We’re On Our Way

OK, it’s time to get started. When I read the newspaper lots of ideas jump out at me about things that could be predicted, analyzed and maybe even engineered for the better. Politicians like to say and do things that make us feel good but that don’t have a real impact. For example, after the Libyans cheered the return of the Lockerbie mass murderer, President Obama said we won’t stand by idly. Sure we will probably make some tough statements, but let’s think about what we really could do. We could boycott Libyan oil but oil is in demand and there is a world market. What we don’t buy from Libya we have to buy somewhere else and somebody else will step in and buy the Libyan oil we don’t buy. It’s not likely to have much of an impact. We could go to the UN Security Council for sanctions. Senator Schumer from New York has proposed doing just that. But there are at least two problems with this. First, to impose sanctions we will have to have unanimity among the 5 permanent members of the UNSC. It doesn’t seem all that likely that China or maybe even France will go along. It would be interesting to model that. Maybe in a week or two when I have the model up and running on the web site, someone out there can put a good data set together on this and we could see. But then, we must also realize that sanctions work best when they are threatened but not implemented. If you have to put them into use then the target has probably already concluded that the cost of the sanctions is smaller than the political costs of giving in to the sanctioners demands. Foreign policy is tough but we could model the likelihood of sanctions working after we model whether they are likely to be implemented at all. Maybe someone could build the beauty contest data set — 100 means the player in question is completely for imposing sanctions through the UNSC and 0 (zero) means absolutely opposed (with intermediaite values capturing degrees of leaning for or against) — and someone else could build a more detailed data set on positions regarding the stiffness of sanctions. Then we could anaylze both.

Bruce