Bruce Bueno de Mesquita's Crystal Ball

Until reading "Is Iran going to build a bomb?" in today's NY Times Magazine I'd never heard of Bruce Bueno de Mesquita. Since the subject of the article is of more than passing interest to me, it was the first article I read. Also, The name Bruce Bueno de Mesquita caught my eye. I've provided a link to this interesting article below.

Bueno de Mesquita is a professor of applied game theory at New York University and a fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He is also a consultant to the CIA. His predictions reportedly are usually more accurate than those of CIA staffers. Since the early 1980s the CIA has hired Bueno de Mesquita to perform more than 1,000 predictions.

How does he make the predictions? Not with a crystal ball but rather he analyzes the issues at great length, gathering information about the individuals who are likely to influence the event under study--about their attitudes on the issue and their estimated power to influence the particular event. He assigns numbers to the players from 0 to 200 and plugs the information into his computer where he applies his proprietary game theory software.

On the issue of the likelihood of Iran building a nuclear bomb Bueno de Mesquita identified 90 individuals and organizations with an interest or influence on the question, ranging from Khamenei, Amahdinejad and Iranian hardliners to the U.N. to the U.S. to Israel and assigned each a number between 0 and 200, with 0 representing "no nuclear capacity at all" and 200 representing a nuclear test. Bueno de Mesquita then pushed the button his computer, and out popped the answer.

The outcome changes over time, beginning at 160, indicating likely bomb making, but declines over time to 118, meaning that Iran will not make a nuclear bomb.

The NYTimes Magazine article linked below provides considerably more detail on how Bueno de Mesquita reached this conclusion and on his career as a modern Nostradamus. It's a fascinating story.

The result