Numerical models had a tough decade to start off the 2000s.  A field that had shown itself to be both scientific and applied in areas like semiconductor physics was extrapolated out to cultural issues and economics and successfully predicted...nothing.

A new model created by an international research group claims they can now predict which European countries are more likely to become united or which are more likely to break up. It does so by not only considering demographic and economic criteria but also culture and genetics.

What?  Europe? No predicting the Arab Spring?  No riots in China?

It is common wisdom that the more of a group that join together in unity, the greater the benefit - Science 2.0 is an example of that, the miracle of compounding means researchers get a much larger audience than they would get on their own. Economically, this might be because the marketing power gets bigger and costs are shared. But when regions or even countries are brought together there is a difference in populations, both economically and culturally, which carries a high cost.

if you think economic models are shots in the dark, imaging trying to create an accurate methodology that quantitatively analyzes specific cases to essentially predict the past so that it might predict the future.

The mathematical model that they created uses a country's wealth alongside size and cultural differences in terms of population genetics and then use it to support the idea that such genetic distance between regions can be used as a good tool when approaching cultural distance.

That's bound to be controversial - a proxy for cultural heterogeneity based on genes.  

So which countries in Europe are disintegrating?

They predict Scotland from the UK and the Basque country from Spain but no one really needed a mathematical model for those; they have active separatist campaigns.   But Albanians and Macedonians have been openly shooting at each other for decades yet that didn't make the list?

Which countries will unite?  According to their model, when countries were paired together, those that would be more inclined to unite would be Austria and Switzerland, Denmark and Norway and France with Great Britain. Yes, they believe that Great Britain and France uniting would be possible.  How did they calibrate that model? Pairing at all is the flaw here.  Obviously there are a lot of knobs in country instability but placing criteria like 'who would team up if they had to team up?' is not really the same as predicting anything meaningful.

Back to genetics.  They clarify they are not claiming that genetics explains culture  - only progressive bloggers make crazy claims like that - but they do insist there is a correlation between the two, so populations that have mixed more, a melting pot of immigrants like America rather than a salad bowl like Germany, display greater cultural similarity. "We are not saying that genes explain the way a person thinks," clarifies Ignacio Ortuño Ortín, researcher at the Carlos III University of Madrid (UC3M) and co-author of the study. 

Like I wrote earlier, these models really only work when predicting the past - they are crafted so that they get a prior event right and tweaked until they do. The idea behind a good numerical model is that it will be general purpose.  In semiconductor physics, a tool that can help analyze a chip package is good; one that is modified to match measured data for a customer problem, however, is bad, because it may not work for the next customer.

To test it, they tried to predict the breakup of Yugoslavia.  We all know it happened but they found that the economic differences determined the order of disintegration. No surprise their model also showed that. Cultural differences, although small, played a key role in triggering instability, they say.  Basically, without the USSR to be commonly hated, they turned on each other again, despite the fact that they had generations of being together.

Their first futuristic predictions are done an odd way; they first turn Europe into a single country, like the United States, then they predict which countries might merge or separate if they were free from legacy.

No surprise the fiscal train wrecks, like Greece and Portugal, become quite happy as part of a United States of Europe, while Germany and France are basically screwed.(1)

The Basques and the Scottish would have more motivation to secede, their model claims, even if it doesn't make any economic sense, and it surely does not. Meanwhile, Austria and Switzerland might pair up, so might Denmark and Norway and France and Great Britain. 

None of the model accounts for strategic interests so perhaps it is possible.  Is it valid?  Not really, not any more than firing up Balance of Power and seeing what happens.  It's fun to think about, and the Russians are interested in the model, the researchers say.  But if you have seen the Russian space program you can imagine a video game might be more accurate.



Citation: Klaus Desmet, Michel Le Breton, Ignacio Ortuño-Ortín and Shlomo Weber, 'The stability and breakup of nations: a quantitative analysis', Journal of Economic Growth, 2011, Volume 16, Number 3, Pages 183-213 DOI: 10.1007/s10887-011-9068-z

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