A research scientist and winner of the Ig Nobel Prize (for scientists who make discoveries that “first make people laugh and then make them think”), Fisher explains the business of calamity prediction in accessible prose and everyday anecdotes. The third in his series on the science of the ordinary (previous entries were “Rock, Paper, Scissors,” and “The Perfect Swarm”) “Crashes, Crises, and Calamities” is a toolkit for understanding what is at stake in our lives and for the planet — and what happens when we don’t understand what a disaster looks like in the making.

Fisher spoke to Salon over the phone about three simple signs to heed, what animals sense that we don’t, and why predicting the future is more realistic than ever before.

There’s a long, spotty history of trying to predict the future. Can you talk about that?

People have always been trying to predict the future. Of course, when it comes to predicting the future of society, nothing has worked, even when you look at modern economic methods of prediction, which are very often based on the assumption that the future is going to be the same as the past. That’s the same as the Egyptians and Sumerians, who drew correlations between the position of the stars and the growth of crops and attempted to apply that to the future. The whole point of critical transitions and sudden change is that the future is totally different from the past. Basically, any attempt to predict critical transitions is nonsense, and I include people attempting to use biblical prophesies. I especially include them, I’m afraid.

This is our first real chance to predict when dramatic changes are about to occur. We haven’t been in this position before, right through history. Learning how to use it in time is the next step, and I’m not sure that we will.

What has changed that allows us to make better predictions now than in the past?

We have not had these very powerful computers that could put in the work to make the signals show up against a very noisy background. We’re in a similar position now as we were in the old days of television: You knew a picture was there, but you weren’t quite sure what it was about. As it improved, it became sharper and the background became less murky and snowy. The same thing is happening with the analysis of the fluctuations in different situations.

Your book claims that you can see the signs of an environmental disaster in much the same way you can see the signs of a divorce. How does that work?

It’s a very simple idea that applies to a huge range of problems, from predicting social catastrophes to global catastrophes. It’s looking for the subtle early-warning signs. It’s a bit like watching a swan swimming across a lake. It looks like the swan is going along perfectly smoothly, but underneath there’s a whole lot of things happening: Its feet are paddling furiously, it might run into something. We call those “critical transitions,” when something dramatic is going to occur.

When things are going smoothly, there is a balance between processes that are working to maintain control. And when these processes get out of balance, you get a “runaway.” In a marriage, there might be a family argument — someone says something that provokes someone else to say something nastier, and you get this escalation. In physics we call it the runaway effect.

When you get a dramatic transition it is because the runaway process has taken over and the question is: How can you tell when that’s going to happen? Until recently we haven’t had a clue, and it’s been with the aid of some very sophisticated mathematics, which I don’t go into in the book, that we can see what happens when we get close to one of these critical points. There are subtle warning signs, weak signals that you have got to keep your eyes open for.

What are these warning signs?

One of the signs is more extreme conditions. In a relationship, for example, you might get a period when you have violent arguments and then periods when you’re lovey-dovey. If you get these extremes, or these things happen more frequently, that’s a warning sign that you’re getting very, very close to collapse.

Another thing that happens is quick fluctuation between different states, like, for example, when the cod fisheries collapsed in Newfoundland. The fishermen wouldn’t believe it because they had one or two years of good catches, but if they had been aware of [the warning signs] before that ultimate fluctuation between high fish stocks and low fish stocks, they would have said, “uh oh.”

The third warning sign is loss of resilience. When something happens to disturb the situation, it can be very hard to recover. I like to think of that in terms of a relationship: You think you’re getting along OK, you’re agreeing and you go out to a party. Then something happens. One person gets offered a drink and takes it, and the other gets mad. Rather than recover from the situation and apologize, they glower at one another all night, and it gets increasingly hard to recover from the disturbance.

How much can the average person do to predict disaster, or is it all up to the people in lab coats?

Just a month ago, I was playing five sets of tennis three times a week when I just happened to slip and sprung a small hernia. I saw a hernia surgeon, and he said, Oh by the way, if you’re going to have an operation, you’re probably going to need to have an examination first by a cardiologist. So I went and saw the cardiologist, and he did a few tests on me, and the result is that I am going to have a triple bypass because he found that I had two blocked arteries, and I didn’t have a clue.

