early 80s decide to take off for a three year speculative adventure that involved long hours, high discipline, and hard work? answer, because i believe what i had to say about bill rehnquist was significant and worthy. if i remained silent, the information would die with me. historians and scholars study and appraise facts about the character and moral standards and out of public experiences of personages who make history. their judgments and writings help guide future generations. bill rehnquist was by all measures a historic figure. in addition he was 33 years on the supreme court. he played a central role and the only person who didn't, both in the two most important events in the past decade. the impeachment of president bill clinton and the election of president george w. bush.

my book explains why bill was more than a figure head when he presided at the clinton trial. without a doubt, he was better prepared and more knowledgeable about impeachments than any other single person who participated in those proceedings. and much of my impeachment chapter contains new information, which the mainstream media for whatever reason did not cover in 1999. i also disclosed previously unknown but not confidential facts before bill rehnquist and the presidential election of 2000. on the monday evening before election, he sent me a fax with his bet on the election. i should add that he and i and my wife bet on every election, primary or otherwise, local or

otherwise, and we always bet by fax. on the afternoon -- on monday afternoon we exchanged faxes from his secretary and the official betting parlor for the the obermayer's and the rehnquist's it was the chief justice of the united states. you will note that on the afternoon before the election he predicted and changed his long-hand bet that george w. bush would beat al gore by an electoral margin of 320-218. he had earlier in the day, apparently, picked 305-320, much closer. his long-hand betting card then 10 days after the bet, he sent me a letter on supreme court stationary, one of the few formal letters i ever received, asking to be excused from a $1 bet because, and i'm going to

quote, it is remotely possible that the florida election case might come to our court. i will point out to you that the long-hand betting card with the letters are in my book. i also explained why he believed that he and his colleagues acted courageously and patriotically when they decided twice to get involved in the bush-gore disputed election. he knew that taking on the case would be a thankless assignment. regardless of which candidate won, the justices would be vilified, harassed and be subject to vit ol. he and my wife went to the movies to three saturday nights out of every month. and only once in the course of 15 years of doing this did he ever say he was concerned about going to a restaurant and that

was the week after bush versus gore and he was afraid we would be harassed so we ate in my kitchen. additionally, he knew that the supreme court, an institution that he loved, would be diminished and demeaned in the view of the losers, whoever they were. in the fullness of time i am sure that many other books will be written about rehnquist, bill rehnquist. he was too important a person for future historians to ignore. but all of those books will be different than mine. i write -- i wrote from the perspective of a devoted friend who is not a lawyer, but an intellectual and social companion of bills over the 19 years we discussed personalities, philosophy, current and past, actual and imagined.

we shared interestingly uniquely similar and parallel lives. we were born 12 days apart. i was born on september 19th, 1924. and he on october 1st, 1924. we went into the army as privates shortly after the passage of the 18,7.x19-year-ol draft act in the winter of 1942, '43 we were both discharged in the army as sergeants in april 1946. we graduated from elite colleges. he from stanford. i from dartmouth. after attending public high schools where we were not academic stars but we had very, very happy recollections. six of our seven children attended the same -- graduated from the same public high school in mclean, virginia, and two of them were actually classmates. we married similar women and had big weddings. our approach to politics and economics was almost the same.

we had similar reading habits and we enjoyed quoting poetry. that's a pretty long list. friend and foe alike, from his contemporaries when he was a 27-year-old law clerk at the supreme court to post mortem ual gists describe him and how it went far deeper in politics and economics. conservatism was an essential part of the prism through which bill rehnquist viewed life itself. he respected tradition and order. intellectual and social. as well as political and economic. he believed -- and this is the essential concept, i think, that the proven and established should not be rejected until

there is a substantial reason to believe that the new is superior. that kind of defines a conservative. while my book is not about public policy, it is necessary to explain the role of conservatism played in his life. let me deal with a few personality quirks that i believe tend to explain this. the one in which i'm going to start with and which is both amusing and interesting is his frugality. i first learned -- we met playing tennis and after two or three sundays of tennis, i brought a new can of balls, which i thought was country club courtesy. and he said, how often did i play. and so forth and he didn't think people should buy new balls you believe they lost a little fuzz. and this was wasteful and we would play with them but we would continue to play with them

and he would buy the next only after the fuzz wore off of them. the next exposure to his frugality, we went out to a restaurant together for lunch. as a matter of fact, one about two blocks from here called the two quail. and when the check came, he asked was i figuring the tip before or after taxes. [laughter] >> i told him i usually figured it after taxes. and he explained to me that he didn't believe in tipping somebody for being a tax collector. [laughter] >> at any rate, so in the course of many, many dinners together and lunches together, i always carefully explained to him before we got to the tip business, that i had eliminated the question of taxes. when he got to be 65, the arlington county library -- they since changed, notified him that they were reducing his fines for late books because he was a senior citizen. of course, i became a senior citizen the same week. and he said to me, he thought

that was totally unfair and he was going to bring it to their attention that senior citizens usually had more time on their hands than people in the work force. we would go out to dinner and he also had a light beer before dinner. and he would ask the waitress, could you list the domestic light beers. he was afraid imported beer might cost a little more. [laughter] >> they listed the specials on it on a menu and he would invariably ask could you price that? he rarely bought the special, but he told betty ann and me repeatedly he never thought people should make merchandise offerings without telling you the price. there was something wrong with that. his post office box in vermont -- he doesn't have a post office box. he picks up his mail -- he did

at general delivery 'cause you had to have a box to pay for it. general delivery is a service rendered to all the citizens. now, i just would like -- this requires more -- it's interesting and amusing but it requires further explanation. first of all, he was equally frugal with the public's money at which he was a steward. when he became chief justice, he succeeded warren berger. he felt he could get along with three law clerks and two secretaries. and that's what he had. his colleague and friend, justice blackman, after he's retired for a few years, wanted an extra secretary to prepare his prepares to give to the library of congress. and he turned him down because he thought it was a dangerous precedent for retired justices to have more than the one secretary they're allowed under some regulation.

and he incurred justice jackson -- justice blackman's wrath but he thought that was the proper thing to do. and i think blackman did too, after a while. and i assure you that one secretary's salary can be lost in the supreme court budget without much difficulty. he never had security at his home. while lots of federal judges who were hisñ standards have security, congress doesn't have security, he never had any guards even after bush versus gore. he had a lot of reasons but the chief reason was it was a wasteful precedent. if you started providing security for all nine justice supreme court 24/7 that was a very good deal and he was one among equals when it came to his decisions. now, this shows a sensed of self-discipline and it shows a respect for money as a steward of value.

that's an economists term but it's a vital and valid one. what makes bill rehnquist's frugality is they are misers. he did not conveyor about becoming rich or even well-to-do. his estate, which is the final proof, consisted of two plain vanilla cds at banks, two homing and a few personal possessions. he had no stocks. no bonds. no mutual funds. i believe it also had to do with his idea what might corrupt or lead to commentary about his bias. now, i think this tells a lot about a man, a lot more than any of the commentators to talk about his opinions.

