Triggered by the desire to calibrate the value of the game theory research of Bruce Bueno De Mesquita (BDM) I found a useful review of his work by Michael Lerner. Following is a sample from the article — of BDM’s thoughts on more effective approaches to the Middle East conflict:
Recently, he’s applied his science to come up with some novel ideas on how to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “In my view, it is a mistake to look for strategies that build mutual trust because it ain’t going to happen. Neither side has any reason to trust the other, for good reason,” he says. “Land for peace is an inherently flawed concept because it has a fundamental commitment problem. If I give you land on your promise of peace in the future, after you have the land, as the Israelis well know, it is very costly to take it back if you renege. You have an incentive to say, ‘You made a good step, it’s a gesture in the right direction, but I thought you were giving me more than this. I can’t give you peace just for this, it’s not enough.’ Conversely, if we have peace for land—you disarm, put down your weapons, and get rid of the threats to me and I will then give you the land—the reverse is true: I have no commitment to follow through. Once you’ve laid down your weapons, you have no threat.”
Bueno de Mesquita’s answer to this dilemma, which he discussed with the former Israeli prime minister and recently elected Labor leader Ehud Barak, is a formula that guarantees mutual incentives to cooperate. “In a peaceful world, what do the Palestinians anticipate will be their main source of economic viability? Tourism. This is what their own documents say. And, of course, the Israelis make a lot of money from tourism, and that revenue is very easy to track. As a starting point requiring no trust, no mutual cooperation, I would suggest that all tourist revenue be [divided by] a fixed formula based on the current population of the region, which is roughly 40 percent Palestinian, 60 percent Israeli. The money would go automatically to each side. Now, when there is violence, tourists don’t come. So the tourist revenue is automatically responsive to the level of violence on either side for both sides. You have an accounting firm that both sides agree to, you let the U.N. do it, whatever. It’s completely self-enforcing, it requires no cooperation except the initial agreement by the Israelis that they are going to turn this part of the revenue over, on a fixed formula based on population, to some international agency, and that’s that.”
As we have learned, “incentives matter”, in foreign policy just as in economics. Surely BDM’s proposal would at least improve the possibility of future cooperation. Will it take two generations of such policies to wash away enough of the Palestinian indoctrination of their young?
BDM founded Decision Insights Incorporated in 1981 and the New York consulting firm Mesquita & Roundell in 2003, but has been consulting independently for years for clients in the private sector and for a long list of governments:
…As one of the foremost scholars of game theory—or “rational choice,” as its political-science practitioners prefer to call it—Bueno de Mesquita is at the center of a raging hullabaloo that has taken over some of the most prestigious halls of learning in this country. Exclusive, highly complex mathematically, and messianic in its certainty of universal truths, rational-choice theory is not only changing the way political science is taught, but the way it’s defined.
To verify the accuracy of his model, the CIA set up a kind of forecasting face-off that pit predictions from his model against those of Langley’s more traditional in-house intelligence analysts and area specialists. “We tested Bueno de Mesquita’s model on scores of issues that were conducted in real time—that is, the forecasts were made before the events actually happened,” says Stanley Feder, a former high-level CIA analyst. “We found the model to be accurate 90 percent of the time,” he wrote. Another study evaluating Bueno de Mesquita’s real-time forecasts of 21 policy decisions in the European community concluded that “the probability that the predicted outcome was what indeed occurred was an astounding 97 percent.” What’s more, Bueno de Mesquita’s forecasts were much more detailed than those of the more traditional analysts. “The real issue is the specificity of the accuracy,” says Feder. “We found that DI (Directorate of National Intelligence) analyses, even when they were right, were vague compared to the model’s forecasts. To use an archery metaphor, if you hit the target, that’s great. But if you hit the bull’s eye—that’s amazing.”
Lerner closes with “A sample of Bruce Bueno de Mesquita’s wilder—and most accurate—predictions”
Forecasted the second Intifada and the death of the Mideast peace process, two years before it happened.
Defied Russia specialists by predicting who would succeed Brezhnev. “The model identified Andropov, who nobody at the time even considered a possibility,” he says.
Predicted that Daniel Ortega and the Sandanistas would be voted out of office in Nicaragua, two years before it happened.
Four months before Tiananmen Square, said China’s hardliners would crack down harshly on dissidents.
Predicted France’s hair’s-breadth passage of the European Union’s Maastricht Treaty.
Predicted the exact implementation of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement between Britain and the IRA.