But I might have noticed, applying the theories of my own book, that for a few months what’s been happening is, I’ve been having periods of extreme energy and then extreme lethargy, and swinging between extreme states.

Were there warning signs for the recent disaster in Japan?

Tsunamis, earthquakes, volcanic explosions, are the most difficult things to predict because they are the simplest. The warning signs are most apparent in complex situations, but predicting these one-off natural disasters is very, very hard.

Mind you, if you look on a very large scale, building a nuclear reactor on the ring of fire doesn’t strike me as the most sensible thing to do. Plenty of warning signs there, aren’t there?

There have been stories about animals running away from home before an earthquake for as long as I can remember. You talk about this a bit in your book — can we really rely on animals to help us see into the future of earthquakes or tsunamis?

I don’t think anybody has looked closely enough at whether animals really do, on a regular basis, act strangely before an earthquake. But if they do, then why would they? One possibility is that animals are responding to something quite physical. If we could find out, and if it was a real effect, and we could measure it sufficiently to check that this is what the animals are picking up, then we wouldn’t need the animals. But it’s not clear. My guess, and it’s only a guess, is that animals do pick up weak signals and that they do respond to them with fear.

I was in Sri Lanka just a fortnight after the Christmas Day tsunami, and our driver happened to be in the region south of Sri Lanka just before it came. He told us that there were many animals that he saw heading for the hills. That’s another story that reinforces the idea that animals might be picking up something. It might be changes in pressure. All we know is that we don’t have that sense.

How does Western society deal with predicting the future differently than other parts of the world?

We’re a bit more self-absorbed, and we talk about individual freedoms and individuality. But that concept is quite alien to some other cultures. Some cultures think in much more of a group mentality.

It’s a scary question, because you start asking a question like this at a dinner party and you get people who have been thinking about this, and the future of the world, and it always comes back to the one thing where no one is prepared to grasp the nettle. We can talk all we want to about predicting the future, but the one thing you can predict is that the continued growth in population is going to lead to catastrophe. Underlying it all — our behavior, our pollution, our use of resources, the way that we muck up ecosystems — underlying all that is the fact that there are just too many damn people. And there’s no way that everyone in the world could live at a moderate Western level. There’s not the resources. You can make that prediction without talking about fluctuation or talking about extremes.

And it is very hard, but our best chance is to look for those weak signals. Our best chance is not to wait until the event is almost upon us. Look for the tiny little hints beforehand and say, “OK, look, something is coming up here. Let us prepare ourselves. It’s important and really does matter.”

1996, The Chicago Tribune: Is it real?

“It just seems silly and obstinate that ‘The Real World’ refuses to acknowledge it is a cultural phenomenon and that some of its participants enter this Warholian bargain fully expecting to become stars. Or that the show refuses to acknowledge that a participant’s moonlight walk hand-in-hand with a new beau is changed by a camera being there recording it for national consumption.”

1997, Richmond Times-Dispatch: Is it still edgy?

“Despite the well-worn premise, ‘The Real World’ offers enough petty fighting to hold interest. But it’s no longer groundbreaking; it’s simply a soap opera. And if the long success of shows like ‘General Hospital’ is any indication and MTV continues to pick new settings, we may eventually see seven strangers picked to live in a house … in Chesterfield.”

2001, Salon: Is it still entertaining?

“When exactly ‘The Real World’ jumped the shark is debatable, but clearly the show isn’t the consistently dramatic and entertaining half-hour that it used to be. The advent of gimmicks — like forcing the cast to work a job together (which began in Miami with the infamous business that never got off the ground) or casting close friends (as happened during the Seattle season) — seemed to indicate that the show was moving away from a proven formula.”

2004, San Diego Union-Tribune: Is it mere exhibitionism?

If “The Real World” was once a fascinating window into the lives of young adults, now it’s little more than a Peeping Tom snatching glimpses of what happens when people stop being polite and start getting drunk and naked.

2006, Chicago Daily Herald: Is anybody watching?