it's the same hard intellectual discipline which i call conservatism ts his writing style, both in his history books and in his opinions spare and unadorned. there's little legalese in there and he's a former speechwriter and in the last days of barry goldwater's campaign was the chief political speechwriter. his ability to synthesize complex issues, again, part of it being conservative. he didn't waste words. he even had an alcohol discipline. one light beer but never more. he rarely ate a meal or watched tv sports events with me without having light beer first. but never two. and this is over a period of 15 years. he bet small amounts on anything

but he never gambled. he considered betting big amounts gambling and betting kind of a fun game. the one exception, and i mention it because it is interesting, to his disciplined life was cigarettes. and i can't satisfactorily explain this habit. he said he could stop. we talked about it often. and he told me he stopped several times in his life but he enjoyed cigarettes and he knowingly took all the risks. he would have used a -- he saw himself as an informed better. i also discuss another mutual area which i think gives insight into him -- into the man who had all this power that nobody has talked about before. our army experiences, although superficially different were very similar. this gave me an understanding to

the large and lasting effect the army had on bill rehnquist thought patterns. the no deferral draft took over our lives and the thinking of 18 years old in 1942 and '3 is rarely understood by people in this room. every healthy 18-year-old that i knew was either conscripted or volunteered in the hopes of getting preferred treatment. there were no exceptions. you may remember the framer of the number one song on the hit parade. you don't remember but you may know. for most of that year was, they're either too young or too old. what's good is in the army. what's left will never harm me. my own experience was very similar to bill's i told you we were born 12 days apart. we both graduated from high school in 1942. and we were soldiers less than a year later. it was a very scary time to be

18. three of my high school classmates at a public high school in philadelphia were killed in action while they were 19 years old. to explain a little further about something i know, when i'm matriculated in dartmouth in 1942, there were approximately 2400 undergraduates. 18 months later, in march of 1944, the entire civilian enrollment at dartmouth college was 174. 2400 to 174. and of that 174, more than 20 were wounded veterans. this was the lowest enrollment at dartmouth since 1819 when james monroe was president. although the student body was more than eight times as large in 1942, it was -- it was -- it

remained during the war larger, the mexican war and the civil war than it was in world war ii. that, i think, describes what we shared in a way that very few people understand. all veterans of world war ii share something. but few shared as much as bill and i. as an example, justice stevens had a distinguished career in the navy in a special organization that was involved in cracking codes. now, he was an officer, a naval officer, and distinguished himself. but always as bill said where somebody served him his meals. it took us two years to become sergeants. and we never advanced beyond that. we always lived in fear. and this is what i think reflects itself in his judicial conduct. that some low level military

bureaucrat would have us is destroyed barricaded where we would wounded our killed. privates learned of a new posting when a sergeant read your name on a clipboard at revelry and there were no appeals. our democratically elected government had ordered us in harm's way. we understood it was necessary. we didn't question now and certainly now now, i don't know about then, when was it was appropriate but we knew government's power. and we knew just how great it could be. and we feared it. and the fear was deep. it lasted throughout our lives. finally, in closing, i would just like to say that "rehnquist" is not a highbrow book. it is a warm and occasionally funny personal memoir.

it is a yarn about friendship with two bright and worldly old men. as it explores some of the offbeat intellectual byways and every day experiences we enjoyed together, it tells more than was ever previously known about an important public figure while he was at the apex of power. from my point of view, it's a final act of fielding. i believe it's a final act which is also a meaningful contribution to history. thank you. [applause] >> we will take questions. we have a microphone if anybody has some. but i want to ask the first one. i want you to discuss what he did about books and also cars. books -- he didn't save books. i have a library which i love.

and i snooze in it surrounded by friends. and it's an important part of my life. and he inscribed one of his books to me to oby who reads books as well as collects them. he did not save books. he used libraries when he was done with books, he often threw them out. and i tell in my book that one of the books -- possessions that i have that we enjoyed together, i own a johnson dictionary. the work product of the first lexiconographer in the english language, not a first edition but an early one. and samuel johnson, the first lexiconographer could only define words by quotations since there were no other words. so he would find a word and we looked up words where there was

seven different quotations to show nuances of the word as it was used that came to his mind. and we who kind of we thought we were very smart with quotations greatly admired -- just enjoyed reading about dr. johnson who wrote most of this dictionary himself. he had some eight clerks. so to talk about books, we enjoyed books. and we for many years would read the same book and talk about it -- about three weeks later. we gave ourselves three weeks to read a book. and, you know, before the movies we would sit and talk about a book. and it's part of why -- and i say in my book in the epilogue, why i miss him so much.

because i have a lot of very interesting and well read and fun friends but i don't know anybody who knew as much as he could and who could quote funny poetry at dinner and have a fun time out of it who i can -- who i can say let's both read this book and talk about it and i will get a terribly savvy, smart opinion about it. cars, he had a small subaru and he thought fancy cars were an affectation. i thought he was right, really. but then just slightly before he died, i bought a small bmw. and i rationalized, you may say, or i decided -- i bought it because it was the only -- it was the only compact car that had eight air bags. and i maintained at a guy in my age should be more interested in air bags than any other features in the car. [laughter] >> so i showed it to him and his only remark was, it looks like a

chevy to me. [laughter] >> go ahead, john. >> next question. >> thank you for your mention i'm a lutheran who lived in wisconsin for years. and i'd like your insights on how the chief justice being a lutheran from wisconsin -- how that shaped who he was. >> i'll answer it. there are a couple of answers. one he was not born a lutheran. he was confirmed in the church of christ. a congressionalist church and he converted to lutheranism. he admired in lutheranism the

formality -- i'm not sure that's the correct word. the structure, the structure of service. he described -- what i describe in my book that we both were quite interested in t.s. eliot. and as some of you may know, t.s. eliot was also born in the congressionalist church and from a distinguished line of congressionalists who had been in new england, and t.s. eliot converted to episcopalism and we went to ash wednesday and eliot described himself as converting to the english version of catholicism. he called himself an angleton

catholic. and bill saw lutheranism in a similar -- we talked about eliot and connected his conversion from congressionalists to lutheran similar to eliot episcopalism. did i answer your question? which poets do you both like? [laughter] >> that's a good question. well, i would say -- this tells you about me. i am one of -- i was one of the last people around who attended robert frost's final seminars at district court mouth. -- dartmouth. i asked robert frost if you read in the lawrence thompson biographies set conditions. that he would only teach seminar if it could be taught in a parlor environment and there

would be no grades. and there would be no more than 10 men and no women there at that time. and i was one of them. and i have come away -- and i wanted to go in the seminar because i respected robert frost. i came out with a much deeper understanding and a more profound respect. he liked -- he quoted earlier 17th century british poets. he could quote many -- they don't rhyme easily they're pretty hard to quote. we may have liked eliot but it wasn't very easy to quote him. it wasn't as easy. but he loved to quote pope and things that remind. he could remember those rhymes. but he also read, you know, modern poets.

he was familiar with robinson jeffers and hd. he read poetry and enjoyed it. and understand it and the last line of my book says we found in this a way of explaining transcendent ideas that the prose doesn't do. and my book ends with a quote from a contemporary elegy by a poet. the death abides as grief knows. we are what we have lost. >> another question? >> well, thank you as an army veteran, thank you for your service to our country. but you did mention that both the chief justice and yourself, because your army experience had

a fear of government -- >> i can't hear. >> i'm sorry. both the chief justice and yourself had a fear of government because of your early military experience. how did that affect his thinking in the court? >> well, i'm not sure i'm qualified to answer that. i'm sure -- i mean, i haven't read all his opinions and i don't feel qualified but i can say that many of his opinions which deal with states' rights and that's something they talked about and it had a feeling of the dispersal of power was in the interest of the democracy. and it's more of a dispersal of power than power of states. although i think they are not mutually exclusive concepts.

