nobelist murray gell-mann of the santa fe institute gave a lecture on patterns in cultural anthropology today. gell-mann demonstrated how various phenomena in sociology, anthropology and history follow guttman scaling.
Scaling is the branch of measurement that involves the construction of an instrument that associates qualitative constructs with quantitative metric units. Scaling evolved out of efforts in psychology and education to measure “unmeasurable” constructs like authoritarianism and self esteem. In many ways, scaling remains one of the most arcane and misunderstood aspects of social research measurement. And, it attempts to do one of the most difficult of research tasks — measure abstract concepts.
this discovery, which was long suppressed because it did not fit the prevailing ideology in anthropology, delivers some supporting evidence for the ideas expressed in asimov’s psychohistory, the premise that the development of societies can be modeled, and that public policy can be forecast by mathematical means.
with the end of anthropology likely, as indigenous tribes disappear from the face of the earth, new venues for research need to be found. gell-mann suggested acculturation and the study of migration as promising areas. closely related, a study of history by arnold toynbee is a seminal work that deserves more attention.