My younger brother bought me this book for Christmas and I thought it was well done. Bueno de Mesquita is "a master of game theory" and professor of politics at NYU and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute. According to the book flap one of his recent books was co-authored by Condoleezza Rice. His conservative leanings pop up once or twice in the book but it's mostly a non factor.
I'm not quite sure how to write this review. Should I preview the book and let you read it for yourself or give you my full breakdown? I'll do both and hope for comments to let me know which is preferred going forward.
The Predictioneer's Game: Using the Logic of Brazen Self-Interest to See and Shape the Future
Preview:
Professor Bueno de Mesquita uses computers and game theory to try and determine the outcome of events for businesses, interest groups and government agencies most notably the CIA. The basic tenet of game theory is that people will act in their own self interest. Bruce uses that and a few other situational factors to determine what will happen and how to avoid or engineer a preferred outcome. The models that he creates have a remarkable accuracy and have been used extensively. They take account of the major players in a decision, what their position is and how strongly they feel about it, and how persuasive/powerful each player is. Sound familiar? It reminds me of what we all did last summer scrambling over the healthcare positions and legislative procedures. Bueno de Mesquita says that one of his worst ever predictions came during the healthcare fight in Bill Clinton's first term.
More specific review:
The professor's model predicted that Congressman Dan Rostenkowski was the crucial factor for healthcare to pass. He would be needed to shepherd the bill through the House Ways and Means Committee. Rostenkowski instead was indicted on felony corruption charges.
Wikipedia- Charges against Rostenkowski included keeping "ghost" employees on his payroll, using Congressional funds to buy gifts such as chairs and ashtrays for friends, and trading in officially purchased stamps for cash at the House post office.
Bruce doesn't go into it but it was Eric Holder who brought the charges on D.R. and later Rostenkowski was pardoned by Clinton. The next Democrat to hold Rostenkowski's seat was Rod Blagojevich. The models failed to predict this turn of events but provided a learning experience, future models would include a factor for random shocks. The author does this quite well taking us through thirty or so years of his experience with different models and the varying scenarios they've been applied to.
The book starts off by discussing Belgium's King Leopold II.
Belgium's good works during Leopold's reign are almost uncountable. He oversaw the expansion of political freedom with the adoption of universal adult male suffrage in competitive elections, putting his country on a firm footing to become a modern democracy. On the economic front, he encouraged free-trade policies that guided Belgium to remarkable growth. In little Belgium, coal production, the engine of industry in nineteenth century Europe, rose to such heights that it almost equaled that of France. Social policy too moved briskly ahead. Primary education became compulsory, and with the 1881 School Law, girls were assured access to secondary education. Moreover, Leopold's policies provided greater protection for women and children than was then the norm in most of Europe. Thanks to legislation passed in 1889, children under twelve could not be put to work, and after they turned twelve their workdays were limited to twelve hours, a radical departure from prevailing policy of the time.
When the Belgian economy was racked by a major economic crisis in 1873, Leopold helped improve the lot of the poor with pro-labor reforms, including granting workers the right to strike, a right that was still hotly resisted in the United States half a century later. He promoted truly ambitious public works projects, including massive road and railway construction designed to reduce unemployment, promote urbanization, and increase business opportunities. He was way ahead of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Barack Obama in recognizing how to stimulate employment and economic prosperity by building up infrastructure.
Leopold was a great reformer at home, a founder of Belgium's long years of peace and plenty.
But then there was the Congo.
In April's Mother Jones Adam Hochschild discusses the Congo under King Leopold.
King Leopold II of Belgium, had early on in Europe's great landgrab secured what he called "a slice of this magnificent African cake." Belgium itself had not been interested in acquiring a colony, but for its business-minded king--a constitutional monarch with only limited powers at home--that presented an opportunity: He hired the explorer Henry Morton Stanley to stake out boundaries for him and then pulled off the lobbying coup of the century by persuading the United States and most of Europe to recognize this vast territory as his personal property.