>> another question? >> did he ever speak about a person who had shaped his life? [laughter] >> well, let me see say i devote part of a chapter to somebody who played a very important and brief role in his life. and who has not been written about very much previously and that's dennison kitchel who was a very important force in the legal community of phoenix and in the ultimate formation of the conservative movement in the republican party. he discovered bill rehnquist when he was a clerk for justice jackson and enticed him to come to phoenix to practice law. he was the attorney for the goldwater department stores and

he got barry goldwater to run for the phoenix council and then was his manager throughout -- till he got the republican nomination and he gave up his practice of law to do that. and when he was trying to organize a conservative taft delegation of the 1952 republican convention when taft contested eisenhower for the nomination and he wanted a conservative delegation from arizona, he somehow or other found dick klein who later became attorney general for the united states as a magazine in a cum laude of harvard law school. he was a native of arizona but he brought him out to work for him and organize politics. and this one man dennison kitchel found these three people who changed the course of barry goldwater and bill rehnquist,

that's a remarkable man. and dennison kitchel was himself a very unusual man. he came from a very social family in new york. his father was the managing partner in a law firm, which is the oldest law firm in new york. i looked that up. he went -- kitchel went to st. paul school and to yale and to harvard law school and then moved out to arizona. and he came from this long social background in new york. his grandfather had taught at greek at yale during the civil war. then he got involved in all -- and kitchel was a very unusual man. and he did not remain friends. and you will read how at his suggestion i met kitchel once. he was not -- it was clear they were not very friendly. . ..

>> in what way does that make a difference to him? >> i think it was tremendous. they were a very devoted couple. she was a terribly smart woman.

they met when he was in washington as a clerk to justice jackson. she worked for the cia on the austrian desk. and they then -- it was genuinely -- i'll tell you. this is a very important thing. until her illness, every night they read between 40 and 50 pages aloud to each other of 18th or 19th century novels. when i first met him, and i didn't realize all this, i asked him to -- he was reading scott's quentin irwin. a real obscure book in my opinion. and i asked him how come. he said they went through novels and did this, and they've gone through most of them. eventually, they even went into a little bit of the 21st century and read jack london and

a few other things. i asked him why did this, why did it aloud. he said it was a very hectic life and there's always pressure, and this meant every night he spent one hour with his wife doing something that was intellectual and something that they could do together. did i answer your question? >> does your book mention anything, any instances, times when mr. rehnquist had very difficult situations that he was handling on the court, and needed a friend, not to tell specifics about cases too, but that you knew that you were somehow helping him through a difficult time? >> i'm not quite sure i understand the question. >> as a supportive friend -- vacuum up all the time.

we saw a lot of each other. and things that bothered him, we talked about. and rarely about cases, because we almost never come about cases. he didn't need my advice about them. and i don't think they were ever had a great emotional content. they were cases. but there were all sorts of -- i'm not sure, the ones i discussed, you know, it's hard for me to answer what kind of things you would talk about. you know, we had children the same age. we occasionally talked about how you adjust to children having their own lives. [laughter] >> we talked a great deal about religion, and i discussed that -- somebodies asked about that already. i was jewish, because i am. he came to our passover on a

regular basis and participated and enjoyed it. enjoyed my family. and i will say, i was reticent, reticent about asking my wife, because we see the passover a basis of families passing tradition to generation to generation. so there are a lot of toddlers who make and scratch other people's legs, do all sorts of things under the table. is orderly, but it's still family and part of how i think it should be conducted. but he loved that. that was a family enjoyed religion. and part of his enthusiasm for the red mass, which is a portion of my book, this is a mass -- he attended -- as long as they kept attendance records, which for about 20 years, he attended more regularly than any of his

catholic college. and some of his catholic college are very devout. because he enjoyed it and he enjoyed a group like lawyers who sought divine guidance, didn't think they were operating in abstract without divine guidance. he took great pleasure in going to the red mass. and it's not a requirement at all. i will add, in the interest of separation of church and state, although it's conducted for judges and lawyers, they are very fastidious about saying it's not a command performance for anybody in the judiciary because that might breach some serious -- the church state separation. nobody urged him to go. he loved to go. he thought this was terribly important that judges and lawyers, the day before the sunday before the supreme court opened had a special service in which they wanted guidance.

and we talked about religion a lot. i talked about that. we talked about media a lot. that's one of the areas we didn't quite agree on. i have some strong feelings about cameras in courtrooms. and he has equally strong feelings on the other side. although i will add, there was at least -- imi reporting days spent a couple of years covering badged records, the very bottom of the list. and i really felt that any kind of tape record had been kept up what happens in the magistrate courts would be in the publics interest. all sorts of very strange things happen when nobody -- nobody is watching you. at his level, it's all there and it is all in the transcript. the two or three below. and he almost agreed -- he

understood that the magistrate's court question was one he was a family with, and quite the sense that i was where it just was not a very pretty business, that's putting it the nicest way. i covered some odd -- i was the magistrate court rockaway beach flushing in new york. they are byways of justice. and the "washington post" in its review, after we talked -- we talked about this. we fantasize during a football game break what the supreme court would be like if they had instant replay. [laughter] >> and we had talked earlier, and i explained that i had gotten him interested in marshall mcluhan, the media theorist, and mcaloon had predicted 64, a couple of years before the super bowl that football would pass this book as a popular game. because of instant replay. was terribly complicated game

with changing players, changing all sorts of things on a very rapid basis. but if you had instant replay and you could explain it, it could become a much more -- it would pass all the other sport in america, which it has done. so somehow or a another and he got very interested in mcluhan after i called to his attention, and one day watching a football game, when there was a break or have them come he said what do you think would happen if they had instant replay in the supreme court? and we agreed that we thought would happen, they would find a retired judge would be john madden, and after a while at the end of every half hour, the court was adjourned for 15 minutes and john madden, judge, would conduct a chalk talk. and then eventually, two or three or four other justices would become superstars and

