Hello world!

Hello and welcome to The Predictioneer’s Game blog. I will be launching this very soon. In the meantime, keep your eyes out for a profile on the book and on me (Bruce Bueno de Mesquita) in the Sunday New York Times Magazine Section on August 16th. I will start the blog shortly after that article appears.

I’ll try to address questions about foreign policy and sometimes business from a strategic point of view, always trying to work out what motivates the actions by others as well as by ourselves. For instance, think about the imposition of economic sanctions as a foreign policy. Are sanctions more likely to work when they are threatened or after they are implemented? My answer: they will hardly ever work if they have to be implemented but they can work as a threat. I’ll explain why later. How about health care? There seem to be two conflicting objectives but the debate never seems to focus on them together. One idea is to provide universal coverage. The other is to reduce the cost of health care which currently takes up about 1/6th of the US economy and maybe more. But then it turns out — not too surprisingly — that universal coverage means higher costs, not lower costs. We must choose between better coverage for all at a cost to those already paying to be covered while making the cost a larger share of the economy or not increasing coverage and not boosting the cost to achieve universal coverage but leaving some vulnerable to the costs of illness. How might we use logic and the evidence in terms of the experience of other systems to work out what the right trade-off, if any, is between costs and benefits. Why doesn’t the debate focus on the logic and a balanced look at evidence rather than partisan points of view? How will universal, subsidized health care influence demand for care? Will it make the society healthier and more productive or will it distort the economy and reduce the average person’s quality of care? Do we have reason to believe the declarations — cheap talk in game theory terms — of the parties on either side? Is the debate just another form of negative campaigning by all sides? I hope you will think about these questions while I get this blog up and running.

In the meantime I’d welcome your thoughts on these and other subject. Maybe we can all learn something about what sanctions on Iran might do to their nuclear ambitions or what impact they might have on North Korea, or what sorts of illnesses (or prevention) a British-style system is good at and what it is bad at treatingjust to throw out some stuff to think about.

Bruce