“In the early days, MTV was the only game in town. Everyone watched it. Everyone talked about it. Its effect was so powerful that MTV’s first audience is often referred to as ‘the MTV Generation.’ …

Today, MTV no longer has an exclusive hold on teenagers. The network competes with iPods, popular Web sites like myspace.com and a number of youth-based television networks for the attention of young people. The network is now just one face in the crowd.”

2006, The Bradenton Herald: Do we still need it?

“Maybe after 25 years the network has run its course. How much longer can the ‘Real World’ series continue? How hip is the 17th season of anything? And aren’t young music fans now better served by MySpace, the online destination where bands stream their songs and videos for free and encourage feedback?”

2009, The New York Times: Is it a relic from another era?

“There is something about ‘The Real World’ that feels permanently stuck in the early 1990s, when issues of sexual orientation were guaranteed to rattle. There’s so little rattling, and seemingly so little prospect of sexual tension, that ‘The Real World: Brooklyn’ threatens to sink to the innocuousness of ‘The Love Boat.’”

2011, The Daily Beast: Is it being unfairly dismissed?

“What’s unique to ‘The Real World’ is that it’s the only show in which young people are put together and encouraged to discuss difference in substantive ways.

‘The Real World”s sustained ratings success is not because of its casts’ alcohol-fueled romps, but because at its core, it’s still the same show it always has been: one about kids from different backgrounds working through their differences and finding surprising commonalities along the way. Which is something you’ll never see out of Snooki.”

Salon spoke to Lofton over the phone about Oprah’s message, the daytime guru’s own skeptical views of religion, and what our love of Oprah tells us about the American hunger for help and guidance.

What was it about Oprah that made you think of her in the context of American religious history?

Within these very corporate formats of daytime television, extraordinary forms of suffering were being confessed to and described. There’s a great book about Oprah by Eva Illouz, “Oprah Winfrey and the Glamour of Misery,” and Illouz points out something that I dig into, and that is the strange way in which the extremity of human despair — not merely estranged spouses, we’re talking stories of people coming home and seeing that their spouse has murdered all their kids and then themselves — are being dealt with in the same way as these topics that are seemingly shallow. Good glasses for a spring party, best new strategies for boyfriend wear. This exposure of human need at 4 p.m. on a weekday afternoon made me think, “What is this thing?” We’re so accustomed now to reality programming and a whole spate of shows spun off from Oprah, but, as a scholar of a religion, I think it’s one of our jobs to be cued into how people manage pain, and the idea of evil, or whether or not we live in a just world.

What is Oprah’s religious background?

Oprah talks about a Baptist church that her grandmother took her to in Mississippi. She tells an anecdote about how she was a successful young churchgoer and was asked to preach in front of that audience and was a very good girl who memorized scriptural passages. Then in her adulthood, she has some criticism of male figures in the church and the dominance of male authorities and it seems that by the time we get to the ’90s, it’s circulating that she’s no longer a member of the church but she continues to use Christian idioms in her conversational speech. She says, “Jesus lives.” She’ll say, “Amen.” She’ll occasionally sing lines from obviously Protestant hymns, but she claims now that she’s no longer interested in organizational religion, and she’s more interested in a personal relationship with God. Indeed, she has around her a large collection of spiritual purveyors of a wide variety: Buddhist, Hindu, Unity Church. Every flavor of the contemporary, spiritual rainbow is welcomed into her studio.

What does our reverence for Oprah say about our culture and religion in America today?

I think it says that most Americans see very little that is contradictory about connecting consumption and spirituality. I think it also shows that no matter how anti-establishment, or anti-authoritarian, or freedom-hungry Americans claim to be, they are also, always, hungry for help. Hungry for recognition. Hungry for guidance in the mad excesses of the American material world. Hungry for someone to limit their choices a little, and offer some discriminating preferences on your behalf.

If Oprah is a preacher, what is she telling us? What is her gospel?

Her gospel — her good news — is you. The good news is that if you take hold of your life; if you discover (as she says) your best life, anything is possible. Of course, this good news is translated not only through her exhibition of you — you through her audience members, guests, columnists, message board commentators — but also through the unending rehearsal of her. The good news is her revelations about her best life — lived, she says, in service to you.

