BDM, in profile

If you were a grad student and came across BDM's story of predicting Khomeini's successors years in advance, why would you do anything *but* game theory?

Students, explain this to me.

I am not sure Tourism based formula as advocated by BDM would work.

We have on record Hamas behavior in last few years - knowing fully that their actions would stop revenue stream, they still went ahead and did those actions. What BDM presumes here is rationally Hamas would not do those actions. But Hamas 'rationality' is to base actions on perceived help from Arab and their other money bags. Those helping hands do not realize on time is a different matter, but Hamas is not that convinced 'not to base' their actions on those presumed helping hands.

Also what about the line of thinking from Hamas where the goal is to ?weaken? Israel regardless of what pain comes to them? They have visceral belief in their own surviving abilities but quite shallow, negative opinion of Israel?s ability to sustain the financial blows (or terrorist acts). Again the irrationality is well evident ? despite the proven fact of 6 decades of continued existence of Israel; Hamas like groups continue to fall for the thinking that their terrorists and financially ruinous acts can break Israel. So where is the basis of rationality on Hamas side?

Only when events finally drive the point to Hamas that negotiating with Israel is the only viable choice; then some real progress may happen.

The key is not to overrule the possibility of Hamas exaggeration of their inter-nation help as well as irrationality in their behavior. Individuals, groups and societies do have 'irrational' premises / way of behavior on which they base their actions. And this irrationality can go on for quite long. (Variant of Keynes quote ? markets / actors can be irrational far longer than you can be solvent...) In way that is the notion of ?free actor? ? in a fixed set of actors who we can regard as ?free actors?; that freedom would essentially get manifested when we notice at least few ?irrational? actors.

Like Umesh Patil, I'm not sure what Dr. BDM's first step here is a first step toward.

It would give more revenue to a Palestinian government (once we assume that all tourist revenue is "very easy to track." There is reason to doubt this). What, then, is the appropriate response to Palestinians objecting to any money coming from foriegn tourists to "their" attractions (e.g. Bethelem) going to Israeli occupiers? To Israelis objecting to Palestinian terrorist sympathizers getting any revenue from tourists visiting Mediterranean beaches? To people on either side willing to cost their side revenue as long as it hurts the other?

In a region without conflict, it seems to me, economic viability would not derive primarily from tourism, though that would help, but from Palestinian integration into the Israeli economy. This would require much closer contacts between Israelis and Palestinians than there are now. But that is the problem. Neither side really wants closer contacts for economic reasons if these look as if they might lead to obstacles to the pursuit of political objectives.

Perhaps I'm just misunderstanding Bueno de Mesquita's theory, or its application here, and I'd welcome a correction if that is the case. It just looks to me as if he's proposing taking baby steps toward an objective toward which both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute look with great ambivalence. That isn't a departure from the traditional Mideast peace process; that IS the traditional Mideast peace process.

He's right about the problem with the "peace process" in Israel -- the commitment issue -- but his solution as summarized in that article is bizarre. Dividing up tourist dollars by population? Huh? This would seem to be based on some sort of odd notion that there's some sort of collective "tourist dollars" that gets put into a big pool which can be divided up by some centralized government scheme, the way international aid dollars do.

Uh, tourists -- not governments -- provide "tourist dollars," and they provide their dollars not to some "tourist dollar agency" which can divvy up the money, but to individual hotels, restaurants, souvenir stands, etc...
I don't even understand what it means when it says that tourist revenue is "easy to track."

The only thing I can think is that they make up some number which they claim is tourist dollars, figure out what the sales taxes would be on that estimate, and then divide that number by population. But to the extent that Israel and the PA collect taxes, don't they already do this? So don't the same incentives already exist? The only innovation BDM seems to be advocating is to divide by population rather than by actual revenues generated. But why is that more conducive to peace?

It's still not clear to me how de Mesquita has solved (or thinks he has solved) "garbage in, garbage out".

The most striking feature of international relations is how little any one actor knows. I suppose one can control for this somewhat with analysis of internal consistency, but it still remains the case that of any 10 "facts" fed into such a system, at least 3 are probably wrong.

In poker (my favorite simplified testing field for game theory) it is possible to determine what the correct strategy is (more or less, heh), but one's ability to predict the outcome of a given hand is distinctly limited. Even in the long run, it demands that one play at least somewhat probabilistically in order to avoid being too predictable. In other words, successful gamesmanship demands that one be unable to predict the specifics of even one's own behavior in advance.

Does rational choice theory expect the shear volume of interacting variables to dampen out such "noise" in the real world? If so doesn't this take us straight back to GIGO?

I'm not just raising objections here, I'm actually quite curious. Can anyone suggest an answer, or at least a good place to look?

Um arthur, a few reasons why:
- BDM has been a big supporter of the Bush admin and Iraq war, until it went clearly south - whoops;
- almost none of the formal modelers in IR or anywhere in the field have any public policy profile of any sort - no one knows who they are, and even fewer people care what they think. I'd bet you vast amounts of money that within the US government far more people would be interested in what a Barry Posen or Bob Jervis has to say than any game theorist out there;
- many of the predictions ain't exactly rocket science (Israel-Palestine negotiations unlikely to succeed? Shocking!). He also predicted the end of the Cold War - in a paper published in 1997. Moreover, many of his models rely heavily on inputs from people who actually know some things about history, other countries, foreign languages, etc.

Color me unimpressed. If BDM were as astonishingly good a prognosticator as he claims he ought to be worth tens of billions of dollars; our government ought not to ever be suprised by anything; and/or BDM should have been assasinated by a foreign power that realized that with him the US has an unbeatable superweapon. Some of his claims to have predicted things like details of Iranian succession years in advance are just nuts -- there's fundamental randomness in the processes that make such predictions implausible, as if I claimed that I have a track record of predicting winning lottery numbers a year in advance 97% of the time. Either I'm making ex post facto "predictions", the system is rigged, or I'm just making shit up.

Don't get me wrong, I do quant work, I think game theory has lots of insights, even in IR, and some of them have come from BDM. But his predictive claims are ludicrously inflated. When I took an advanced game theory seminar I was the lone IR guy in a room of Americanists, and I presented and critqued some BDM articles. They were flabbergasted that someone would claim that kind of predictive ability for foreign events given that it goes so far beyond the state of the art for forecasting in the relatively more data-rich, rule-bound, and transparent American poltics (or U.S. business behavior).

BDM is smart guy. In his "Predicting the future" he made similar claims to those presented here - in 1985 he was able to predict the end of the Cold War. He did not think about it, but the data he had could allow him to.

However, intriguing as this idea is, I see a flaw. This proposal works in a absolute-gain world. As we know, relative gains are more important. Do Israeli want peace, or do they want a weak Palestinian community? No morality, just facts: they want the Palestinian to give up violence, but they do not want them to be stronger. Otherwise, it will be the Palestinians to "rule".

In his Predictin the Future, BDM claims that the stronger usually dampens economic growth to maintain its power. He relies on the example of a treaty signed in 1242 (if I am not wrong) through which the Catholich Church attempted to slow down the European economy and thus prevent the rise of competitors.

Thus, why should Israel let the Palestinians get stronger? BDM should answer - but I see a contradiction with his own works.

bye, a.g.