Predicted China’s reclaiming of Hong Kong and the exact manner the handover would take place, 12 years before it happened.
For readers interested in a deeper assessment of Bueno de Mesquita’s work, see his 17-page CV at NYU [PDF].
It’s like the hardliners have an underpants gnome theory of expansion:
1) Build settlements
2) ???
3) Greater Israel
What feasible strategy do they think goes between 1 and 3?
Don’t miss this, one of Megan’s last pre-beach posts.
A quite excellent true history of the Middle East’s last sixty years by Professor Efraim Karsh, head of Mediterranean Studies at King’s College, University of London, and the author most recently of “Islamic Imperialism: A History” (Yale). Much of this is based upon recently declassified documents from the British Mandate. Excerpt:
Sixty years after its establishment by an internationally recognized act of self-determination, Israel remains the only state in the world that is subjected to a constant outpouring of the most outlandish conspiracy theories and blood libels; whose policies and actions are obsessively condemned by the international community; and whose right to exist is constantly debated and challenged not only by its Arab enemies but by segments of advanced opinion in the West.
During the past decade or so, the actual elimination of the Jewish state has become a cause célèbre among many of these educated Westerners. The “one-state solution,” as it is called, is a euphemistic formula proposing the replacement of Israel by a state, theoretically comprising the whole of historic Palestine, in which Jews will be reduced to the status of a permanent minority. Only this, it is said, can expiate the “original sin” of Israel’s founding, an act built (in the words of one critic) “on the ruins of Arab Palestine” and achieved through the deliberate and aggressive dispossession of its native population.
This claim of premeditated dispossession and the consequent creation of the longstanding Palestinian “refugee problem” forms, indeed, the central plank in the bill of particulars pressed by Israel’s alleged victims and their Western supporters. It is a charge that has hardly gone undisputed. As early as the mid-1950s, the eminent American historian J.C. Hurewitz undertook a systematic refutation, and his findings were abundantly confirmed by later generations of scholars and writers. Even Benny Morris, the most influential of Israel’s revisionist “new historians,” and one who went out of his way to establish the case for Israel’s “original sin,” grudgingly stipulated that there was no “design” to displace the Palestinian Arabs.
The recent declassification of millions of documents from the period of the British Mandate (1920-48) and Israel’s early days, documents untapped by earlier generations of writers and ignored or distorted by the “new historians,” paints a much more definitive picture of the historical record. These documents reveal that the claim of dispossession is not only completely unfounded but the inverse of the truth. What follows is based on fresh research into these documents, which contain many facts and data hitherto unreported.
Highly recommended. I have archived the Karsh essay for future reference.
Karsh has authored several other books on the Middle East, including Fabricating Israeli History: The ‘New Historians’ (2000).
Israel Radio’s Paris correspondent Gil Michaeli has just reported that the French Court of Appeals has overturned the libel judgment against Phillipe Karsenty and has determined that Karsenty did not libel France 2 correspondent Charles Enderlin when he reported that the ‘death’ of 12-year old Mohamed Al-Dura at Netzarim in the Gaza Strip in September 2000 may have been staged, and that it was unlikely that the death was caused by IDF soldiers.
More at Israel Matzav
Technorati Tags: Al Durah
More analysis of the dysfunctional Israeli political system
…At a deeper level, however, it is the political system itself that is chronically dysfunctional. When Israel was a newborn country fighting for survival, it had no time to devise an appropriate political model, so it went for pure proportional representation, practised almost nowhere else in the world. In a recent edition of Azure, a liberal-right Israeli journal, Amotz Asa-El, a former editor of the Jerusalem Post, summed up the results:
This system has been depleting Israel’s political energies for decades: it radicalised the territorial debate, debilitated the economy, obstructed long-term planning, derailed government action, distracted cabinets, diverted budgets, weakened prime ministers, destabilised governments, enabled anonymous and often incompetent people to achieve positions of great influence and responsibility and blurred the distinctions between the executive and legislative branches of government. Perhaps most crucially, it has led talented, accomplished, moral and charismatic people to abandon the political arena to the mediocre, unimaginative and uncharismatic people who currently populate it.
There are 12 parties in the current Knesset, and over 140 have sat in its plenum in the past six decades, many of them one-hit wonders formed for bargaining purposes. To gain a majority a coalition must typically include four or five parties, spanning a wide ideological spectrum. Usually at least one is a religious or populist party that makes its support conditional on expensive budget handouts.