The gold diggers the king put to work here were different from those mining gold at the same time in the Klondike, for they arrived in chains... One eyewitness account from 1914 describes mothers nursing babies as they carried loads of up to 66 pounds.
Some Kilo miners were forced to work for a decade or more, and released only when they supplied sons to take their places. Repeated uprisings against the forced-labor regime were brutally suppressed and thousands of deserters were recaptured and put to work again... Discipline was enforced by armed mine police and by the chicotte, a whip of sun dried hippopotamus hide with razor sharp edges, whose blows were meticulously tabulated. Records from one group of northeastern Congo gold camps register 26,579 lashes applied to miners during the first half of 1920 alone.
And gold wasn't the only resource Leopold was after. Rubber collectors were treated horrifically as well.
Wikipedia- Villages who failed to meet the rubber collection quotas were required to pay the remaining amount in cut hands, where each hand would prove a kill. Sometimes the hands were collected by the soldiers of the Force Publique, sometimes by the villages themselves. There were even small wars where villages attacked neighboring villages to gather hands, since their rubber quotas were too unrealistic to fill.
One junior white officer described a raid to punish a village that had protested. The white officer in command "ordered us to cut off the heads of the men and hang them on the village palisades ... and to hang the women and the children on the palisade in the form of a cross."
Professor Bueno de Mesquita talks about this stark contrast in leadership from the same guy. He posits that in Belgium he was accountable to many and could be replaced, so sensible policies were the way to retain power. In the Congo he was only accountable to a few cronies so keeping them rich was his only concern. Bruce then goes on to ask if we knew the details of these two situations could we have predicted the actions of Leopold before they happened? He describes how he believes he can do that by looking at passed events to sees if the model would have predicted the outcome. Then checking if the model could have been used to change the result like by stopping Hitler from gaining power or halting World War I.
Avoiding World War I
First the main power brokers were identified: Austria-Hungary, Germany, Italy, France, Russia, England and Serbia. De Mesquita carefully identifies the question each model is looking to explore. In this case it's each country's stance about Austria's position against Serbia following the assassination of the Archduke. Austria demanded that Serbia relinquish their sovereignty or it was war, a demand they knew could not be fulfilled. Using expert opinion and historical records the model then plots how the countries views change over time (through negotiations or other events).
So here's a little excerpt about a path that could have been taken to stop the War to end all wars.
The historian Niall Ferguson has argued that a big factor leading to war in 1914 was that the Austrians and Germans were uncertain of British intentions and that this uncertainty was caused by the British...
Britain was the world's greatest sea power (although the Germans were certainly challenging that claim at the time). They could have filled several of their navy's ships with a few thousand British troops to be transported to the Adriatic, taking them just a short distance from Serbia. Maybe they could have sent some other ships into the Bosporous, roughly flanking landlocked Serbia from either side. This would have served several potentially advantageous purposes. It is very much, in game-theory lingo, a costly signal. Talk is cheap, but sending a fleet into a prospective combat zone is putting your money where your mouth is.
The Germans and Austrians probably would have taken more seriously the prospect that Britain meant business. As we will see, the model indicates just that. Additionally, a naval mobilization of this sort has none of the grave risks associated with the Russian mobilization of ground forces. Russia could move troops quickly to and across the German frontier. Understandably, that made the Germans more than a little jittery. British ships filled with soldiers would have taken a long time to get into position. Finally, the ships would not have been directly in the path on which initial fighting was expected. Thus the shiploads of troops would very much have been a signal of what was to come without precipitating immediate military action. In reality, British ships under French command headed for the Adriatic a few days after war had been declared: too little too late.
I highly recommend this book and I would love to get my hands on one of his programs. This was a good mix for me; politics, history, strategy and it was well written. I picked up more than a few good nuggets of information, like how to get the best price on a car or why the Catholic church has a policy of celibacy. $27.00 is a high price tag for 229 pages, better to buy a paperback or kindle version or maybe it's available at a local library.
Crossposted to the Progressive Electorate