My TakeMore predictions about a looming Chinese-American war

This is the first column in a three-part series by Alex Lo. Read part one here.

You have heard ad nauseam about the Thucydides trap. The following are three lesser-known theories that more or less predict a blow-up between the world’s two superpowers, at least on certain readings of their proponents.

1. Zipf’s law or the principle of least effort

Here I beg your indulgence for a brief dive into word frequency distribution in the English and Chinese language before getting into geopolitics. George Zipf was a prominent Harvard philologist and linguist in the first half of the last century. He got the credit even though the French philosopher, Guillaume Ferrero, was the first to propose the principle in 1894.

In his study of English, Zipf finds an inverse relationship between the frequency of word occurrence and what he calls their ranks. Rank 1 words like “the” and rank 2 words like “of” are therefore the most frequently used; and the higher the ranks, the less frequent those words are used. To prove his point, he made a complete count of 300,000-plus words in James Joyce’s Ulysses. His principle also explains why some English words are longer than others and why a word can have multiple meanings, not just one.

On a logarithmic graph, this inverse relationship plots a more or less straight line. How steep or shallow the slope of the line tells us something interesting about the phenomenon being studied, as we will see below. His line is analogous to the straight line in a simple regression analysis in statistics.

“Each individual will adopt a course of action that will involve the expenditure of the probably least average of his work,” Zipf wrote of the principle of least effort.