At its mildest, this means that ministers in the same cabinet publicly squabble all the time. More seriously, politicians are accountable to their party but not their voters. Parties that are brought in to make up the coalition numbers wield disproportionate clout, so extremists set the agenda. Pork-barrelling is rife. And important reforms are distorted by political haggling.
Another consequence of the coalition horse-trading: the Defence portfolio is held by a novice.
At its worst, the system threatens national security. The ability of a few tens of thousands of settlers to set Israeli policy in the occupied territories for four decades is the most glaring example. A more recent one was the 2006 Lebanon war. When Mr Olmert became prime minister as head of the centrist Kadima party, he brought Labour into the coalition by appointing its leader, Amir Peretz, a former trade-union boss, as defence minister. Mr Peretz would have preferred the finance portfolio, but Mr Olmert did not want a political rival holding the purse-strings, and defence was the only other job senior enough for the second-largest party. It was the first time the top two posts had been filled by people with no real experience in security matters. Four months later the war broke out. Its failures, found the Winograd commission that investigated it, were in large part due to the combination of an ill-prepared army and the politicians’ inexperience.
What to do?
Even those who favour change hotly debate what kind would work best. Besides a presidential or semi-presidential system, proposals include increasing the threshold to exclude all the small parties; expanding the Knesset, which is not big enough to be an effective check on the executive; and electing some or all of the Knesset members directly by constituency instead of by party list, to make them more answerable to their voters. A simple and useful change, says Mr Grinstein, would be for the biggest elected party always to be asked to form a government, rather than having to cobble together a coalition with a majority first. This would encourage parties to try to attract voters rather than other parties.
As it stands, the turkeys are in charge of the menu
…Still, it is politicians, not their voters, who will have to approve a change in the system. The risk is that whatever they agree on will continue to serve their own interests better than the country’s.
Israel, which turns 60 this May, is a pure representative democracy. Virtually every social group has its own political party, if not several. This means that none of the country’s many ethnic and religious subsets is disenfranchised. But as a result all governments are unstable multi-party coalitions subject to perverse incentives that have more to do with politicians’ careers than with the wishes of the electorate at large.
The crippling nature of Israel’s proportional representation system are very rarely discussed. Yet it is responsible for much of the state behavior that is counter to the long term interests of Israelis. First-past-the-post systems [e.g., U.K., U.S.] tend to produce strong majority governments that are able to take bold action [e.g., Thatcher, Reagan]. Proportional representation systems tend to produce weak coalition governments that can be levered into truly stupid policies by tiny special interests [e.g., Israeli settlers]. Israel has been cursed with this system since its birth in 1948. Having evidently learned nothing, the U.N. has “blessed” the Iraqis with a similar electoral design.
My reluctant turkey caption refers to the unfortunate fact that most of the Israeli politicians benefit from the current electoral system. Most fear that they would have no office in a reformed system. But they are the people who must do the reform. More on the current state of Israeli parties here.
The Economist takes a hard look at the Israeli system in its April special report [see sidebar for links to the report sections]. Here’s an excerpt from The dysfunctional Jewish state:
As our special report this week explains, political deadlock or the capture of the political system by special-interest groups add to many of Israel’s other woes, such as the botching of the war against Hizbullah in Lebanon in 2006, the decline of the education system and the dwindling pool of army conscripts due to religious exemptions. In other democracies a rebellion by members of the government is rare and extreme. In Israel it is the norm. This makes it hard to take bold decisions and almost entirely banishes considerations of the greater good and the longer term—all things that making peace requires.
…Israel has achieved some remarkable things during its 60 years. But for the sake of its security and domestic well-being, it now needs a system that makes politicians answerable to voters, not to other politicians. What shape it should take—whether a mixture of proportional representation with electoral districts, higher thresholds to keep small parties out of the parliament, or just rules to make it harder to topple governments—is up to Israelis. Unfortunately, since their politicians will design and vote on it, it is unlikely to be optimal; but almost anything would be better than what there is now.
There is no clearer indicator of a “clash of civilizations” than the prevalence of honor killings in the Arab world. With all due respect to pluralism, universalism, and respect for the Other, here is a piece of intolerance that can unite all of us, left and right, liberal and conservative. The idea that one’s relationships are one’s own business is a cornerstone of liberal thinking. That a disapproved-of relationship justifies murder — that one should take pride in killing one’s own sister because of it — well, that’s just way, way outside the pale of anything we Westerners can handle. Honor killings are so shocking to even the most tolerant among us, that one wonders why the West has failed to express its moral outrage.
