Category: Model Library

Samuelson’s Multiplier Accelerator

This is a fairly direct implementation of the multiplier-accelerator model from Paul Samuelson’s classic 1939 paper,

“Interactions between the Multiplier Analysis and the Principle of Acceleration” PA Samuelson – The Review of Economics and Statistics, 1939 (paywalled on JSTOR, but if you register you can read a limited number of publications for free)

SamuelsonDiagramB

This is a nice example of very early economic dynamics analyses, and also demonstrates implementation of discrete time notation in Vensim. Continue reading “Samuelson’s Multiplier Accelerator”

Bulbs banned

The incandescent ban is underway.

Conservative think tanks still hate it:

Actually, I think it’s kind of a dumb idea too – but not as bad as you might think, and in the absence of real energy or climate policy, not as dumb as doing nothing. You’d have to be really dumb to believe this:

The ban was pushed by light bulb makers eager to up-sell customers on longer-lasting and much more expensive halogen, compact fluourescent, and LED lighting.

More expensive? Only in a universe where energy and labor costs don’t count (Texas?) and for a few applications (very low usage, or chicken warming).

bulb economicsOver the last couple years I’ve replaced almost all lighting in my house with LEDs. The light is better, the emissions are lower, and I have yet to see a failure (unlike cheap CFLs).

I built a little bulb calculator in Vensim, which shows huge advantages for LEDs in most situations, even with conservative assumptions (low social price of carbon, minimum wage) it’s hard to make incandescents look good. It’s also a nice example of using Vensim for spreadsheet replacement, on a problem that’s not very dynamic but has natural array structure.

bulbModelGet it: bulb.mdl or bulb.vpm (uses arrays, so you’ll need the free Model Reader)

Environmental Homeostasis

Replicated from

The Emergence of Environmental Homeostasis in Complex Ecosystems

The Earth, with its core-driven magnetic field, convective mantle, mobile lid tectonics, oceans of liquid water, dynamic climate and abundant life is arguably the most complex system in the known universe. This system has exhibited stability in the sense of, bar a number of notable exceptions, surface temperature remaining within the bounds required for liquid water and so a significant biosphere. Explanations for this range from anthropic principles in which the Earth was essentially lucky, to homeostatic Gaia in which the abiotic and biotic components of the Earth system self-organise into homeostatic states that are robust to a wide range of external perturbations. Here we present results from a conceptual model that demonstrates the emergence of homeostasis as a consequence of the feedback loop operating between life and its environment. Formulating the model in terms of Gaussian processes allows the development of novel computational methods in order to provide solutions. We find that the stability of this system will typically increase then remain constant with an increase in biological diversity and that the number of attractors within the phase space exponentially increases with the number of environmental variables while the probability of the system being in an attractor that lies within prescribed boundaries decreases approximately linearly. We argue that the cybernetic concept of rein control provides insights into how this model system, and potentially any system that is comprised of biological to environmental feedback loops, self-organises into homeostatic states.

See my related blog post for details.

Continue reading “Environmental Homeostasis”

Wonderland

Wonderland model by Sanderson et al.; see Alexandra Milik, Alexia Prskawetz, Gustav Feichtinger, and Warren C. Sanderson, “Slow-fast Dynamics in Wonderland,” Environmental Modeling and Assessment 1 (1996) 3-17.

Here’s an excerpt from my 1998 critique of this model: Continue reading “Wonderland”

Early warnings of catastrophe

Catastrophic Collapse Can Occur without Early Warning: Examples of Silent Catastrophes in Structured Ecological Models (PLOS ONE – open access)

Catastrophic and sudden collapses of ecosystems are sometimes preceded by early warning signals that potentially could be used to predict and prevent a forthcoming catastrophe. Universality of these early warning signals has been proposed, but no formal proof has been provided. Here, we show that in relatively simple ecological models the most commonly used early warning signals for a catastrophic collapse can be silent. We underpin the mathematical reason for this phenomenon, which involves the direction of the eigenvectors of the system. Our results demonstrate that claims on the universality of early warning signals are not correct, and that catastrophic collapses can occur without prior warning. In order to correctly predict a collapse and determine whether early warning signals precede the collapse, detailed knowledge of the mathematical structure of the approaching bifurcation is necessary. Unfortunately, such knowledge is often only obtained after the collapse has already occurred.

This is a third-order ecological model with juvenile and adult prey and a predator:

See my related blog post on the topic, in which I also mention a generic model of critical slowing down.

The model, with changes files (.cin) implementing some of the experiments: CatastropheWarning.zip

Positive feedback drives email list meltdown

I’m on an obscure email list for a statistical downscaling model. I think I’ve gotten about 10 messages in the last two years. But today, that changed.

List traffic (data in red).

Around 7 am, there were a couple of innocuous, topical messages. That prompted someone who’d evidently long forgotten about the list to send an “unsubscribe me” message to the whole list. (Why people can’t figure out that such missives are both ineffective and poor list etiquette is beyond me.) That unleashed a latent vicious cycle: monkey-see, monkey-do produced a few more “unsub” messages. Soon the traffic level became obnoxious, spawning more and more ineffectual unsubs. Then, the brakes kicked in, as more sensible users appealed to people to quit replying to the whole list. Those messages were largely lost in the sea of useless unsubs, and contributed to the overall impression that things were out of control.

People got testy:

I will reply to all to make my point.

Has it occurred to any of you idiots to just reply to Xxxx Xxxx rather than hitting reply to all. Come on already, this is not rocket science here. One person made the mistake and then you all continue to repeat it.