heroes. and then those two or three or four justices would determine in the public interest to change the meantime of the court from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. [laughter] >> any rate, you know, his extension is once you start having cameras in the courtroom, it wasn't long before you had instant replay. next question. >> i've got one. we have kind of screwed on it. you don't seem to give any impression that he felt a burden of office as chief justice. do you have any feel for that? or do you think he was trying to separate outside from the inside? >> i put it a different way. i really think he loved it. he loved his job. and it really wasn't a burden. it's like anything else. some days you are overwhelmed, and during his illness he fought

to stay -- he was operated on in october 2004, and he didn't die until september 2005. he was unable to come to the court, as you know. he administered the oath to george w. bush on january 1, 2005, january 20. but he was taken in a wheelchair to the edge of the platform and he barely got out and got back. but my march, he went to the court and that's the only thing he did. you have to understand that this man had a tube -- many tubes in his throat at one time. by the time he went to the court that may have been down to one that came out of his neck. he never ate a meal through his mouth. from the day he operated on until the day he died. and he still came down to that court. he still met with his clerk and wrote opinions that his chief of staff, and that's a different job, that the woman who happened

to -- who is his -- who takes care of his -- eased the ceo of the federal court system, at least i think. so the chief of staff doesn't deal with the supreme court in terms of decisions. but deals with his administrative details. he wanted to continue this. you have to understand he was 14 years an associate justice, and for only the second time, an associate justice became a chief justice. and i don't think this happened -- i think he worked very hard to make this happen. he wanted the job. he enjoyed the job. i'm sure some days it was a burden. >> thank you. thank you all for your kind attention. again, the book "rehnquist" is available -- i think will make it easy. if you want to sign them why don't you stay here. books are for us outside and you can continue conversations with them afterwards.

thank you again for your attention. [applause] >> a politics professor uses game theory to predict the outcomes of business and government problems. he believes that the u.s. will not stop terrorist influence in pakistan and legislative attempt to global curb global warming will fail and that iran will not develop nuclear weapons. >> thank you very much.

it's a great pleasure to be here, and for those of don't like the numbers to approach things, probably a few by a car probably the way i recommend it. "the predictioneer's game," to save $1000, maybe more. i've done is eight times with great success. changes the lay of the land. so prediction which is the subject i want to talk about tonight, i will end by making some predictions, perhaps we'll be depressing but that's life. prediction is not anything new of course. people have always been trying to predict. they stare up at the stars and try to figure out what they mean. noster thomas stared at a bowl of water to figure out what was going to happen in the world and then wrote some mumbo-jumbo quatrains which only after the events people could look at and say he predicted that very smart guy.

cutout sheets and trails very unpleasant for the cheap, and probably not very informative. and all those methods had one string and comment. they don't work. so what i want to talk about is a way to predict and to engineer future events that does work. when i say it does work, i want to put a marker down. as mentioned, the central intelligence agency has evaluated my models and a couple thousand applications. it's not just that they have concluded that the models are more accurate than analyst, which indeed they have concluded, which doesn't make their analyst very happy with the. they conclude it's right about 90 percent of the time. and it hits the bull's-eye more than twice as often as their analyst. but academics have also evaluated these models. i have published hundreds of predictions in peer-reviewed journal articles were the predictions are about events

that had not happened at the time the articles were accepted or published. so no questions that they were real predictions. academics who always have wanted to shoot and others, have come to a similar conclusion, about 90% accuracy. i want you to keep that in mind that there is a track record. that track record is over a very large number of cases. how do i predict? what is the method? i have no great wisdom. i have no great insight into the world. what i have is a very powerful tool, game theory. what is game theory? game theory is just a way of thinking about how people compete with each other. if you think about the problem that he physicist has, we called up the hard science that these are the easy scientistic want to physicist have to worry about? they have to worry about how particles will interact with each other. as it happens, if i took his pen

and i threw it at the wall, no molecules in the pen are going to rearrange themselves in anticipation of hitting the wall. but if i stepped off of this podium and grabbed one of you and try to throw you against the wall, there would be a lot of molecules rearrange. you would respond strategically. that's what game theory is about. game theory is about working out the strategic responses of people, anticipating what they will do and choosing your best moves given what you think others will do. my game theory makes a few very simple assumptions about people. sometimes people have problems with these assumptions. i want to be clear about what they do and don't mean. game theory assumes people are rational. by rational, all that is meant is that people try to do what they believe is in their best interest. now, let's be careful here.

rationality does not mean having perfect foresight. doesn't even necessarily mean having good foresight. rationality does not mean looking at all of the various options that a person has and choosing the best one. indeed, if you try to look at everything you could do, you are probably behaving irrationally. because the cost of continuing to search eventually is going to exceed the expected gain of the continued search. win the cost exceeds the game, it makes no sense to keep on looking. rationality just as people do what they believe is in their best interest. now that means that people have values, and people have beliefs. values are the things that they want. and people are free of course to choose their values that they are shaped by their families, by

their experience, by their culture environment that they live in. there is nothing rational or irrational about what people want. there is something rational about what they do to achieve what they want. so they have values and they have beliefs. they have beliefs, for example, about how other people will react to them. what sorts of people others are, are they the kinds of people who want to be tough, bullied them? are they the sorts of people who want to cooperate and try to find compromises? so forget that means they face uncertainty. they know their beliefs are just that, believes. they are not certain knowledge about how others will respond. and they make choices under constraint, besides the beliefs and the uncertainty, they have some pool of resources. they are limited by what they have to get your the king of nepal, you might aspire to

conquer europe. you just don't have the wherewithal. you are constrained. you know you are constrained. you can't do it. so they have values, beliefs, and they face constraints. and they have to work out what is the optimal way to behave, given that they are constrained at that there are other people trying to defeat them. this is in essence the problem of chess. it is the problem of bridge. it is the problem of poker. so if you think about a game like poker, for example, is it about how good the cards are that you hold? are generally not. it is better to hold good cards of course, but you can play the very successful game of poker holding poor cards. poker is about signaling people through betting. and foreign affairs is about signaling people. there are two kinds of signals. cheap talk and costly signals.

i'm always very proud of my undergraduate -- i teach a course at nyu, the course of international relations that i'm very proud when they come into class after a president or some other foreign policy leader makes an important statement and say wow, that was cheap talk. for example, you remember a few months ago the north koreans working for a poorly behaved and president obama made a speech that there will be dire consequences for the north korean violation of our agreements. there will be economic -- heightened economic sanctions against north korea. and my students understood this is just like saying blah, blah, blah. we don't trade with north korea. what will we sanction them with economically when we don't do business with them? is just babble. on the other hand, sometimes when a president says there will

be dire consequences, as with president obama has threatened sanctions against iran for its nuclear program, which i will come back to, that can have real effects. that's a costly signal. not just because it costs the iranians something if we cut back thank transactions and other activity business activities that the iranians do, but because it costs some of our friends money. because they do business with iran. if they abide by the sanctions that we threatened, that's costly to them, which means they will be a little annoyed. and so the president is taking a political risk, and because it is costly, we can take the statement as credible. and of course, the iranians have to work out is the cost of getting into the sections, getting into the threat, the demand for change in behavior greater than the cost of living with the economic losses of the sanctions. if they conclude that the threat

of sanction is worse passionate the actual sanctions would be worse for them, then changing their policy, then they would change their policy. if they conclude that the sanctions will not cause them to as much as it will cost him politically to get in, then they will not give in. this is why threatening sanctions can be credible and enforcing, including sections is almost never successful. implementation means it is already worked out that they can bear those costs. that is game theory reasoning. it is working backwards to thinking about what's the other guy going to do, and then deciding which are actions should be. okay. so if one wants to construct a model to analyze foreign policy problems, how do we start? well, for one thing, we want to think about who are all of the individuals and groups that will try to shape a decision on a given policy.