Why do you think so many people who shun religion are comfortable looking to Oprah for “spiritual guidance”?

Precisely because she says she doesn’t seem typical in her authority. Because she represents — in her race and gender and origins — being utterly outside established power. Also, she isn’t preaching to sell you something singular. She says, over and over: I am here to let you be you. My answers are mine, and they made my struggling life something fantastic to share. You’re not joining a group, you’re just finding your inner fabulous. This is appealing to people who associate religion with controlling authority, rigid dogma or social adherence. This is a religion for those who don’t want to be religious, but want to feel revelation.

You connect Oprah to early traditions in American evangelical preaching. Not just her charisma and eloquent speaking ability, but less obvious connections. Can you explain that?

I connect her to two figures — George Whitefield, a prominent 18th century minister, and Charles Finney, a 19th century minister — who weren’t merely interested in spreading the gospel but also eliciting conversion. There’s an idea that a gospel is true if the purveyor is willing to talk about how it’s made. Oprah does that every time she does a show about “Oprah without makeup” or a confession about her weight gain — this is her showing the strings of her own construction.

The other tradition I connect her to is the emergence of women as evangelical preachers, who always had to be conscious that they were being somewhat insurrectionist to the Word by even being out in the public. Oprah tries to appeal to an audience that wants to see a successful and capable woman without being too perfect. She can’t be too obnoxious in the face of the conservative domestic idea that we still have for women. So Oprah isn’t married nor does she have children because if she had those things and was also trying to be Oprah, her audience would be uncomfortable. That she is free to minister only to them and is not responsible to a domestic life actually puts her in a long line of preachers with similarly ambiguous lives.

What do you think of Oprah after spending so much time scrutinizing her?

I think that I’d be doing a great disservice to her work if I don’t emphasize that her viewers take from her inordinate comfort and a life that they describe as asking too much of them. The second thing that I think about is the extraordinary American fact of her. She talks about this a lot too, and this is where she becomes a great subject for me. She is an indication of the American dream. I’m interested in how that dream is unbelievable, extraordinarily powerful, and possibly corrupt.

According to a statement from the British embassy in Mexico, Buckingham Palace is aware of Chavez’s hunger strike but no invitation will be extended to her.

Anticipation is mounting over the royal wedding elsewhere, as well — a team of U.K. graphic designers has created souvenir “sick bags” and invited citizens to “keep this handy on April 29th 2011.” Lydia Leith is selling the bags for £3 each and actually sounds well intentioned. She told Canada’s National Post:

A few people seem to think it’s a serious jibe at the monarch but it was only ever intended as a bit of fun. Truth be told, I’m a bit of a fan and have a fair bit of royal memorabilia myself — including the 1984 royal marriage pencil case which is sitting on my desk in front of me.

Pity we stick to balloons and birdseed at American weddings.

Szuchman, an editor at the Wall Street Journal, and Anderson, a reporter at the New York Times, spoke to hundreds of couples and surveyed even more to come up with the case studies they present in their book. In a crowded genre, their relationship book certainly has an unconventional approach. There’s no hand holding and soulful gazing here; “Spousonomics” is for people who appreciate good, old-fashioned logic.

Salon spoke to Paula Szuchman over the phone about the surprising joy of bar graphs, why you should go to bed angry and the benefits of scheduled sex.

Why is the book called “Spousonomics”? Is this part of a naming trend started by “Freakonomics”?

“Freakonomics” definitely spawned something. And this is a new way of thinking about a relationship, ostensibly an easier way of thinking about it. You don’t need a “feelings journal” or a “courage log.” I think there’s something appealing about the debunking nature of “Freakonomics” that showed people how — if you actually look at what drives people, what motivates people to do what they do — you can have a better understanding of why we end up in certain situations. 

Why did you find economics to be a good approach to relationships?

