Human Development Dynamics: An Agent Based Simulation of Macro Social Systems and Individual Heterogeneous Evolutionary Games

Purpose: In the context of modernization and development, a complex adaptive systems framework can help address the coupling of macro social constraint and opportunity with individual agency. Combining system dynamics and agent based modeling, we formalize a simulation approach of the Human Development (HD) perspective to explore the interactive effects of economics, culture, society and politics across multiple human scales. Methods: Based on a system of asymmetric, coupled nonlinear equations, we first capture the core qualitative logic of HD theory, empirically validated from World Values Survey (WVS) data. Using a simple evolutionary game approach, second we fuse endogenously derived individual socio-economic attribute changes with Prisoner’s Dilemma in an agent based model of the interactive political-cultural effects of heterogeneous, spatial intra-societal economic transactions. We then explore a new human development dynamics (HDD) model behavior via quasiglobal simulation methods to identify paths and pitfalls towards economic development, cultural plasticity, social and political change behavior. Results: Our preliminary results suggest strong nonlinear path dependence and complexity in three areas: adaptive development processes, co-evolutionary societal transactions and near equilibrium development trajectories, with significant implications for anticipating and managing positive development outcomes. Strong local epistatic interactions characterized by adaptive co-evolution, shape higher order global conditions and ultimately societal outcomes. Conclusions: Techno-social simulations such as this can provide scholars and policymakers alike insights into the nonlinear, complex adaptive effects of societal co-evolution. We believe complex adaptive or evolutionary systems approaches are necessary to understand both near and potentially catastrophic, far-from-equilibrium behavior and societal outcomes across all human scales of modernization

Senturion: Predictive Political Simulation Model

This paper summarizes work utilizing the Senturion predictive analysis software at the National Defense University (NDU). The Center for Technology and National Security Policy (CTNSP) at NDU has been testing the Senturion capability since 2002, and has begun to support the application of this new technology in DOD. In this paper, we begin by describing the methodology underlying the software, and then provide an overview of three case studies that used the software: a predictive analysis of the stabilization and reconstruction phase of Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF), the run-up to the Iraqi elections in January 2005, and the leadership transition in Palestine following the death of Yasser Arafat. Each of these projects tested the application of the software’s modeling technology to unfolding events. Each analysis was performed and briefed to senior government decision makers well in advance of events; the forecasts from each project tracked well with reality, often providing counter intuitive results. The approach provides policymakers and analysts with a tool for anticipating the outcome of complex political events that can also provide a detailed explanation of why events may not unfold as expected with traditional means of analysis

Happiness and the state: Going beyond GDP with political performance measures for societal subjective well-being

Extending human development metrics beyond GDP, we explore the impact of objective national political performance measures of state capacity, extraction and allocations as additional mechanisms impacting societal happiness. While ‘adding politics back in’ is not novel, such objective political performance measures are distinctly apolitical and not ideologically anchored to types of political systems, cultural legacies or institutional structures. Compared to subjective governance perceptions, these measures potentially allow for alternative, more accurate comparisons of state performance across time, space, structures and cultures. Here we econometrically investigate the role of national political performance on subjective well-being from the World Happiness Report 2021 for a panel of 83 countries from 2006 to 2019. We perform exploratory data analysis and then offer fixed effects, panel-corrected standard error estimations controlling for vectors of more traditional economic, social, and technology determinants to investigate how such factors change in various regional and heterogeneous cultural contexts. Globally, our findings indicate that political performance is almost equally as important as economic development, being strongly associated with increasing societal level subjective well-being. In going beyond GDP to assess human attainment, understanding nuanced national political performance is critical when seen through the evidentiary lens of various regional and cultural contexts

Political Performance

Why do some nations fail while others succeed? How can we compare the political capacity of a totalitarian regime to a democracy? Are democracies always more efficient? The Performance of Nations answers these key questions by providing a powerful new tool for measuring governments\u27 strengths and weaknesses. Allowing researchers to look inside countries down to the local level as well as to compare across societies and over time, the book demonstrates convincingly that political performance is the missing link in measuring..

Replication data for: Relative Political Capacity Dataset

This measure represents a sign along the road to developing a social science indicator similar to the ubiquitous applications of GDP and GDP per capita in economics. Political science has long valued the universality of these concepts and the powerful applications they allow for measuring and comparative purposes. It was the chase after the elixir of a political science counterpart that led to this volume. Despite its universal appeal, as a concept GDP remains limited in some ways. It does not include the non-monetized economy, the black market, the subsistence economy, or volunteer work, and it fails to address why the public sector is approximated by inputs not outputs. Yet, GDP remains the gold standard for cross national economic comparisons. And GDP per c apita is the measure of choice for assessing the average productivity of individuals across and within nations. Is there a GDP- like indicator that would allow scholars to compare governmental functions across time, space and across types of governments? That was our challenge. Various attempts have been made to develop proxies for government performance but none of them have allowed scholars to measure the effectiveness and efficiency of governments, the performance of governments, vertically and horizontally--from the international to local levels. In order to find our GDP-like political indicator, the various scholars contributing to this effort developed, tested and integrated three distinct measures of political performance. They are Extraction, Reach, and Allocation. Extraction approximates the ability of governments to appropriate portions of the national output to advance public goals. Reach gauges the capacity of governments to mobilize populations under their control. Allocation evaluates the share of public revenues provided to competing national priorities contrasted to the optimal allocation based on maximizing economic growth. Each of these measures was tested empirically to determine if significant and substantive results followed from their application. These tests, as cataloged in this book, establish the universality of the political performance concept