Static analysis, static projection, or static scoring is a simplified analysis wherein the effect of an immediate change to a system is calculated without regard to the longer-term response of the system to that change. If the short-term effect is then extrapolated to the long term, such extrapolation is inappropriate. Its opposite, dynamic analysis or dynamic scoring, is an attempt to take into account how the system is likely to respond to the change over time. One common use of these terms is budget policy in the United States, although it also occurs in many other statistical disputes.

Examples

A famous example of extrapolation of static analysis comes from

overpopulation Overpopulation or overabundance is a phenomenon in which a species' population becomes larger than the carrying capacity of its environment. This may be caused by increased birth rates, lowered mortality rates, reduced predation or large scale m ...

theory. Starting with

Thomas Malthus Thomas Robert Malthus (; 13/14 February 1766 – 29 December 1834) was an English cleric, scholar and influential economist in the fields of political economy and demography. In his 1798 book '' An Essay on the Principle of Population'', Mal ...

at the end of the 18th century, various commentators have projected some short-term population growth trend for years into the future, resulting in the prediction that there would be disastrous overpopulation within a generation or two. Malthus himself essentially claimed that British society would collapse under the weight of overpopulation by 1850, while during the 1960s the book ''

The Population Bomb ''The Population Bomb'' is a 1968 book co-authored by Stanford University Professor emeritus Paul R. Ehrlich and Stanford senior researcher emeritus in conservation biology Anne Howland Ehrlich. It predicted worldwide famine due to overpopulat ...

'' made similar dire predictions for the US by the 1980s. For economic policy discussions, predictions that assume no significant change of behavior in response to change in incentives are often termed static projection (and in the US Congressional Budget Office, "static scoring"). However, when applied to dynamically responsive systems, static analysis improperly extrapolated tends to produce results that are not only incorrect but opposite in direction to what was predicted, as shown in the following applications.

Applications

Technological singularity

Some have criticized the notion of a

technological singularity The technological singularity—or simply the singularity—is a hypothetical future point in time at which technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible, resulting in unforeseeable changes to human civilization. According to the m ...

as an instance of static analysis:

accelerating change In futures studies and the history of technology, accelerating change is the observed exponential nature of the rate of technological change in recent history, which may suggest faster and more profound change in the future and may or may not be ...

in some factor of information growth, such as

Moore's law Moore's law is the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit (IC) doubles about every two years. Moore's law is an observation and projection of a historical trend. Rather than a law of physics, it is an empi ...

or computer intelligence, is projected into the future, resulting in

exponential growth Exponential growth is a process that increases quantity over time. It occurs when the instantaneous rate of change (that is, the derivative) of a quantity with respect to time is proportional to the quantity itself. Described as a function, a ...

or hyperbolic growth (to a singularity), that suggests that everything will be known by a relatively early date.

Notes

{{DEFAULTSORT:Static Analysis Misuse of statistics Public finance Forecasting

Examples

Applications

Technological singularity

See also

Notes