I had recently gotten married and, like a lot of people, the first year of marriage was hard. We had this argument, and my husband is very visual, so he pulled out a notepad and drew a very simple graph charting the mood of our relationship over time. It was amazing — our relationship boiled down to a bar graph. It wasn’t super-scientific, but we saw that it wasn’t all downs. There were some ups, and we thought about how we could get back to those “up” times. It was a practical approach.

I work at the Wall Street Journal, and so I’m mired in finance and economics. It was interesting to see the parallels between some economic terms and my relationship. There were booms and busts.

Doesn’t looking at marriage from the perspective of economics take the romance out of it?

What is the romantic solution to constantly arguing about the same thing?

Economics by itself is not romantic. If you have a problem in your relationship that you’re trying to solve, that’s not a romantic endeavor. Going to a couple’s counselor is not romantic. Arguing all night is not romantic.

What is surprisingly romantic is strategizing. It’s silly to think that we don’t strategize as couples — if we want to go away for the weekend with our girlfriends, we think about it. We think, how can I present it so that it will have the best response? Strategizing can be romantic because it means you’re thinking about the other person.

“Go to bed angry” is one of the unusual pieces of advice you give. Can you explain what you mean by that?

We turn a lot of commonplace advice on its head in the book. The economic principle of loss aversion says that we hate to lose even more than we love to win. We really, really hate to lose, and if we sense that we are about to lose we start to act irrationally. That happens to a lot of people when they’re arguing — especially at night, because they’re tired, they’ve had a long day and emotions run high. Before you know it, a little tiff has turned into World War III. You stay up all night trying to win at all costs and in the meantime you’re losing sleep. Sometimes staying up all night arguing is the worst thing you can do to resolve that argument.

But if you wake up in the morning having gotten some sleep, you are going to be more clear-headed, and you’ll be able to start off with an aim to resolve an argument instead of keeping it going with a blind determination to win.

Guys love that advice, by the way.

Why is that? Is it because it’s logical and that appeals to men?

Yeah, the stereotype fits. I don’t like saying it, but it feels like more women want to stay up and resolve the argument and the men say, “I have to go to bed. I just have to go to bed.”

You suggest that couples should have sex a certain number of times each week and one partner shouldn’t get to back out. Isn’t that kind of harsh?

We’re definitely not saying “Do it x number of times a week.” We look at a couple who committed to three times a week, but we don’t say that’s right for everyone. We conducted a study and one of the questions is: Why don’t you have enough sex with your spouse? And the No. 1 reason is being too tired. The second or third reason is being too busy. If you go back to the theory that economics is the study of scarce resources, then you have your answer right there. People are tired. They have a certain amount of wakeful hours in a day. You have to go to work, you might have kids, and then sex is the last priority. It can be a lot easier to go to bed than to do one more thing — have sex. So how do you overcome that?

In economics you lower cost and up demand. The idea is, make it easier, make it less costly to have sex and at the end of a long day, after you’ve worked and eaten dinner and put the kids to bed, it can feel really costly to have sex because what you really want is to go to sleep. There’s all sorts of ways to lower cost. Maybe you do it before you have dinner. Or you make a plan. Don’t make each other guess whether or not you’re in the mood. Send a clear signal.

Again, is the advice romantic? Maybe not. But have you ever regretted having sex with your partner? Most people would say no. You don’t regret it. It ends up being pretty romantic in the end.

You put a high premium on “transparency” in a relationship. Can you talk a bit about what you mean by transparency?

A lot of miscommunication happens around mind reading. We talked to a lot of couples where one person would say: He or she should know what I want. He should know that I want the laundry done, and he should know that I want to be told how beautiful I am. My question is, really? Why? Why should another person know exactly what you’re thinking? You wouldn’t expect your boss to read your mind. Why would you expect anyone else but your spouse to read your mind?

I noticed there were very few couples in your book who weren’t heterosexual. How did you choose which couples to include?

We did focus groups around the country, asked friends and friends of friends to get groups of friends together, and we tried to have a large swatch of different ages and demographics — East Coast, West Coast, and middle of the country. But we did not end up interviewing a lot of homosexual couples. It was just the way it went. We also did a survey that was a lot more randomized, a national survey that looked across all demographics. But maybe that’s something for the sequel. Gay marriage-o-nomics.