Predicting Social Systems – a Challenge

There is a lot of pressure on social scientists to predict. Not only is an ability to predict implicit in all requests to assess or optimise policy options before they are tried, but prediction is also the “gold standard” of science. However, there is a debate among modellers of complex social systems about whether this is possible to any meaningful extent. In this context, the aim of this paper is to issue the following challenge:

Are there any documented examples of models that predict useful aspects of complex social systems?