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Can game theory predict what will happen at the U.N. climate negotiations?

by AnnelieseHXW Posted on September 24, 2015

Can game theory predict what will happen at the U.N. climate negotiations?

By on 24 Sep 2015commentsShare

Over the past few months, upwards of 50 countries have made their views on fighting climate change exceedingly clear. In submitting pledges to the United Nations in the run-up to the Paris negotiations, cabinets and diplomats the world over have spelled out exactly what their governments are prepared to commit to the global climate dilemma. Now, a team of economists from Norway, the Netherlands, Germany, and Scotland thinks it can leverage these positions to predict the outcome of the Paris talks in the same way football analysts might use players’ stats to predict the winner of the Super Bowl. (After all, COP21 will basically be C-SPAN’s Super Bowl.)

Viewing most national interests as frighteningly cemented, these self-dubbed “predictioneers” are employing a branch of economics called game theory to call the outcomes. Game theory is the math behind rational decision-making. In practice, what the economists’ work takes is figuring out how to convert negotiating blocs’ positions into streams of usable numbers. Climate Home has the scoop:

One method anticipates the bargaining positions of all main actors and blocs, from the United States, European Union to the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS).

How salient is the issue of loss and damage – or climate compensation – for cyclone-menaced AOSIS, for example? How flexible can it be on the issue’s inclusion in a final pact? And what clout can it exert over other countries?

Those variables, deduced by researchers’ scanning of official UN submissions as well as conversations with negotiators, award a value for each “actor”.

Running actors’ values through game theoretic models produces a series of predictions for what observers can expect from the negotiations.

Sound a little too Nate Silver to be true? It might be. Things like political momentum and the reality of fatigued, hungover diplomats are tricky, if not impossible, to capture in game theory.

But in fact, researchers on the team have predicted U.N. climate talk outcomes before — with impressive accuracy. In 2009, before the notably boondoggled Copenhagen negotiations, two of the team’s economists independently predicted the unfortunate Copenhagen outcome (which failed to guarantee any legally binding international climate action). Here’s more from Climate Home:

Frans Stokman at the University of Groningen, predicted a weak, voluntary agreement which slightly deepened pledges made for the Kyoto Protocol, and pledged a limited adaptation fund.

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, a self-styled “predictioneer” favouring science over punditry, too predicted the Danish summit would be a “bust”.

“Sacrificing self-interest for the greater good just doesn’t happen very often. Governments don’t throw themselves on hand grenades,” he wrote in a Foreign Policy article in October 2009.

Success in Paris won’t take governments throwing themselves on hand grenades, but it will take an immense amount of compromise — especially on behalf of developed countries. How optimistic should we be about these compromises? The economists are expected to reveal their predictions shortly before the negotiations begin in late November.

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‘Predictioneers’ forecast Paris climate talks outcome with game theory

, Climate Home.

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Can game theory predict what will happen at the U.N. climate negotiations?

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Health Update

by NorbertKirkhope Posted on February 25, 2015

Mother Jones

This is not of interest to most of you, but I do get emails and queries fairly frequently, so I figure I ought to share once in a while. The big picture summary is that nothing serious is wrong; a biopsy is scheduled for Friday; and I’ve been officially enrolled in the second stage of chemo treatment (the stem cell transplant). For those who want to know more, additional detail and miscellaneous griping is below the fold.

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Health Update

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SIM Card Manufacturer Says Its Encryption Keys Are Safe From NSA Hacking

by Aaron Stone Posted on February 25, 2015

Mother Jones

I’m passing this along without comment since I don’t have anything substantive to add. I just wanted to keep everyone up to date on the Intercept story about the NSA stealing cell phone encryption data stored on SIM chips:

Security-chip maker Gemalto NV said Wednesday that American and British intelligence services could be responsible for a “particularly sophisticated intrusion” of its networks several years ago, but denied that the alleged hack could have widely compromised encryption it builds into chips used in billions of cellphones world-wide.

….Company executives also asserted that the interceptions wouldn’t have compromised the security of its newer SIM cards for 3G and 4G cellular networks, only older 2G networks. The reason: Gemalto says the new technology no longer require it to send telecom companies the keys to decrypt individuals’ communications—so they couldn’t have been intercepted.

