negotiate but then cheat on any agreement as soon as doing so became advantageous (Kim’s preferred approach); would slowly reduce the extent of North Korea’s nuclear program in exchange for different levels of U.S. economic and security concessions; would eliminate the program conditionally (with various gradations of conditions having been specified); or would eliminate the nuclear program unconditionally (the most preferred outcome from the perspective of the American president and his foreign policy team).
Next we want to know what background conditions should be imposed on the question. For example, we might ask which of the above policies Kim Jong Il could be induced to adopt if the United States publicly targeted nuclear- tipped missiles at North Korea, or if the United States guaranteed North Korea’s security within its borders, or a host of other possibilities. Each condition defines a scenario so that we can compare what is likely to happen if the United States (or some other government) takes this or that action. This way, we start to answer “what if” questions. Once the issue, the options, and the scenarios are defined, then only a very few facts and a bit of logic are needed to identify solutions.
First, the facts. In my experience, all that is necessary to make a reliable prediction is to:
Identify every individual or group with a meaningful interest in trying to influence the outcome. Don’t just pay attention to the final decision makers.
Estimate as accurately as possible with available information what policy each of the players identified in point 1 is advocating when they talk in private to each other—that is, what do they say they want.
Approximate how big an issue this is for each of the players—that is, how salient is it to them. Are they so concerned that they would drop whatever they’re doing to address this problem when it comes up, or are they likely to want to postpone discussions while they deal with more pressing matters?
Relative to all of the other players, how influential can each player be in persuading others to change their position on the issue?
That’s all you need to know.
What’s interesting about the four pieces of information that I contend are crucial is that while they’re not the kind of stuff that can be easily looked up in a book, it
Experts have invested years in learning a place’s culture, language, and history. They follow the intimate political details that go on in the area they study. If anyone knows who will try to shape decisions, how influential those people can be, where they stand, and how much they care about an issue, it is the experts. Come to think of it, isn’t knowing this information what it means to be an expert?
About now you might wonder, if the experts know the information needed to make predictions, what do we need a predictioneer for? Here is where specialization of skills is really important. It’s important to remember that experts alone do not do nearly as well at anticipating developments as do experts combined with a good model of how people think. A declassified CIA study reports that my forecasting model has hit the bull’s-eye about twice as often as the government’s experts who provided me with data.1 I certainly don’t know more than they do about the countries or problems they study. In fact, I often know no more than what they tell me. But they’re not experts on how people make choices, because that, after all, is not the focus of their knowledge.
With all of the information we collect in order to predict and shape outcomes, computer modeling is necessary both to organize the data and to run simulations of negotiations or exchanges. Think of these simulations as a game of chess in many dimensions, in which the computer calculates everyone’s expected actions, taking anticipated responses by everyone else into account. The computer has a tremendous advantage over experts, analysts, or the smartest decision makers when it comes to playing such a complicated game. Computers don’t get tired; they don’t get bored; they don’t need coffee breaks or much sleep; and they have fabulous memories. They are content to crunch as much information as we shovel into them.
Consider the computer’s advantage. Suppose we were examining the North Korean nuclear problem in 2004, as I was, and suppose we simplified it (which I didn’t) to consider just five players: George W. Bush, Kim Jong Il, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, China’s Hu Jintao, and South Korea’s Roh Moo Hyun (ignoring Japan for the moment). How many conversations among the parties to the talks might each of those five decision makers want to know about?
George Bush certainly would want to keep track of what he said to each of the other four and what each of them said to him. They would all want to keep tabs as well on any proposals they made and any they heard from others. That’s twenty exchanges of views right there. Certainly that is not all that any of them would want to know. Bush would be interested to know, or at least try to figure out, what Kim Jong Il might be saying to Putin, to Hu Jintao, and to Roh, and each of them would want to know about the conversations they were not directly involved in too. That’s another sixty possible discussions. And Bush might even want to know what, for example, Putin thought Kim was saying to Hu Jintao and to Roh Moo Hyun, not to mention what he thought Roh said to Hu and to Kim, and so on.
All in all, taking all the layers of information being traded back and forth among just these five decision makers, there are 120 possible exchanges or imagined exchanges (that is, 5 factorial, or 5?4?3?2= 120) to know about. Keeping track of those 120 possible offers and counteroffers that might be on the table is essential in sorting out what is best to do at any moment in a negotiation. Those 120 possible exchanges of points of view and beliefs about such exchanges are what can happen in a single round of bargaining with just five stakeholders. It might be surprising to know that a smart person can keep that amount of information pretty straight in his or her head. Keeping the information straight, however, becomes an acute problem as the number of interested parties rises.
Just adding Japan’s prime minister—the talks are, after all, six-party talks, not five-party talks—to the mix inflates the number of important bits of information six times from 120 to 720. Moving up just to ten players, the number of useful pieces of information rises astonishingly to over 3.6 million! No one—not Newton, not Einstein, not von Neumann—can keep that much information straight in his head; but of course the tireless computer can.
Alas, the computer’s great memory and excellent work habits come at a price. There is a vital gap between how experts or newspaper articles express facts and how computers ingest and digest them. Like the rest of us, experts communicate in sentences. Models talk in numbers. So part of my job is to turn sentences into numbers so that the computer can crunch away. Numbers have big advantages over words—and not just for computers. Most importantly, numbers are clear; words are vague. It’s essential to turn information into numerical values, and in fact