By about 11, the fire was slowing, evidently having run out of fuel (list ignoramuses), and someone probably shut it down by noon – but not before at least a hundred unsubs had flown by.

Just for kicks, I counted the messages and put together a rough-cut Vensim model of this little boom-bust cycle:

unsub.mdl unsub.vpm

This is essentially the same structure as the Bass Diffusion model, with a few refinements. I think I didn’t quite capture the unsubscriber behavior. Here, I assume that would-be unsubscribers, who think they’ve left the list but haven’t, at least quit sending messages. In reality, they didn’t – in blissful ignorance of what was going on, several sent multiple requests to be unsubscribed. I didn’t explicitly represent the braking effect (if any) of corrective comments. Also, the time constants for corrections and unsubscriptions could probably be separated. But it has the basics – a positive feedback loop driving growth in messages, and a negative feedback loop putting an end to the growth. Anyway, have fun with it.

Computing and networks have solved a lot of problems, like making logistics pipelines visible, but they’ve created as many new ones. The need for models to improve intuition and manage new problems is as great as ever.

Arab Spring

Hard on the heels of commitment comes another interesting, small social dynamics model on Arxiv. This one’s about the dynamics of the Arab Spring.

The self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi on December 17, 2011 in the small Tunisian city of Sidi Bouzid, set off a sequence of events culminating in the revolutions of the Arab Spring. It is widely believed that the Internet and social media played a critical role in the growth and success of protests that led to the downfall of the regimes in Egypt and Tunisia. However, the precise mechanisms by which these new media affected the course of events remain unclear. We introduce a simple compartmental model for the dynamics of a revolution in a dictatorial regime such as Tunisia or Egypt which takes into account the role of the Internet and social media. An elementary mathematical analysis of the model identifies four main parameter regions: stable police state, meta-stable police state, unstable police state, and failed state. We illustrate how these regions capture, at least qualitatively, a wide range of scenarios observed in the context of revolutionary movements by considering the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, as well as the situation in Iran, China, and Somalia, as case studies. We pose four questions about the dynamics of the Arab Spring revolutions and formulate answers informed by the model. We conclude with some possible directions for future work.

http://arxiv.org/abs/1210.1841

The model has two levels, but since non revolutionaries = 1 – revolutionaries, they’re not independent, so it’s effectively first order. This permits thorough analytical exploration of the dynamics.

This model differs from typical SD practice in that the formulations for visibility and policing use simple discrete logic – policing either works or it doesn’t, for example. There are also no explicit perception processes or delays. This keeps things simple for analysis, but also makes the behavior somewhat bang-bang. An interesting extension of this model would be to explore more operational, behavioral decision rules.

The model can be used as is to replicate the experiments in Figs. 8 & 9. Further experiments in the paper – including parameter changes that reflect social media – should also be replicable, but would take a little extra structure or Synthesim overrides.

This model runs with any recent Vensim version.

ArabSpring1.mdl

ArabSpring1.vpm

I’d especially welcome comments on the model and analysis from people who know the history of events better than I do.

Encouraging Moderation

An interesting paper on Arxiv caught my eye the other day. It uses a simple model of a bipolar debate to explore policies that encourage moderation.

Some of the most pivotal moments in intellectual history occur when a new ideology sweeps through a society, supplanting an established system of beliefs in a rapid revolution of thought. Yet in many cases the new ideology is as extreme as the old. Why is it then that moderate positions so rarely prevail? Here, in the context of a simple model of opinion spreading, we test seven plausible strategies for deradicalizing a society and find that only one of them significantly expands the moderate subpopulation without risking its extinction in the process.

This is a very simple and stylized model, but in the best tradition of model-based theorizing, it yields provocative counter-intuitive results and raises lots of interesting questions. Technology Review’s Arxiv Blog has a nice qualitative take on the work.

See also: Dynamics of Scientific Revolutions, Bifurcations & Filter Bubbles

The model runs in discrete time, but I’ve added implicit rate constants for dimensional consistency in continuous time.

commitment2.mdl & commitment2.vpm

These should be runnable with any Vensim version.

If you add the asymmetric generalizations in the paper’s Supplemental Material, add your name to the model diagram, forward a copy back to me, and I’ll post the update.

Spot the health care smokescreen

A Tea Party presentation on health care making the rounds in Montana claims that life expectancy is a smoke screen, and it’s death rates we should be looking at. The implication is that we shouldn’t envy Japan’s longer life expectancy, because the US has lower death rates, indicating superior performance of our health care system.

Which metric really makes the most sense from a systems perspective?

Here’s a simple, 2nd order model of life and death:

From the structure, you can immediately observe something important: life expectancy is a function only of parameters, while the death rate also includes the system states. In other words, life expectancy reflects the expected life trajectory of a person, given structure and parameters, while the aggregate death rate weights parameters (cohort death rates) by the system state (the distribution of population between old and young).

In the long run, the two metrics tell you the same thing, because the system comes into equilibrium such that the death rate is the inverse of the life expectancy. But people live a long time, so it might take decades or even centuries to achieve that equilibrium. In the meantime, the death rate can take on any value between the death rates of the young and old cohorts, which is not really helpful for understanding what a new person can expect out of life.

So, to the extent that health care performance is visible in the system trajectory at all, and not confounded by lifestyle choices, life expectancy is the metric that tells you about performance, and the aggregate death rate is the smokescreen.

Here’s the model: LifeExpectancyDeathRate.mdl or LifeExpectancyDeathRate.vpm

It’s initialized in equilibrium. You can explore disequilbrium situations by varying the initial population distribution (Init Young People & Init Old People), or testing step changes in the death rates.