The Thermodynamics of Social Processes: The Teen Birth Phenomenon

Abstract

We argue that a process of social interest is a balance of order and randomness, thereby producing a departure from a stationary diffusion process. The strength of this effect vanishes if the order to randomness intensity ratio vanishes, and this property allows us to reveal, although in an indirect way, the existence of a finite order to randomness intensity ratio. We aim at detecting this effect. We introduce a method of statistical analysis alternative to the compression procedures, with which the limitations of the traditional Kolmogorov-Sinai approach are bypassed. We prove that this method makes it possible for us to build up a memory detector, which signals the presence of even very weak memory, provided that this is persistent over large time intervals. We apply the analysis to the study of the teen birth phenomenon and we find that the unmarried teen births are a manifestation of a social process with a memory more intense than that of the married teens. We attempt to give a social interpretation of this effect.