B. Mesquita and India
Despite the hoopla, the U.N. climate change conference in Copenhagen is destined to fail. Here’s what will happen instead: Over the next several decades, world leaders will embrace tougher emissions standards than those proposed — and mostly ignored — in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. But real support for tougher regulations will fall. ...
How do I know all this? Because in 1979, I learned that I could predict the future.
Don’t get me wrong — I’m no soothsayer and I have no patience for crystal-ball gazers, astrologers, or even most pundits. In my world, science, not mumbo jumbo, is the way to predict people’s choices and their consequences for altering the future. I use game theory to do just that for the U.S. government, big corporations, and sometimes ordinary folks, too. ...
There is nothing uncanny about my ability to predict. Anyone can learn to use scientific reasoning to do what I do, though I’ve been refining the model I use ever since I accidentally got into the prediction business back in the last days of disco.
The opportunity initially fell into my lap when a U.S. State Department official called to ask me who was likely to be India’s next prime minister. At the time I was a professor of political science at the University of Rochester — where the application of game theory to political questions originated — and I had written my Ph.D. thesis at the University of Michigan about winning and losing strategies among India’s opposition parties. So the State Department official was asking me to use my "expert" knowledge to speculate about the next Indian government.
It happened that I had just designed a mathematical model for a book I was writing about war, as well as a little computer program to make the necessary calculations. The program provided a way to simulate decision-making under stressful circumstances like those that sometimes lead to war. It calculated the probability that actors would get what they wanted if they chose one course of action (say, negotiations) or another (like war), weighting the probabilities by an estimate of how much the decision-makers valued winning, losing, or intermediate compromise outcomes. Of course, it also recognized that they had to work out how others might respond to the choices they made.
The phone call about India got me thinking that maybe war and peace decisions really aren’t that different from everyday political confrontations. Sure, the stakes are higher — people get killed in wars — but then any politician seeking office sees the personal political stakes as pretty darn high. Intrigued, I grabbed a yellow pad and listed everyone I thought would try to influence the selection of India’s next government. For each of those people (political party leaders, members of India’s parliament, and some members of critical state governments), I also estimated how much clout they had, what their preference was between the various plausible candidates for prime minister, and how much they cared about trying to shape that choice. With just one page of my yellow pad filled with numbers, I had all the information the computer needed to predict what would happen, so I plugged it in and awaited the results.
My "expertise" had led me to believe that longtime parliamentary leader Jagjivan Ram would be India’s next prime minister. He was a popular and prominent politician who was better liked than his main rivals for the prime minister’s job. I was confident that he was truly unbeatable. He had paid his political dues and it seemed like his time had come. Many other India watchers thought the same thing. Imagine my surprise then when my computer program, written by me and fed only with my data, predicted an entirely different result. It forecast that Charan Singh would become prime minister, that he would include someone named Y. B. Chavan in his cabinet, and that they would gain support-albeit briefly-from Indira Gandhi, then the recently ousted prime minister. The model also predicted that the new Indian government would be incapable of governing and so would soon fall.
I found myself forced to choose between my personal opinion — that Ram would win — and the logic and data behind my model. In the end, I chose science over punditry. When I relayed my findings to the State Department official, he was taken aback. He noted that no one else was suggesting this result and that it seemed strange at best. When I told him I’d used a computer program based on a model of decision-making that I was designing, he just laughed and urged me not to repeat that to anyone.
A few weeks later, Charan Singh became the prime minister with Y. B. Chavan as his deputy prime minister and support from Indira Gandhi. And a few months after that, Singh’s government unraveled, Gandhi withdrew her backing, and a new election was called, just as the computer model had forecast.