Hmmm. On the one hand, many of the Snowden documents are indeed fairly old, dating back to 2010 or 2011. So they could be out of date. On the other hand, the NSA didn’t necessarily have to “intercept” anything here. A sufficiently sophisticated hack could presumably have given them direct access to the Gemalto database that contains the encryption keys. And needless to say, Gemalto has a vested interest in assuring everyone that their current products are safe.

So….who knows what really happened here. We’ll likely hear more about it as Gemalto’s internal investigation continues.

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SIM Card Manufacturer Says Its Encryption Keys Are Safe From NSA Hacking

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America Sucks at Eating Vegetables

by munrhexaa Posted on June 5, 2014

Mother Jones

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Hold on a second. Kelsey McKinney draws my attention this morning to the latest USDA report on the kinds of foods we eat, and the chart on the right shows what it has to say about vegetables.

Is this for real? Since when are potatoes vegetables? I mean, I’m delighted by this news since it means my mother has been wrong all these years when she badgers me about not eating enough vegetables. Hell, it turns out that the bag of potato chips in my pantry apparently counts too. I’ll be sure to have some with my lunch today.

Still, I suspect that mom is right, which makes this a pretty depressing chart. Regardless of how the USDA classifies them, I’ll continue to put potatoes (and corn) into the starch food group. Aside from that, it appears that we eat plenty of salad (head lettuce, Romaine lettuce, tomatoes) but not much of anything else. All the things we traditionally think of as vegetables (broccoli, peas, beans, etc.) are consumed in such tiny quantities they don’t even show up.

That’s terrible. Eat your vegetables, America!

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America Sucks at Eating Vegetables

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Chip-and-PIN Credit Cards Coming in 2015?

by SophiaGalvez Posted on June 4, 2014

Mother Jones

Sam’s Club has announced that it will soon be issuing a chip-based credit card. Hooray! However, it’s a chip-and-signature card, not one of the more secure, more logical, and more universal chip-and-PIN cards. But wait:

The other major security technology widely used on credit cards elsewhere i.e., every country on the planet except ours is PIN codes, which are more difficult to fake than a scribbled signature. The Sam’s Club cards will be PIN enabled but will primarily verify users by signature. The next generation of the cards, however, will primarily require PIN verification when they are issued next year.

Hold on. When did this happen? A few months ago, America’s credit card issuers were insisting that chip-and-signature was the way to go. The transition plans were all in place and it was what everyone had agreed to. Retailers didn’t have the technology for chip-and-PIN and consumers didn’t want it, because we were all too stupid to get used to using a PIN code with our credit cards.

Now, suddenly, chip-and-PIN is right around the corner? What’s going on?

UPDATE: I guess I haven’t been paying attention. In December Wells Fargo announced that it would offer chip-based cards on request. “Technically speaking, they are chip-and-signature,” says a Wells Fargo spox, “though the chip does have a PIN and can accommodate a PIN-based transaction if the situation required it (e.g. an unattended or offline kiosk.)” And JPMorgan Chase says it will be offering chip-and-PIN cards later this year. I guess the chip-and-PIN bandwagon is starting to gain momentum.

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Chip-and-PIN Credit Cards Coming in 2015?

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Here’s Why Phoenix Is Ground Zero for the VA Health Care Scandal

by ansonsten Posted on June 3, 2014

Mother Jones

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I’ve steered clear of the VA story for the past few days, though not for the obvious reason. Basically, I got to the point where the collective hypocrisy over the whole thing became too much to take. Rather than write an epic rant I might later regret, I decided to just shut up.

However, in one of my last posts on the topic, I urged everyone to keep at least two things in mind. First, there’s a difference between the backlog of vets trying to establish eligibility for VA health care and wait times for vets who are already in the system. Second, always ask: “compared to what?” If you’re claiming that VA health care is terrible on some metric or another, tell us how that compares to private sector health care.

Today, Phil Longman comes along to write knowledgeably about both topics. In particular, he takes on the second one. Here’s Longman on wait-times:

Here’s a key relevant fact that is just the opposite of what most people think. For all the wars we’ve been fighting, the veterans population has been falling sharply….I have visited VA hospitals around the county and often been unnerved by how empty they are. When I visited two of the VA’s four state-of-the-art, breathtakingly advanced polytrauma units, in Palo Alto and Minneapolis, there was hardly a patient to be found.

