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The Predictioneer's Game: Using the Logic of Brazen Self-Interest to See and Shape the Future by Bruce Bueno De Mesquita Random House, September 2009 272 pp., $17.82

The game of "What Makes Us Human?"—or what made us human at some point in our long evolutionary history, so the story goes—continues to provide entertainment. Richard Wrangham's Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, published earlier this year, must have gladdened many a kitchen. But whatever else we are—forked radishes, singing Neanderthals, political animals, and so on—we are also predictioneers, all of us, in a way that distinguishes us from our fellow creatures. (Prediction + engineer = predictioneer.) Like chess players, we look ahead, weighing alternative possibilities. By anticipating what might be, we hope—within our modest sphere of influence—to shape what is. Bruce Bueno de Mesquita—let that name roll off your tongue a couple of times—differs from most of us in that he makes his living doing what humans typically do in a less systematic fashion. He invites us into his workshop in The Predictioneer's Game: Using the Logic of Brazen Self-Interest to See and Shape the Future (Random House).

As the cheesy subtitle suggests (we are brazenly self-interested, you see, and we had better get used to it), parts of Bueno de Mesquita's brilliant mind are still controlled by his high-school self. If you simply can't endure another juvenile takedown of Mother Teresa, you should probably skip this book. But if you persist, you'll get your money's worth and more from these pages. In fact, I predict that if you do read this book, you'll be thinking about it for weeks afterward, reminded of it every time you read the newspaper or the headlines on the Web.

Like John Nash, the Nobel Prize—winning mathematician whose life was the subject of the book A Beautiful Mind and the film taking off from it, Bueno de Mesquita is a game theorist: he works with models of complex human interactions, models that assume self-interested behavior ("rational choice") by all parties. But he differs from Nash in that he's primarily engaged in applying the theory to negotiations or potential negotiations in many settings, ranging from political conflicts to corporate mergers and litigation. (To introduce and demystify the strategic thinking at the heart of game theory, he spends the entire first chapter telling us how to get the best possible deal when buying a new car.)

Whatever the nature of the problem at hand, Bueno de Mesquita and his associates conduct extensive interviews with expert observers, identifying the parties with a significant stake in the outcome and clarifying what they say they want, what their preferences are (how they would rank various possible outcomes), and who among the players might be particularly influential in the negotiation process. The information thus gathered is fed into a mathematical model that he has refined over the years, and based on the results, he will advise his clients (the CIA, various other government bodies, corporate boards) how to proceed.

None of this sounds particularly striking. What makes Bueno de Mesquita's work interesting to the rest of us? To begin with, his predictions are unusually specific. While much of the advice he's dispensed over the years remains confidential, he has shown an admirable willingness to go out on a limb in public—as he did at the TED conference in February 2009, when he predicted that Iran would not (in the near future) build a nuclear bomb. And his track record with such predictions is impressive. He likes to cite a declassified internal cia study crediting him with a 90 percent rate of success (adding that his predictions often differed from those of the cia analysts who provided the information he used to reach his conclusions).

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December 2009, Vol. 53, No. 12

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