Pathways for socio-economic system transitions expressed as a Markov chain
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Cross-impact balance (CIB) analysis provides a system-theoretical view of scenarios useful for investigating complex socio-economic systems. CIB can synthesize a variety of qualitative or quantitative inputs and return information suggestive of system evolution. Current software tools for CIB are limited to identifying system attractors as well as describing system evolution from only one scenario of initial conditions at a time. Through this study, we enhance CIB by developing and applying a method that considers all possible system evolutions as transitions in a Markov chain. We investigated a simple three-variable system (27 possible scenarios) of the demographic transition and were able to generally replicate the findings of traditional CIB. Through our experiments with four possible approaches to produce CIB Markov chains, we found that information about transition pathways is gained; however, information about system attractors may be lost. Through a comparison of model results to a recent literature review on human demography, we found that low-income countries are more likely to remain stuck in a demographic trap if economic development is not prioritized alongside educational gains. Future work could test our comparative methodological findings for systems comprised of more than three variables.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.007 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".