Asimov and Socionomics

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I obviously love science fiction and I have a great interest in the economy, trends in general, and I occasionally receive e-mails that combine those topics.
Isaac Asimov wrote a trilogy of novels entitled the Foundation Series with his main character being Hari Seldon a mathematician who develops the concept of mathematical sociology: a way to predict future events using the law of mass action.
From the article:

In the 1940s, renowned science fiction writer Isaac Asimov began writing a trilogy of novels called the Foundation Series. Asimov’s protagonist discovers and develops “psychohistory,” a mathematical science that statistically predicts the general course of future events for large groups of people.

As it turns out, Asimov’s idea was actually science, minus the fiction. In the 1930s, a decade prior to Asimov's initial Foundation stories, Ralph Nelson Elliott made a discovery that became key to the development of socionomics, a new science of social prediction.

This leads us to the Elliot Wave which is used to predict social mood trends that affect changes in history and culture.

The foreword to The Wave Principle of Human Social Behavior (1999), Prechter's explication of socionomics, summarizes that:

Social mood trends represent changes in human attitudes. Changes in social mood trends precede compatible changes in history and culture, indicating that the former causes the latter. Thus, there is powerful evidence that the pattern of mood change produced by the social interaction of men is the underlying engine of the trends of social progress and regress... The relationship of the pattern to Fibonacci mathematics suggests that the Wave Principle is another manifestation of a type of growth pattern found throughout nature in processes of growth and decay, expansion and contraction.

Nowadays, Socionomics and the Elliot Wave are tools being used to predict peaks and valleys in the stock markets but on a broader scale, these models can be used to monitor and predict changes in human thought, habit, and ways of life that will then lead to major shifts historically and culturally.
Right now with massive unemployment, for example, we are facing a social mood trend change on a mass scale. When you are out of work, short on cash, and hungry, your outlook on life and what is really important begins to shift.
I love science fiction that deals with these kinds of ideas and even though fiction is mixed in, there is still that degree of truth that makes me sit up and think about life differently and observe current events more closely. People I talk to on a daily basis perceive our current economic situation in different ways:
1. They think recovery is around the corner.
2. They know this is the worst "recession" they have ever seen.
3. They recognize we are entering into a new way of life even more different than the first depression and permanent in nature.

I am in camp number three. Even though people hope and wait, it is obvious that people are making major lifestyle changes and some not by choice. These changes are being made by massive numbers of people but the outcome is happening in slow motion. So I expect that the changes historically will also take time and when we look back years from now we will be amazed at the changes. One thing for sure, going through these lifestyle changes is painful but I hope at the end we will have more peace in our lives.

This is the ARTICLE in full.