Bruce: Likewise, you could make these statements about North Korea and Saudi Arabia and what have you for the same reason, because now you Jed: Those were the kings. Right, and then the rest of them were the popes right?
This completely changed incentives, this incentivized secular rulers to secularize, and in order to That is to get bishops who would be loyal to them rather than to the church.
And so would offer a bishop more to the liking of the king than the other way around, so as to get the income. And that meant that kings had an incentive to stimulate economic growth, whereas before Bruce: They made money by waging war or marrying the right person, now they could make They could be rich by stimulating the economy, which they had not tried to do before.
And the church had the opposite incentive now. And so I can show with evidence that in dioceses where the bishop was expected to be loyal to the church, that was a That was not true before the agreements were signed. Bruce: I can show it was not true before. And then they saw the strategic incentives to stimulate growth and to stymie growth, they each acted on it.
Bruce: Yeah the strategic particles. Jed: That is so cool. Bruce: The last chapter, which is called today, zooms in on stripping out the religion aspects and monarchy aspects of History as the data source. We are taking the logic of these agreements, as strategic documents and looking at how they changed incentives.
So the focus is on how different incentive structures produce different results. But historians have missed this version of the impact of the So that is really really fascinating.
And through your eyes, I wanna know what are gonna be the long term effects of this? What about the countries that have done well? And the countries that have done poorly like the United States, Brazil, and other places, are we gonna be the ones that are like Southern Europe, that have lower standard of living?
Tell us about what do you see in the future. Bruce: So in the selectorate understanding of organizations, leaders, politicians, always want to shrink their coalition, if they can. And there are some circumstances that compel them to live with a bigger coalition than they would like. Sometimes those were inherited, and sometimes those are the consequence of of external exogenous random shocks. So for example, major earthquakes or tsunamis, major natural disasters, often drive large numbers of people into refugee camps where essentially they are given unwittingly freedom of assembly.
And so they can coordinate and rise up against the government and compel it to adopt a larger coalition, produce better public policy. The COVID pandemic has driven people disproportionately indoors, the opposite, away from artificial freedom of assembly, away from even genuine freedom of assembly to isolation.
And that makes for an environment I believe that will make it easier for politicians to shrink their coalition and pull back on the ability of people who are unhappy with governance to coordinate with each other. But for many, especially poor people, these technologies are not readily available.
And so they are not able to promote and defend their interests as well as they otherwise could. So I anticipate that one of the consequences of the pandemic is somewhat more authoritarian government, somewhat less accountable government, and a somewhat diminished world politically as a result, which will in turn create a new tension, because once we have control over the pandemic, then we can expect that more people will want to organize to change the pullback that has occurred.
So those who handled it well, or will have had a much shorter period of lockdown, and therefore will not have the reduction in their winning coalition, that those like the United States that have handled poorly will have. Bruce: So those who handled it well will come out looking better, politically.
Bruce: And notice the perverse incentives that this creates. So if you can survive politically while handling the pandemic poorly you improve your future political prospects more than if you handle it well.
It is the nature of large coalition, more democratic, loosely-speaking, governments is two things better public policy, and higher turnover in leaders. Fascinating stuff today. This has been so helpful, Professor Bueno de Mesquita. Thank you for spending the time with us today. Sign up to get the latest news, information, and rankings in our upcoming newsletter.
How game theory and competition explain politics Interview with Dr. The COVID pandemic has driven people disproportionately indoors, the opposite…Away from artificial freedom of assembly, away from even genuine freedom of assembly. The model "scored" where each of the players stands on the issue scale. It also scored each player on other key questions:. The Quad model was completed in August. It ran tens of millions of individual calculations, predicting exchanges between players over seven "rounds" before coming to its conclusion.
Grady of Canary Group ran the model several times to check for consistency. Click here to return to top. Game theorists assume that people in competitive situations will behave rationally, or at least behave in ways they believe are rational, in order to achieve their goals. Critics point out, however, that people ultimately are voluntary actors. Threats or incentives that normally produce one response in people will sometimes produce something quite different in others.
Predictions about the actions of individuals don't rest on the same safe ground as, say, predictions about physics. The movement of particles can be predicted because particles don't have free will. Game theory models have to simplify away some details because they can't mathematically factor in everything that might come into play. When you're talking about the future, Langlois said via email, "there may be new factors we haven't and couldn't have anticipated.
Such "qualitative" factors can't be modeled in a mathematical way. Perhaps the strongest criticism of game theory generally involves the information that goes into models. Computer scientists have an expression — "garbage in, garbage out" — to mean that a computation is only as good as the data being crunched. A model's output is only as valid as its inputs.
The Quad project gathered information from some of the most respected policy and security experts in the world, and it stress-tested their estimates against each other. There's not much higher quality you can get than what we have," said Grady of Canary Group.
Still, more than one of those contributors questioned how much anyone who's outside China's ruling circle can really understand about the inside of China's ruling circle. Read more under The big Quad predictions.
Experience teaches investors that it's a good idea generally to be skeptical about predictions. Political scientists, economists and stock pickers all predict the future, but anyone who's followed them closely enough knows they're often wrong. Predictions also can't account for unexpected events. At least in the near term, that event appears to have made direct cooperation between France and the Quad unlikely.