not just who are the key decision-makers who will may the policy. for example, if we are thinking about what to do about iran's nuclear program, we know that the president of the united states will make a policy choice. but let's face it, president obama probably doesn't know a lot about iran. so he's going to turn to his advisors he's got. the secretary of state, he has national security adviser, he has a secretary of defense, he has a secretary of energy and so forth. he's going to turn to these people and ask, what do you think we should do about iran? what would be the effective strategy? and let's face it. steven chu is a very, very, very, very smart man. he used to be my next-door neighbor that i babysat for his children. he got a nobel prize in physics that he knows about particles interacting.

he does not know a lot of people interacting strategically, and he probably doesn't know much about iran. hillary clinton probably doesn't know that much about iran either. so they have advisors. they turn to their advisors who do know about iran, about energy policy, about nuclear development and so forth. and those people may exert a great deal of influence in what bubbles up to be the recommendations that the president receives and eventually translates into his policy. so if we ignore those people farther down the latter, we're going to get the analysis wrong because they are the people shaping the views. of course, that's just one side. the iranians have their own set of advisors. i suspect that holly khamenei doesn't know much about iranian enrichment. he probably knows more about what he cares to know but he's not an expert on. he turns to be possible to get

advice. so if we want to analyze problems, we need to pay attention to a large number of people who are shaping the choices. people who are advisors, people who are lobbyists, people are in interest groups, people who can organize street emanation demon. real decision-makers who don't have the benefits of a computer model sadly 10 to have to take shortcuts. so they don't pay attention. to all those many, many influences. they say, well, yeah, there were 50, 100, 200 people try to shake things. let's consider the following problem. a magic you just have five decision-makers. kerry, jane, sally, george and john. remember those things. harry wants to know what jane,

sally, george and john are thinking about a given issue. and jane wants to know what harry, sally, george and john, each of the others want to know what the other four are thinking. hairy problems to know what jane thinks and maybe even harry wants to know what jane thinks sally thinks george is saying to john. so if we go through all of those, there are five factorial possible interactions of interest that that's 120. actually, only 60 of them are really important. at least according to my model, and a smart person can keep that straight in your head. if you have 10 decision-makers, still a very small problem. there are 3.6 million possible interactions and factorial. nobody can keep that straight in at. again, we really don't care about all the. i care about a little over 5000

of them and nobody can keep that straight in your head. now think about writing down a model. a model is equation is. it's a math. but the math means that the logic is transparent. you can work through exactly how one goes from input information to results. and the computer is this wonderful instrument, unlike all of us it requires no sleep, no vacations, no coffee breaks, doesn't belong to a unique that says, seven hours a day, an hour for lunch, no more. it will not work to four hours a day. it can punch through all of the possible interactions. so it is certainly not smarter than a smart decision-maker. but it is better equipped to pay attention to all of the subtle nuance details that real people have to skip over and unfortunately sometimes as a result make errors.

hence i believe the explanation for why the model is about 90% right and intelligence analysts get a lot less right. because they have to take intellectual shortcuts. okay. so if we keep track of all of that information, then what are the data that we need? we will work out what people do. you will be surprised how little you actually need to know. you need to know what does each player say it wants. what its position on the issue. not what does it really want, very hard to know that. but what is the position that has staked out. what do they say they want? how important is it to them. how willing are they to drop what it is and pay attention to an issue when it comes up instead of something else that they have to deal with? how high a priority?

how results are they? that is, how much are they committed to finding an agreement, even if it's not the outcome they desire, compared to being committed to sticking to their position, even if it means coming to no agreement going down in a blaze of glory. so if you think about litigation, a mediator is somebody who doesn't care what the resolution of a dispute is. what they care about is that that there is a resolution because they are self interested. and their future employment as a mediator depends on their successful in resolving disputes. doesn't matter how the dispute is resolved as long as the parties do it. i agree. were asked a defendant or a plaintiff probably more resolved that they really do care about how it is settled. so they are probably less flexible. the media is hard problem. people very on those dimensions

and finally, we need one more piece of information about everybody. how much clout could they bring to bear. how persuasive could they be if they chose to be. so what do they say they want? how focused are they on the problem and how results are they? how influential could they be? for numbers for each player. if we know those for numbers, we can plug that into a game like my computer model, by the way, if you want to drive you can play this game, you can download. it is on www.prediction year's game deck. so you can fiddle with it. it is setup so you can make predictions that you can't engineer that i have in mind fantasia and mickey mouse's sorcerer's apprentice. i were a little bit about letting people run amok. and the version that is up at the mall will come down because we are trying to get a webpage version. anyway, you can play the game. just for numbers for each party. notice what i have not included.

nothing about emotions. game theory does not deal with emotions. except if emotions are used strategically. to gain advantage. real raw emotion has no place. i have said nothing about history that i love history. i read a lot of history that i've written about history. but i have not mentioned history as an input to the model. i have not mentioned culture. that is the very things that most people think are central to working out what's going to happen in the world. i believe that history and culture shape those for numbers for each of the players. but if we had the four numbers we don't have to know what shape the. always have to do is know those for numbers. it's like walking in on a chess game. you come into the middle of a chess game. it's black, smooth. you look at the border you don't know how the board got where it was but you can workout the next

move for black to make if you are a reasonably decent chess player. you don't have to know how the game got to. you know the players are self interested. they want to win. therefore you can work out what they're going to do. so why should anybody believe this? we have the track record, and i'm not going to dare to be embarrassed, the title of the unopened chapter of prediction is game, they are to be embarrassed. i believe firmly if people think they have a method for predicting and injuring the future they should come out and state what they think is going to happen again if there is time, why, rather than after the fact say i knew that was going to happen. i realized that. or after the fact providing explanation that is incredibly easy to fit facts to note outcomes. the hard challenge is to dare to be embarrassed and make the predictions before the events happen. so let me talk a little bit about the upcoming copenhagen

meeting. designed to try to control greenhouse gas emissions and global warming. my analyses indicate that we may get an agreement out of copenhagen. it will be meaningless. why will it be meaningless? it is the nature of universal treaties to be meaningless, with few exceptions. so we should step back and i will explain why in imola. we should step back and asked why is that virtually every world leader who went to the united nations and made speeches, calls for the essential universal agreement coming out of copenhagen, without its being universal we couldn't do anything. why is copenhagen, what is the nature of universal agreement? so it has to be an agreement

