Zukunft zerstören können", aber auch im Kleinen und lokal laufend stattfinden, nennt der Autor, bekannter Systemtheoretiker, "X-Events" (so auch der Titel des amerikanischen Originals). Im Zentrum stehen "von Menschen verursachte X-Events" auf den Feldern Technik (z.B. Ausfall des Internets; Zerstörung elektronischer Geräte durch einen elektromagnetischen Puls; Bedrohung durch Kernspaltung und exotische Teilchen; "Roboter unterwerfen die Menschen"), Ökonomie ("Zusammenbruch der Globalisierung", der Lebensmittelversorgung und der Weltfinanzmärkte; Ende des Öls; Ausfall von Strom- und Wasserversorgung) und Medizin (globale Pandemie). Diese Beschreibungen möglicher Bedrohungen und auch möglicher Vorsichtsmassnahmen sind interessanter und überzeugender als der Versuch des Autors, die X-Events als Konsequenz des Auseinanderklaffens von Problem- und Lösungs-Komplexität zu erklären. Mit interessantem, aussagekräftigem Anmerkungs- und Literatur-Anhang, aber ohne Register. (2)

The book contains a collection of papers presented at four special sessions of the 5th International Conference on Mathematical Modelling, held at the University of California, Berkeley in July 1985. The main theme of the volume is the application of dynamical systems theory and related mathematical approaches to fundamental problems of competitive behaviour, industrial restructuring and economic development. The volume assembles some recent advances in modelling which treat these economic problems from a dynamic viewpoint. Sections of the book are devoted to (1) competition and technological evolution, (2) industrial fluctuations and cycles, (3) accumulation and maintenance of capital, (4) location and spatial dynamics. Some of the contributions spring from ambitions to modify or reform basic elements of established economic theory. Approaches and concepts introduced in the models are inspired by the development of recent contributions in physics, chemistry and theoretical biology. However, the problems addressed are deeply rooted in economics with a particular focus on technological change, business cycles and economic development. The ideas of Joseph Schumpeter are a common source of inspiration for many of the authors. In the Schumpeterian spirit, all chapters are preoccupied with dynamic analysis of market economies and competition. The reader will find many new ideas and new models which may help to shape a new pathway for the theory of economic dynamics and related analyses