Notes from the 25th annual TED conference in Long Beach, CA.; first posted on www.stltoday.com, my newspaper’s website.
Political scientist Bruce Bueno De Mesquita is exceedingly confident of his ability to predict the future in matters of politics and to prove his point, he offered the final day of the annual TED conference a bold forecast about Iran:
By the end of this year or early 2010, the chances that Iran will build a bomb will decrease significantly. “Iran will make enough weapons grade fuel to show they can, but not enough to actually make a bomb,” said De Mesquita, a professor at New York University. This is not the outcome the United States would prefer, he added, but will be one it can live with.
De Mesquita was one of the final speakers of the four-day conference in Long Beach, Calif. TED, which stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, drew some of the world’s leading scholars, technologists, business leaders and a handful of Hollywood celebrities.
How did De Mesquita come to this forecast and why is he so sure of it?
He applies “rationale choice theory,” to situations nvolving persuasion and coercion. It is rooted in game theory, meaning it requires math, and is effective in forecasting situations involving negotiations, such as politics and business, but not the markets, he warns. The CIA has found that this method to be 90 percent accurate, he said.
Rational choice theory is rooted in an assumption that all people are rationally self-interested, “they are just trying to do what they think is in their own best interest,” he said. As an aside, he notes there are two exceptions: two-year-olds and schizophrenics.
The theory factors in the influencers around the person at the top of the ladder. Is not enough to understand what the president wants on a foreign policy issue, for instance, because he is influenced by his secretary of state and she, in turn, is influenced by other advisers.
During his talk Saturday, De Mesquita listed four kinds of information needed to use rational theory successfully:
–Who has a stake in a decision?
–What do they say they want?
–How focused are the on the problem at hand?
–How much clout could they bring to bear if they focused intently on the situation?
He finds this information from a variety of sources, including newspapers and experts, and loads into computer models for analysis.To make his prediction about Iran, De Mesquita analyzed three questions:
- How secure is the Iranian theocracy?
- Where will the nuclear program go?
- Will Ahmedinejad remain in power?
His computer model included 87 Iranian decision makers and public polling data. Virtually no one in Iran wants to test a bomb, he said, and his model’s analysis of the country’s power structure showed that those who do want to test a bomb are fading from power.
TED Curator Chris Anderson signaled a bit of apprehension at the conclusion of De Mesquita’s talk, asking if he had considered the possibility that making a public prediction could change the outcome of a tenuous international situation.
De Mesquita said he had thought about that and hoped that it would hasten Iran’s movement to his prediction conclusion.
