Rating: 3/5
It’s a nice introduction to de Mesquita’s modeling approach to predicting the output of protracted human negotiations (be it negotiating with North Korea on nuclear weapons or in Congress about health-care reform or in the boardroom to prevent your rival from getting the CEO spot). de Mesquita claims to have a very high (90% is often mentioned) success rate.
It’s important to note that de Mesquita’s approach is immune to the Taleb critique of statistical model. Nassim Taleb’s argument works against phenomenological approaches which relate multiple variables statistically (such as if in the past, inflation has been correlated with low unemployment, then in the future it will be so or some similar rule, see also Goodhart’s Law). De Mesquita’s approach is mechanistics, it is based on the mechanics of the situation. If human nature were to change, then the model will be invalidated, but there is more permanence to the pursuit of self-interest, which is the basis of de Mesquita’s models, than to the statistical flukes that form the basis of the models that Taleb tears down. I have been looking for a good critique of de Mesquita, but am actually yet to find one which understands that saying Taleb doesn’t cut it. (For the record, I really like Nassim Taleb’s ideas. They just seem inapplicable to de Mesquita.) An attack on de Mesquita would have to go to his weak points: can his models really capture the essence of the problem? where are his high accuracy statements coming from? how often is the model completely side-tracked by an outside event (one of the major players dying or, in an example from the book, getting arrested on corruption charges)? This might be one of those cases where the weakness of the existing critique has taken away some of the skepticism I had after first reading the book.
It’s pop-science, so it doesn’t bring in the models, or the math, or the details, or the critique. It does make it want to go back and read the original papers though.
A couple of little details from the book: on and around page 40, you get a very informative discussion of why Herman van Rompuy is President of the European Council (the discussion is phrased as if it was about getting a guy named Curly nominated CEO). The interpretation of the Catholic prohibition of charging interest as a way to keep economic growth down was new to me (even if am I taking it as an interesting hypothesis until I have independent confirmation that it is a reading supported by the facts).
On the down-side, the prose is sometimes patronising. He doesn’t really need to repeat his arguments 3 times: once as if it was a intro undergraduate class, one as if it was a high-school class, and a third as if he was trying to explain it to his 4-year old daughter. The graphs out of Excel could have used some work too (even Excel does better graphs nowadays).