But at the same time there is a comparatively small countertrend that results from large migrations of aging veterans from the Rust Belt and California to lower-cost retirement centers in the Sun Belt. And this flow, combined with more liberal eligibility standards that allow more Vietnam vets to receive VA treatment for such chronic conditions as ischemic heart disease and Parkinson’s, means that in some of these areas, such as Phoenix, VA capacity is indeed under significant strain.

This regional imbalance in capacity relatively to demand makes it very difficult to manage the VA with system-wide performance metrics. Setting a benchmark of 14 days to see a new primary care doc at a VA hospital or clinic in Boston or Northern California may be completely reasonable. But trying to do the same in Phoenix and in a handful of other sunbelt retirement meccas is not workable without Congress ponying up for building more capacity there.

VA managers have known for years that some of their facilities were gaming the system by using paper lists and other tactics to mask long wait times. Mariah Blake has the whole story here. In other words, contrary to the legion of pundits who seem to have discovered the phrase “perverse incentives” just last week, VA managers aren’t drooling idiots who didn’t realize that incentive systems can be gamed. They knew it perfectly well and were trying to fix it. Rather, the problem was that (a) they failed to set different goals for different facilities, and (b) they’re apparently lousy at oversight.

Regional imbalances also explain why these problems show up only in some facilities and not in others. And it also explains why, on average, VA wait times are actually pretty good and why VA patients generally rate their care higher than private-sector patients. It helps you get a handle on the “compared to what?” question.

Longman’s piece isn’t an apology for the managers who gamed the system in order to spike their bonuses—or for their higher-ups who failed for years to get this under control—but it does explain why it’s happening in some places and not in others. And there’s more to come:

As I’ll argue further in future posts, the key question to ask when confronting the real deficiencies of the VA is “compared to what?” Once that context is established, it becomes clear that VA as a whole continues to outperform the rest of the American health system, making its true lessons extremely important to learn.

Longman is well worth reading if you genuinely want to understand more about how the VA works and how it compares to health care elsewhere. He’ll make you smarter, not dumber.

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Here’s Why Phoenix Is Ground Zero for the VA Health Care Scandal

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Don’t Believe the Doom Mongering About Obama’s New Carbon Regs

by AbbieBenes Posted on June 2, 2014

Mother Jones

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For deep coverage of President Obama’s decision to roll out new limits on CO2 emissions from power plants, I commend to you the fine folks who cover the environment for us. Their real-time reporting on today’s events is here.

For now, I’ll just make a couple of points. First, EPA administrator Gina McCarthy sure is right about this:

McCarthy said critics who warn of severe economic consequences of the rules have historically decried all environmental protections. She described them as “ special interests” who “cried wolf to protect their own agenda. And time after time, we followed the science, protected the American people, and the doomsday predictions never came true. Now, climate change is calling our number. And right on cue, those same critics once again will flaunt manufactured facts and scare tactics.”

Before the rules came out, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce said it would cost the economy $50 billion annually and hundreds of thousands of jobs. Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, from the coal-heavy state of Kentucky, called it “a dagger in the heart of the American middle class.”

You should basically ignore cries of doom from conservatives and business interests. They’ll be producing reams of data showing that the new EPA regs will cost untold billions of dollars, millions of jobs, and thousands of plant closures. This is what they’ve done with every environmental regulation ever proposed. In virtually every case, they’ve been wrong. The cost of compliance turns out to be a lot lower than we expect, as does the impact on jobs and energy prices. Roughly speaking, this is because capitalism really does work, something these fans of capitalism always forget whenever it becomes inconvenient. But work it does: we invent new ways of compliance and new ways of generating energy, and it all turns out far better than the doom-mongers expect.

But you probably knew that already. So here’s something else to ponder: What is Obama’s real goal in announcing these new regulations? The reason I ask is that today’s announcement is just the first step. We now have to go through the normal drafting and public comment phase, and this is a lengthy process—even if the courts don’t get involved, something I wouldn’t bet on. Obama may have directed the EPA to issue the final rule by June 2015, but that seems hopelessly optimistic to me. At a minimum, for a complex and powerful regulation like this one, I’d expect a minimum of two or three years.

