Dramatic outcomes occur when multiple events coincide in a perfect storm

An apocalyptic article, The Alarming Signposts that this Could Be a Crazy Year by Jonathan Rose.

Rose starts out.

I was fifteen, it was 1968, and seeking refuge from adolescence and the turmoil of the times, I often curled up with science fiction. When your world spins apart, you can find some respite in alternate worlds. And so I did – until one story wrenched me back to the chaotic present.

It was “The Year of the Jackpot,” in which Robert A. Heinlein stunningly foresaw it all.

The story had been published in 1952, but it conjured up the annus mirabilis/horribilis that I could see flashing before me every day: nudity in public, nudity in the churches, transvestites, draft-dodgers, cigar-smoking feminists, bishops promoting sex education, ludicrous lawsuits, a “startling rise in dissident evangelical cults,” and the Alabama state legislature proposing to abolish physics (not the teaching of physics, no, they wanted to repeal the laws of nuclear physics). Heinlein even predicted that weird antiwar protesters would be arrested in Chicago and disrupt their subsequent trial. In the story, a bespectacled statistician (they always wear glasses) discovers that all varieties of human behavior move in waves, and now (as he plots on graphs) all the waves are cresting at once. “It's as clear as a bank statement,” he warns. “This year the human race is letting down its hair, flipping its lip with a finger, and saying, 'Wubba, wubba, wubba."'

The first thing that caught my attention was a personal discrepancy. On the one hand I am pretty confident that I have not read this story by Heinlein. On the other hand, the synopsis, "all varieties of human behavior move in waves, and now (as he plots on graphs) all the waves are cresting at once", sounds so familiar. Have I actually read this story and just don't recall it? Alternatively, have I read a similar story with the same statistical premise by someone else? I don't know and won't know until I put my hands on a copy of this and see if reading it refreshes my memory. It is a puzzling position, though, to have two such contradictory impressions at the same time.

Rose then goes on into apocalyptic mode:

For historians, prediction is a mug’s game, but I’ve studied the graphs (metaphorically) and I can’t help but think that the waves are about to peak once again. The Chinese economy is slowing and will probably drag the rest of the world into a slump – and as a distraction, China just might project her naval forces into the western Pacific. Vladimir Putin has already pounced on the Ukraine and Syria, and may push his luck in the Baltics or the Arctic. The European Union, swamped with Greek debt and refugees, could go the way of the League of Nations and the Holy Roman Empire (both of which seemed like good ideas at the time). The centrist political consensus that united European elites is already giving way to radical populism on the left and right. Just when you think Middle East turmoil couldn’t get worse, the entire region could descend into an Islamic civil war. We may face another financial meltdown, having never really recovered from the last one, and this time outraged voters would probably (1) make another round of bailouts politically impossible and (2) demand blood. It’s entirely possible that, a year from now, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders could face off in a presidential election. Even if neither of them wins their party’s nomination, they could transform American politics – just as Eugene McCarthy did. This scenario assumes and hopes that we will see nothing like the assassinations of 1968, though Twitter now buzzes with threats against Trump. But if yet another black suspect is killed by a white police officer, there could be urban rioting on a scale that we last witnessed almost 50 years ago.

Certainly anything is possible but I wouldn't put this series of impressionistic interpretations into the category of rigorous forecasting.

But it does, for whatever reason, crystalize the oddity of contextual determinism and individual determinism.

There are many trends which are clearly fundamental; they are underlying forces which might be hard to predict in detail but which are in many ways ineluctable. Bill Gates, for example rode a technology wave that carried along many people. Some argue that he was simply in the right place at the right time. He went to a high school with an early computer lab where he put in long hours of code writing and experimentation that put him in a good position to exploit the opportunities that the technology wave and Moore's Law were about to make available. The argument goes that if it weren't Gates, it would have been someone else. He was just lucky. This is the spin that Gladwell puts on it in one of his books. This is contextual determinism. its not the person, its the circumstance.

On the other hand you have the individual determinists. Their reading of the story is that yes, there was a wave growing, but that there was nothing that was predetermined. Gates spent the thousands of hours immersed in the emerging but not yet comprehended technology wave and he took bold gambles against the advice of everyone else. He achieved the outcomes he did through his own unique efforts and not through luck alone.

Our desire for contrasting, binary explanations probably blinds us to the reality. It is not either/or, it is if/then. Yes there are fundamental trends with contextual determinism and path dependency. But there is also decision-making and choice. Perhaps Gates might not have been a technology billionaire had he listened to others and not dropped out of Harvard to pursue his vision. But almost certainly he would have been successful in some other field of endeavor, just not to the same degree.

Yes, there is a degree of luck but, as Pasteur says, "fortune favors the prepared mind." Which gets to Rose's final paragraph.

If you ask whether the Bastille was stormed because bread prices were skyrocketing, or because Louis XVI was inept, or because his tax system was hopelessly corrupt and his government couldn’t pay its bills, or because the armed forces had been humiliated in military adventures, or because the Enlightenment had undermined faith in the established order, or because the lower classes wanted an end to feudalism, or because the middle classes wanted power, most historians would answer: “Sure.” Revolutions never have single causes; they take off only when multiple dysfunctions coincide in a perfect political storm.