But if nothing else, the use of game theory creates a starting point for people to begin to discuss the Quad and what it means. Thirty-seven individuals contributed information that went into the Quad game theory model. All are recognized experts on the politics of at least one of the 15 countries that were modeled. Several are former government officials, some from senior leadership positions.
Of the 37 experts, 12 asked that they not be named as part of this report. Navy participate in Malabar exercise. Credit: AP Getty Images. China remade itself into a giant economy, and more and more it enjoys the giant benefits that go with it: national confidence, diplomatic clout and military power. Other big powers are paying attention. As China has shown new swagger in its dealings with the world, four big democracies — Australia, India, Japan and the United States — have formed a counterbalance.
The future of that "Quad" has tremendous significance, not just in the Indo-Pacific, but everywhere. Decision-makers, risk managers, investors, CEOs, and regular citizens increasingly are aware of rising stakes in a new, global balance of power.
The leaders of the world's biggest economies want to know what's next for the Quad. China is increasingly hemming itself in. Whatever objectives it might harbor for the Indo-Pacific, it's getting in its own way.
President Joe Biden and U. Secretary of State Antony Blinken participate in a virtual meeting with leaders of Quadrilateral Security Dialogue countries March 12, Chinese President Xi Jinping with a naval honor guard.
The big Quad predictions. Three major forecasts covering roughly the next two years came out of the model, which was designed to focus on security and maritime issues: Leaders in Australia, India, Japan and the United States will become much more focused on Indo-Pacific security, and the countries will act in an increasingly coordinated way.
However, they won't take any actions as a group that are more aggressive than they take already. For instance, they will not carry out naval exercises as a group within the South China Sea, which China claims as its own.
Xi will pressure each of the Quad leaders separately in an effort to create a wedge between them, but none will respond to him. Some senior leaders in China, including within the military, will begin to favor a more conciliatory approach toward the Quad.
But they'll run into hard nationalists at the top of the Chinese Communist Party. China will make no serious concessions to the Quad on its maritime claims. Other countries will align with the Quad or come close to its position on security, including the United Kingdom, Canada, Singapore, France and South Korea. That could come in the form of joining naval exercises with some or all of the Quad countries, or openly supporting the group's security-related positions.
Other countries, such as Vietnam, will edge closer to the Quad than they are now. Japan's central role China often presents the Quad as a U. Take, for example, Japan. The South China Sea is one of the world's most commercially important bodies of water, home not just to fisheries but to critical global shipping lanes. When I was in the White House, we could have told you who's who within China. It's much more opaque now. Kamala Harris in Hanoi, Vietnam, in August The U. Other countries, other predictions.
Sympathizing with the Quad doesn't require being in it. Russia and Taiwan That loose sort of non-alliance has a precursor: the one between China and Russia. Kamala Harris In the White House, the model predicted that Vice President Kamala Harris' focus on the Quad issue will sharpen and become "highly resolute, especially compared to other stakeholders in the White House," according to Grady. It's a flexible tool, including who joins.
The port at Busan, South Korea, in The Quad and the global economy. There's no question the Biden administration has made a deliberate statement that the Quad and the G-7 are the two core organizing bodies that they're going to center their work on the global system around. How game theory works. How the model was built The game theory model used to build the analysis for this report was designed by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, a professor at New York University and senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution who began developing his model in the late s.
The 'players' The political specialists identified about key "players" across the 15 countries and territories modeled.
It also scored each player on other key questions: How much influence do they have over the Quad's future? Joe Biden was ranked highest, and everyone else was scored off his baseline. How much do they care about the Quad issue in the first place? For example, U. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is focused on the Quad much less. How flexible are they in their stance toward the Quad? Criticism of game theory. Game theory has its critics.
For instance, we could produce peace between the Israelis and Palestinians by assuming they agree on everything, but that would not be taken seriously. Realistic data need to reflect the current status quo.
Then how things evolve is driven by the model's logic. I teach students how to construct data sets, and they always check, for instance, that the initial round's outcome looks like the current status quo, because that is what the data should reflect if they are realistic.
A robot can only do what it's told. At any point, do you have to step in and account for the fact that computers don't have emotions to help polish an outcome?
When I report results, I leave it to experts to dig into the interpretive nuances of the analysis. I limit myself to reporting only what I can show in the model's output. Part of the point behind a model such as this is for users to realize it is just a model and not a replication of reality in all its subtlety. Instead, the model should help push people to think about contingencies they had not considered but that emerge from the modeling exercise. The question of ethics is different from stepping in and substituting personal judgments about emotions, feelings, etc.
I impose limits on the things I am willing to examine with the model based on my sense of propriety, but I do not presume answers to questions and choose on that basis.
I will not address a question that I view as immoral or improper and have turned down requests on those grounds. Predicting the future of international conflicts is stressful business. What do you enjoy outside of work? I don't find doing forecasts in the least stressful.
It is a great pleasure to see basic research translated into a practical tool for assisting policymakers. And this is far from the main strand of my research. Outside of work I enjoy visiting my children and grandchildren, travel, playing squash and hiking. Forrest is a freelance photographer and writer in New York studio saraforrestphoto. This story, "Bruce Bueno de Mesquita" was originally published by Computerworld. Here are the latest Insider stories.
More Insider Sign Out. Sign In Register.
0コメント