that just about everybody will sign, otherwise it's not universal. why will they sign? universal agreements ask people to do one of two things. either they ask them not to change their behavior, in which case they're perfectly happy to sign and comply because it doesn't ask them to do anything. or it asks them to fundamentally change their behavior, and then lacked teeth. it either has no monitoring mechanism to detect cheating, or if it has a market mechanism and has no way to enforce punishment. so as we think ahead, to copenhagen, let me reflect back on kyoto. 175 countries signed kyoto. the united states did not, the 175 did. now people were ecstatic about such a broad-based agreement. really for the first time we were going to take charge of global warming. unfortunately, they didn't read

the fine print. so of the 175 signatories to kyoto, 137 have to do nothing, except report on what they have done. we are proud to report this year we have done nothing. we are in full compliance with the kyoto protocol. as we promised, we have reported. 137 out of 175 had to do nothing. the host country came forward, we deeply regret we are unable to meet the greenhouse gas emission standards that we signed. and the british and lots of others. did the same. what was the consequence? none. there's no punishment in the kyoto protocol. there is no consequence for signing and then violating the agreement. and that is the nature of universal agreement that they either ask people to do nothing,

so of course they comply. or the ask them to do something serious, and then they shut their eyes so they can see whether or not they are actually doing it. or they are in violation. we have to ask them why do people promote universal treaties instead of taking unilateral action. and the answer is actually quite straightforward. if you can say well, we can't cut our greenhouse gas emissions because, after all, india and china and brazil and some other rapidly developing countries are not cutting there's, would be unfair to put our citizens on a phase a burden while these other people continue to pollute, forgetting, you know, western europe and the united states has been polluting for 200 years and china and india are just getting started. instead of stepping back and saying i have a different plan,

we will unilaterally imposed a very high taxes on fossil fuel use. two main fossil fuel uses that are heavy polluters, gasoline, you know that. maybe you know, maybe you don't know, fertilize. fertilizer is a bigger greenhouse gas emitter than gasoline. so if we put a heavy tax on fertilizer and on gasoline, it would be more expensive to drive big cars, and he will be more expensive to buy produce at the supermarket. now we can figure out why this doesn't happen. we could use those tax dollars to help compensate the indians, the chinese and so forth, for switching to cleaner energy sources. and we could use some of the leftover money to sponsor research on cleaner energy uses. but i am sure you all know that

foreign aid is very unpopular. because what happens if the voter looks at this and says, i'm not going to vote for somebody who is taxing me to give money to people in some faraway country that i've never been to, never going to visit. and so they say no. and therefore, the politicians don't make these proposals. instead, they proposed a universal treaty, and then we all feel good when it gets signed and feel disappointed when it doesn't get enforced and don't work out what was the strategic reasoning behind that. it was the politicians want to get reelected. and you are not going to reelect them if they did the right thing. and if you doubt that, i'm a little short on time, i will very quickly tell you, i asked my students how many of you would give up your cell phone use to help poor people in poor countries around the world? in the answer is, none of the. although, they are very eager to help poor people in poor

countries, but the eagerness is for someone else to pay for it. and we are the same. let me talk a little bit about iran. so back in february, i gave a talk ,-comon it if you could listen to online, and i made three predictions about iran. i predicted that they will not build a nuclear bomb, but they will build -- make enough weapons grade fuel so they could build a weapons bomb but they will not. i predicted that the theocratic regime led by khomeini would begin to decline in power and probably in the next couple of years. be replaced by petty detail ship run by jafar, the head of the revolution a guard with the support of others who control much of the money. and with the clerics rising

influence. so basically producing a more pragmatic regime. and i predicted that the students, dissidents and the clerks would be rising in power as i can get a shot basically will decline. that was back in february that was based on analysis that was done quite a bit earlier. so with my few remaining moments, let me review what we know so far. we're all waiting to see what iran is going to say this week about the international atomic energy agency's proposal of transferring a large amount of the vast majority of its enriched uranium to russia. here's what we know. on september 9, front page of "the new york times," there was a report that said that the president had just been informed by an american intelligence that the iranians had made a big step

forward toward putting a bomb, and delivery, that's the exact word use, deliberately stopped short of making a bomb. and on october 14 of this year, "the new york times" reported that the international atomic energy agency had reported that there was no evidence that iran was attempting to build a bomb, although they clearly had enriched a lot of uranium. why wouldn't they want to build a bomb? they get all the upside in terms of satisfying nationalist urges in terms of reasserting their role in the middle east, in terms of reasserting their prestige as a potential exporter of fundamentalist islam. they are in direct competition with al qaeda which is exporting sunni islam. if they gain all of that by showing they know how but don't actually do it.

and they avoid the wrath of the rest of the international community. what else have the newspapers reported? well, we know in june, which by the way you can look at this online, is when the khomeini power curve starts to turn them. we know there was a huge set of demonstrations against the regime after the elections. i are continuing. the american press does not report very much on these demonstrations. i urge you to read the bbc which does. there are demonstrations almost daily and lots of cities in iran by students against the regime. co-main he said patiently week and having never faced such threats, sufficiently weakened that when the trials of the students and dissidents from june were about to start having been cast by ahmadinejad and others as people who were the dukes of foreign agitators, they were working on behalf of

foreign agitators, no less than the supreme person, khomeini said i have seen no foreign intervention behind the student demonstration to undermine the trials, trying to shore up his political position. and now they are increasing report by iran experts that looks like that jafar is becoming a dictator of iran. let me wrap up. game theory is a transparent form of logic that, with the data, can help to predict the future, not a pie in the sky claimed. it's been done. i've been doing it. others have been doing it for 30 years. it works. not everything is predictable, but an awful lot is predictable. i at least can't predict markets because my models are concerned with problems that involve the

opportunity for negotiation in the face of the threat of coercion. and if you can predict, then there's a very good prospect you can find better solutions to problems that you can engineer. you can find better approaches that will change how other people perceive the situation. therein, change their beliefs and better outcomes. thank you very much. [applause] >> i am nancy jarvis at the world affairs council of northern california. speaking with bruce bueno de mesquita about his new book, "the predictioneer's game." it's now time for us to take questions from our audience. here's a great first question. madeline albright describes global affairs as more like a billiard game, and not like poker or just. where the arrangement of the game is constantly changing and dynamics. how do you account for dynamic

shifts where changes in one variable might have widely different effects on players? >> wonderful question. so my models are themselves dynamic. the data coming in as i mentioned in the position of players and so forth, although those variables within the logic of the model are changing in response to the strategic playing out of the game within the models logic. people's power go up and down. people's position moves this way or that way. people's focus on the issue shift and so forth. the world is a complicated case and is also the with a certain. the models are designed to try to capture much of that uncertainty. so there are multiple dimensions of uncertainty modeled by the program i've written. and in addition, the software, though the nazi on online version, it allows people to