[more]
A useful overview from Strategy Page:
February 28, 2008: As a democracy, Israel cannot ignore threats to its citizens. So the continued rocket attacks on southern Israel create a public outcry for a solution. Moving Israeli troops out of Gaza three years ago was supposed to be a solution, but it wasn’t. Israelis can access Palestinian media, and all they see is the same old “kill the Jews and destroy Israel” propaganda (from both Fatah and Hamas, although the Hamas stuff is more strident and abundant.) So Israel is increasingly applying the same tactics in Gaza (go after the terrorist leadership and technical experts) that worked to stop the Palestinian suicide bombing campaign that began in 2000 (and was defeated by 2005). Even most pacifist Israelis have given up on trying to make deals with the Palestinians. There are too many Palestinian factions, conditioned by a century of “kill the Jews” propaganda, that will not abide by any deal, and will keep trying to kill Israelis.
Defensive measures often have serious limitations. For example, the Palestinian rocket attacks on the town (Sderot) closest to Gaza, continue to kill and wound and Israelis. The “Iron Dome” anti-rocket system Israel is building will not, it turns out, protect Sderot, because the town is too close (two kilometers) to where the rockets are launched. Iron Dome is designed to take down missiles fired from at least four kilometers away. That might change, because the basic problem is time. Missiles fired from two kilometers away arrive in 9-10 seconds, which is before Iron Dome can react. Some Israeli army commanders want to reoccupy part of northern Gaza, to force the Palestinians to launch their rockets four kilometers from Sderot. In the last year, these rockets have killed two Israelis, and wounded dozens more. Israeli attacks on the terrorist groups responsible have left over 300 Palestinians dead. The Israeli shift to mainly targeting the terrorist leaders and technicians has the best chance, in the near term, of crippling the Hamas attacks. The increased Israeli attacks are apparently the result of improved intelligence within Gaza, probably the result of Fatah ordering its supporters there to aid the Israelis in targeting the Hamas leadership.
In the meantime, Israel continues its blockade of Gaza, allowing only food and medical supplies through. This has made Gaza Palestinians angry, but also apathetic and fearful. Hamas is running a police state, so the feelings of the average Palestinian have little impact. The blockade has enraged many Europeans, who are calling for diplomatic, economic and legal moves against Israel for “war crimes.” Many Israelis see this as the old European anti-Semitism, which led to the Nazi mass murder of six million Jews during World War II (with the cooperation of officials and citizens in many European countries). But the Palestinians see such support as one of the few weapons they have left. However, an increasing number of Arabs are getting tired of the Palestinian inability to work out a peace deal. These Arabs have come to recognize that the Israelis are trying harder to make a deal than the Palestinians are. Moreover, Arabs public opinion has turned against the Islamic terrorists, mainly because of the murderous tactics used by Islamic terrorists in Iraq, and elsewhere in the Arab world. The Palestinians are running out of allies, and options. It’s the Palestinians who are best able to control the radicals, whose violence is preventing any peace deal from being made, or kept. Fatah is trying to organize a “resistance” against Hamas, within Gaza. But so far, Hamas has proved too powerful for that to work. But after a few months of concentrated Israeli attacks on Hamas leadership, that may change.
[more]
“One way to get to know Yossi is through his portfolio. Here´s a list of the companies he´s invested with: they include Ilcu, Foxytunes, Gteko, recently sold to Microsoft, Fixya, a very clever customer support web 2.0 site, AtlasCT, a competitor to Google Maps, and Fring, competitor to Gizmo Project or Truphone.”
Investor and venture capitalist Yossi Vardi is a living legend in Israel. Last night we watched a TED Talks video of Yossi on Local Warming. Regular seekerblog readers know we are huge fans of the free TED lectures. Don’t miss this one, and think about subscribing to TED via iTunes:
Investor and prankster Yossi Vardi delivers a careful lecture on the crisis of local warming in the blogging community. Specifically, um, for men.
And here’s an excerpt from Michael Arrington’s recent Vardi interview:
Yossi Vardi is one of the people I’ve had the pleasure to get to know since starting TechCrunch. You can find him at technology events worldwide - just look for the smiling, wild-haired guy surrounded by a pack of people.
…I spoke with Yossi this week and asked him about his investment approach. He generally invests in young entrepreneurs and only takes common stock. If someone has failed before he’s even more likely to invest - “It makes them want to win even more,” he said. He generally doesn’t look at business plans at all, and just invests in the individual.
Technorati Tags: Humor, Humour, Venture Capital
Latest Comments
RSS