BCSSS

International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics

2nd Edition, as published by Charles François 2004 Presented by the Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science Vienna for public access.

About

The International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics was first edited and published by the system scientist Charles François in 1997. The online version that is provided here was based on the 2nd edition in 2004. It was uploaded and gifted to the center by ASC president Michael Lissack in 2019; the BCSSS purchased the rights for the re-publication of this volume in 200?. In 2018, the original editor expressed his wish to pass on the stewardship over the maintenance and further development of the encyclopedia to the Bertalanffy Center. In the future, the BCSSS seeks to further develop the encyclopedia by open collaboration within the systems sciences. Until the center has found and been able to implement an adequate technical solution for this, the static website is made accessible for the benefit of public scholarship and education.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z

HOG CYCLE

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A succession of more or less periodic gluts and shortages triggered by irrealistic forecastings based on spurious extrapolations (of the type "more of the same")

The expression alludes to the known fact that, if there are few hogs (or any other commodity) on the market, they will fetch a high price.

This will induce many farmers to breed hogs, which results in a future glut of hogs and, inevitably, in a crash of their sales value.

"Extrapolating from the present, (farmers) get the future wrong" (Economist 23.03.96, p.13)

The hog cycle is a good example of a forecasting trap.

Extrapolation from a short term trend is practically always wrong, because there are longer trends that supersede the shorter one. However, as this can also be true of the longer trends themselves, even the anticyclic view does not offer a very high degree of probability, and still less any certainty.

Categories

  • 1) General information
  • 2) Methodology or model
  • 3) Epistemology, ontology and semantics
  • 4) Human sciences
  • 5) Discipline oriented

Publisher

Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science(2020).

To cite this page, please use the following information:

Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science (2020). Title of the entry. In Charles François (Ed.), International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics (2). Retrieved from www.systemspedia.org/[full/url]

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