introduce random shocks to the data, to ask the question how robust is a given result against unforeseen first place, how big a change does it take in order for things to come out differently. that is essentially the problem i think that madeleine albright is thinking about. although i have to point out that those random shocks don't happen on a billiard game, it's more like tilting, you know, in an amusement park, tilting the machine where things can slip around. >> you're talking about a black swan events because yes. i like to observe that where it is in fact happen rarely. and we should not lose the 90 percent to get the rare event. but we can at least test the rare event. >> can you give us a look at the dark side, the unsavory uses of your modeling? >> well, i'm not sure what would

constitute unsavory. i guess that would be a matter of taste. i have had some and savory request as i talk about in my book. and in the past year i've had some more both unsavory and bizarre. many years ago i was approached by somebody who alleged to represent more market off the. a very modest man, by the way, still a girl after all these years. still not promoted. suggesting that they wanted me to do analysis on how to move on mars not in each of. of course, i declined and i informed authorities in the united states. this past year i was approached by somebody who was interested in my analyzing how the warlords could take control of afghanistan. and i said, well, if you can produce a letter to me for the from the secretary of state or the present or the head of the foreign affairs committee and

the house or the senate says this is in the interest of the united states. i will analyze that and if you cant i will not. i was also asked this year whether i could analyze what would be the right venue and timing for announcing that the earth was regularly being visited by space aliens, this came from a person who was a very distinguished scientist running a distinguished research institute and the hard sciences. and so i wrote back and basically said, you know, if you can provide a letter from the president, etc., then we'll analyze. otherwise i don't think so. those would be the sort of unsavory or bizarre. i don't do those. >> if you're a equations used in place of analysts, how can they ultimately predict better than analysts in general? how about garbage in garbage

out? >> wonderful question. and several inches. first, i teach an undergraduate fall course called solving for an crisis. my students generally don't have access to analysts or experts. so they troll the web which they are much better at than i am. they generate the data off of websites or they have been very successful. so you don't have had the analysts or the expert. why would the model be better than analysts? well, it would be exactly what i talked about, the model keeps track of much more nuanced information than it was camp iguana but garbage in, garbage out? there's a wonderful chapter on whether the data coming in our garbage. remember, the model is dynamic. the first slice is just a reflection of what the data say the current state of the world is. if the data are garbage, they're not going to reflect a reasonable understanding of the current state of the world. so then we know it's garbage that if the data are pretty good, that is, they do reflect

the way we understand the current state of the world on a projected problem, then that point for it is the models logic that has taken over and is generating change in the variables and changes in the predictions. and so the thing to argue with is the models logic and not the data. >> there someone in the audience who is willing to pick on you just a little bit. and you said before we started that that was all right with you. you say that history doesn't affect your variables. but yet when you discussed the copenhagen summit, first thing you refer to was the historic -- the historically international treaties have no teeth. >> i did not say that history does not affect my variables. i said history is not built into the model. i said quite explicitly that history and culture probably shaped the bodies of the players have on babel's. and therefore, history is a way to understand how the variables got where they are, but however

they got there is less important than moving forward. the kyoto example helps us to see the logic of universal treaties, and to understand why they fail. it's not that because of the kyoto, copenhagen will fail. kyoto deal for the same reasons that copenhagen will fail. kyoto is not shaping the ferry of copenhagen. >> you will like this question because this is part of what to do. if an outcome can be predicted, cannot knowledge or awareness be used or result in change that brings about a different outcome? how can game theory be used for positive change, or can it speak is a wonderful question. of course he can no question that i would not be doing this. so if you think about a policy problem, and i will illustrate this with iran. if you think about a policy problem, there are basically a few things that one can do. one can take a more moderate

position than people anticipate, or a harder line position than people anticipate. one can take a united position or a divided position. a good cop bad cop that one can pay less attention to the issue and expected over the level that was expected. went to chill more flex builder or more resolve. and what we can do is simulate what happens if we are more moderate or for more extreme or what have you. and see how the problem unfolds to see if we can better result. that's exactly what i do in my consulting life when i try that engineer at compared to let me talk about iran. highgate estevez details of which i won't go into on iran, for the american government. and when i present the results of that study in august of 2007,

it was on nuclear policy. i was presented to a pretty senior audience, and including the person who had chief intelligence responsibility for nuclear proliferation issues. and he was very upset with my result. and argued vigorously with them. and i argued vigorously back, and i pointed out the data were there's so the issue was the logic. and here was what i saw the problems in his argument, could he tell me where the failings were in the logic of my model. the meeting broke up rather acrimonious at. i got an e-mail from this person two days later saying, i go to a lot of briefings, ignore them, but you kept me up for the last two nights because i could not dismiss your claim that i had come to my conclusions on weak

logic. the correlation is most surely not causation. i am not trying to suggest any credit here. i'm just stating a sequence of events. this is a person who had chief responsibility later in 2007 for writing the new national intelligence estimate on iran that concluded that there wasn't much evidence that they were trying to build a bomb, at least in 2005. that to me is how a model should be used. he confronted the logic. he confronted the evidence that it led to. he argued with it. he thought about it. he came to the conclusion that maybe there was some real merit in that position, and it was different from the position he had staked out, and he had adjusted. he had lots of other into. i am taking no credit here. i am stating that that's the way to use analytics to good in the world to force people to think through, how did you arrive at

that decision because i can show you exactly how this model arrived at its applications from the logic. sometimes it gets people to change their view. >> as a follow on to your comment about working for the government, the question is can you tell us how game theory can be useful to an intelligence agency? are they efficient for personnel recruitment? >> so this is a really interesting question. i'm at the moment on a committee of the national academy of sciences that was requested by the intelligence community to try to think about how to bring more social science methods like game theory, network analysis and so forth, into the intelligence assessment process. and there are rumors on the committee who specialize in organization theory, and they have some very interesting ideas

about recruiting people to be more effective, intelligence analysts. i don't have much insight. on the other hand, my models have been used to, for example, identify people in senior positions in foreign governments who might be more sympathetic to u.s. concerns than we had thought. and who have leveraged that to help them to provide us with assistance. that's i think a very important thing. >> this is a good question. where have you and your model been wrong? please give us specific examples. [laughter] >> absolutely. 10 percent of the time it's wrong. actually, in prediction year's game, i have a chapter that starts off with the worst ever prediction for my modeling. 1993, i was engaged to workout

with the health care reforms are going to look like when the clintons first came into office. when bill clinton and hillary clinton set up task force. i forget the exact details but i predicted something like 27 specific details of what will come out. i got 100% wrong. every single issue wrong. and i learned a lot from that. at least in my model, what went wrong was that the model indicated that the then chairman of the house ways and means committee, dan rostenkowski, was the key person, the tipping point person who could put together the right compromise to get it through. and he was indicted on i think 17 felony counts. and his focus on health care what does your. of course, he eventually went to prison. more recently, i did a book with some colleagues in 1996 called red flag over hong kong, which is about the transfer of hong kong to china. and had a lot of prediction,

most of which were right. one of the predictions which was wrong, if you are running a hedge fund would have cost you a lot of money. was that china by i think by 2000, would decouple the hong kong dollar, would deepen the hong kong dollar for the u.s. dollar. and they came very close by the way. but they didn't do it. so if you had been a hedge fund investor, you would have bet a lot of money on that deep aching. he would have lost your shirt. that was wrong. i have not had an egregious error of late. actually, in the chapter dare to be embarrassed, there's a section on pakistan. and big picture prediction so far have been right, but there are some important details that have not been right. the model predicted that the pakistani government would try to cut a deal with the taliban,

who were greatly rising and power of corgi and analysts, and lest the united states increased foreign aid. and to the extent that we did not tie strings to that one and a half billion dollars, then they would go after the taliban here but the book also predicted that there was a consequential probability that military would potentially not a sure thing, but a high probability would launch a coup in july. they didn't. . .

