A few weeks back there was a lot of talk about how the DNC and the Clinton campaign were still campaigning like it's 1999. This is a common human tendency, and it reminded me of a branch of mathematics called "catastrophe theory." I was hoping that I would get some further insight into how the math might apply to the election, but nothing has come up, so I'm just going to describe the mathematics and see if anyone has a good idea how to apply it.

The ideas here are actually not that complicated, and I think I can explain it all with a single picture:

Imagine that you have some "system" (like the voters) and it has some properties (like income distribution). In the picture, these properties are the X and Y axes. The system is only stable for certain combinations of these properties, and the stable combinations are all on the line in the middle of the graph.

If you look at the graph, you can see that sometimes there is more than one Y value for a given X value. This is because - unlike it was in algebra class - Y is not completely determined by X . Instead, there are several possible values of Y, but at any given point in time, the system only has one particular value (labelled S).

Now most systems try not to change too abruptly. So if the system's value for X moves a bit to the right, the point S will move along the curve to the new value of X. Where things get interesting is at the u-turn in the curve where it starts to head back. If the value of X is pushed past the end of this turn, the system suddenly can't become stable again by changing Y by a small amount. It has to jump down to the lower line at the point labelled C. This jump is called a catastrophe.

Most people assume that dynamic, real world systems are not like this because they often aren't. Even the toy one in the picture usually doesn't jump around, and this makes people complacent. But when it does happen, everyone goes "No one expected that!". Except the mathematicians and a few prophets.

Many people have commented on how this election year seems unusual. Personally, I think they are all intuiting that we are hitting one of these catastrophic transitions. I have no idea what the nearest stable configuration will be, but my intuition is that income inequality and a general sense of powerlessness are the variables being changed.

This is not quite the revolution Bernie is talking about. He is speaking about actively creating the change, of choosing the new stable configuration for the body politic. What catastrophe theory suggests is that if we don't make this choice, one may be chosen for us. And we have no guarantee that this state of the system will be better for us than the previous one.

Transitions like this come along only every generation or two. The last one was in the 1960s, and I think it is time for the next one. This is why it is so important this year to choose what we want instead of what we fear.