Static Analysis - Examples

Examples

A famous example of static analysis comes from overpopulation theory. Starting with Thomas Malthus 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 made similar dire predictions for the US by the 1980s.

Similarly, some scientists used a short-term trend of temperature declines during the 1930s to theorize that the world would be in an ice age by 1978. As with the overpopulation theories, the projection was less accurate than a roll of the dice because it didn't take into account how factors interact, nor how a short-term trend was being treated like a long-term trend.

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"). By contrast, dynamic scoring refers to projections based on historical response of population to the effect of economic policy changes such as tax increases or cuts.

Typically, static analysis works for very simple systems: for example, how fast snow is accumulating in what is thought to be the midpoint of a blizzard. But even then it must be tempered with rationality—guess how much longer the storm might actually last, rather than assuming that snow will fall continually for the next sixty years, and project the average of the storm so far, rather than plotting the curve of its growth as if that will continue to increase for the second half.

However, when applied to dynamically responsive systems, static analysis tends to produce results that are not only incorrect but opposite in direction to what was predicted, as shown in the following applications.