>> i'm going to give two answers to that. no-yes. no to the extent the financial crisis was the consequence of individual greed and risk taking by bankers, mortgage brokers and so on and so forth. yes to the extent that congressional regulatory policy that, for example, during the clinton years, and then the ante was upped during the bush years,

clinton promoted the idea that section 7% of american should be able to own homes. pushed up the ante to 70%, which pretty much assured that people would be buying homes who couldn't afford them, so to the extent that the regulatory environment contributed, that part would have been predictable, because there was political decisions, self-interested politicians. the individual part was basically just bad market behavior. >> i object to the statement that game theory supports the idea that people compete rather than cooperate to advance their best interests. the studies on the prisoners' dilemma indicate that that may not be the case. how do you react to that? >> i never said that, so i agree with the comment. game theory, in fact, my game is about the conditions under which people cooperate, negotiate, in the shadow of the threat of coercion.

game theory is comfortable with both cooperative behavior and non-cooperative or competitive behavior. self-interest does not preclude cooperating and there's nothing in my model or in my book or in my talk, i hope, that indicated that cooperation is not part of self-interest. cooperation is not always in one's self-interest, so if we take the example of the prisoner's dilemma, the one shop prisoner's dilemma has no cooperative outcome. it has a dominant strategy which is that both parties defect. if we look at a finitely repeated for known number of times prisoner's dilemma, there's also no cooperative outcome. if we look at the infinitely repeated prisoner's dilemma, if the reward payoff is worth more than twice the, what's called

temptation or sucker, that is, take advantage of the other buy or be taken advantage of, then there is a cooperative outcome, there is, by the way, an infy fight number of eequip equilibrium, and if it is the case that cooperating is not double the taking advantage, then the equilibrium is to alternate. i punch you in the nose and you get a big pay off and i punch you in the nose and you get a big payoff. even that is a more complicated problem an one last comment on the prisoner's dilemma, so if you know the story of the prisoner's dilemma, the outcome is two prisoners clueing against the people. >> regarding the israeli-palestinian divide, you say that all land for peace arrangements fail due to the

time inconsistency problem. can you explain? >> yes. excellent question. somebody's read the book. so let's suppose i am the israelisnd you are the palestinians and you say to me, well, if you give us land, i'll give you peace. i give you land, and then you say, well, is that all the land? i thought you were giving me more. it's not worth my while to give you peace. give me more. there was no credible commitment. there was no cost to you for talking the land and then renigging. flip it around. i'm a palestinian, you're the israelis, you say to me, disarm, give up violence. and then we will make peace with you. and so i lay down my arms and i say, ok, now let's resolve the

territorial issue and you say you're no threat to me, you no arms, why would i give you any of my land. this is again, lack of credible commitment. this is time and consistency problem. look at the good friday agreement. what was the one thing that the ira was most lax about complying with? decommissioning, putting down their arms, because once they're gone, you have no credible threat with which to enforce a deal. so land for peace and peace for land are both formulas that are doomed to failure. i do talk about a mechanism that could incentivize both sides to he is chew violence without any need of their trusting each other or getting along with each other, but you have to read the book to find out about that. >> having suffered through the first health care bill, what do

you predict about the current health care situation? >> i have no predictions sadly. i keep trying to get people to give me the data, and i have some people lined up, but now it's pretty late. and i don't have the data, so i will speculate that what we will get will have a very weak public option element to it that will have very severe triggers for it to kick in. that will satisfy some of -- enough of the democrats to go along with a bill that also will get snow to vote for it, but that's pure speculation. i've not analyze it had. >> what are your predictions about future armed conflict between china versus india, china versus the u.s.? >> i think china versus india, i assume the question is serious armed conflict, because there

are little skirmishes going on even as we speak. but serious armed conflict, i think is very, very unlikely over the foreseeable future. it serves neither of their interests, and while it is quite fashionable to believe that nuclear proliferation is in all respects a bad thing, i believe that the proliferation in that part of the world has stabilized relationship between india and china and also the relationship between india and pakistan, because they understand that the costs of a war are just way greater than the benefits. u.s. and china, i think, equally unlikely, maybe even more unlikely.

i a definition of ideology. on issues, you take an extreme position and you're extremely resolved to hold them. china is no longer -- the chinese government is no longer ideological. it is a petty dictatorship aimed at sustaining itself in power and it is very good at sustaining itself in power, so to the extent that i think there is an issue with china, it is a purely internal issue, that is as more and more elites rise in influence, particularly in the coastal provinces, the ability of the central government to sustain its control will become more difficult and they will have to choose either to liberalize and allow these others to have more say, or to crack down and choose to try to keep themselves in power at the

expense of the economy and that could lead to an implosion. i don't see this as happening in the near term and i suspect that they will be food at managing a transition without an implosion, but that's where i would see a real danger, purely internally in china, not between china and india and the u.s. >> as the final question, looking at the next 10 years, are you optimistic or pessimistic? >> i am a usually optimistic person. i believe that the nature of blatant self-interest is such that it makes the behavior of preticketble and therefore can be engineered and we can steer the world towards cooperative solutions to most of its big problems, instead of to violence. if we have, and i don't mean my model in particular, but more people developing sophisticated ways to think about these problems analytically, and to

design the tools to help us make better tee significances and i believe that's happening, i believe political science is very much moving in the direction of more analytical, less opinion-driven research, and that makes me hospital mystic that the -- optimistic that the future major league baseball a more peaceful and prosperous future. >> the predicteer is defined as an engineer, someone who makes the best available steps to ensure optimal outcomes. whatever model you used, i congratulate all of you who joined us this evening for having made an optimal dough significance an for your perceptive questions. thank you so much. that concludes our programs on behalf of the world affairs council of northern california and books inc., please join me in thanking bruce bu bueno de mesquita.

>> the national press club here in washington is the host of this 35-minute event. >> hello, bob, sylvia. this is great. to see you.

>> i congratulate you on your book. >> you have to read it. it's a short read. >> we already did. >> you mailed him one. >> yes, i did. i mailed it to everybody. >> and dedicated it. a very nice dedication. >> so super. >> hi, francis. >> hi, how are you kathy? >> dan told me this is done in world record time. >> from idea to publication. three months. august, idea. november, where it is, i'm not even carrying it around. you can read it on the way home because you can read it in a very short period of time. >> as fast as you wrote it. >> i read it multiple times now, and, you know, it's good. >> that's great. >> how do you think we're doing? >> i acty,