In other words, it probably won’t go into effect during Obama’s presidency. And that makes me wonder if it’s as much a bargaining chip as anything else. Back in 2010, when cap-and-trade was being considered in the Senate, Obama warned that if it didn’t pass, he’d take executive action on his own. That wasn’t enough to scare Republicans into supporting the bill, but now he’s actually doing it, which means there’s a concrete regulation to compare alternatives to. And I wonder if that isn’t the main point: Produce something specific enough that it’s possible to get some Republican support for an alternative. Even now, I suspect that Obama would be much happier with congressional legislation than with an executive action.

I’m just noodling here, and I might be entirely off base. God knows Obama has no reason to think that anything short of Armageddon will provoke any serious compromising from Republicans in Congress. Still, the timing certainly seems a bit peculiar. It’s been four years since cap-and-trade failed. Why did it take this long to produce the EPA regs that he had threatened as the price of failure?

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Don’t Believe the Doom Mongering About Obama’s New Carbon Regs

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Yep, Republicans Are Even Outraged Over the Release of a POW

by stevenjakoby Posted on June 2, 2014

Mother Jones

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Republicans are upset over the release of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl. They have several complaints: the president “negotiated with terrorists”; the president broke a law requiring 30-day notice before prisoners are transferred out of Guantanamo; and among a few fringe types, a belief that perhaps Bergdahl was actually a deserter not worth rescuing.

Is there anything to any of this? Probably not. But it’s pretty much impossible to tell for sure. Republicans these days are so hellbent on finding reasons to be outraged over everything President Obama does, there’s no longer any way to tell whether their outrage over any specific incident is real or manufactured. And in this case, it’s probably not worth trying to find out.

As a rough rule of thumb, I figure that if there’s anything to these Republican complaints, there will be at least one or two Democrats from red states who join in. So far I don’t think there have been any, which is probably a good sign that this is just random partisan fulminating, not genuine outrage.

UPDATE: On a historical note, I guess it’s worth pointing out that prisoner exchanges—and the issues surrounding them—at the ends of wars have often been contentious, leading to partisan sniping. This is a tiny prisoner exchange, so maybe it’s normal that it’s leading to a tiny amount of partisan sniping.

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Yep, Republicans Are Even Outraged Over the Release of a POW

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The Obama Doctrine Is to Not Have a Doctrine

by jurekjans Posted on May 30, 2014

Mother Jones

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Fareed Zakaria takes on the cult of foreign policy toughness—far too common even among centrists and some liberals—that instinctively equates military force with decisiveness and everything else with hesitancy and weakness:

Obama is battling a knee-jerk sentiment in Washington in which the only kind of international leadership that means anything is the use of military force. “Just because we have the best hammer does not mean that every problem is a nail,” he said in his speech Wednesday at West Point. A similar sentiment was expressed in the farewell address of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a strong leader who refused to intervene in the Suez crisis, the French collapse in Vietnam, two Taiwan Strait confrontations and the Hungarian uprising of 1956. At the time, many critics blasted the president for his passivity and wished that he would be more interventionist. A Democratic Advisory Council committee headed by Acheson called Eisenhower’s foreign policy “weak, vacillating, and tardy.” But Eisenhower kept his powder dry, confident that force was not the only way to show strength. “I’ll tell you what leadership is,” he told his speechwriter. “It’s persuasion — and conciliation — and education — and patience. It’s long, slow, tough work. That’s the only kind of leadership I know — or believe in — or will practice.”

Maybe that’s the Obama Doctrine.

Please spare me from more doctrines. But Zakaria is basically saying that the Obama Doctrine is not to let yourself get seduced by the straitjacket of doctrines. I guess that’s a doctrine I can live with.

You know, the one time I felt a little sorry for Sarah Palin was when she got so much grief for not knowing the Bush Doctrine. Hell, I didn’t know it either. You’re either with us or against us? Bring ’em on? We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud? The truth is that I still couldn’t tell you. Nor could I really tell you about the Carter Doctrine or the Reagan Doctrine or any other doctrine more recent than the Monroe Doctrine. They never really meant all that much, did they? Every president has an underlying worldview, and that’s about all we can expect. I think Obama has articulated his as well as anyone has.

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The Obama Doctrine Is to Not Have a Doctrine

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America Is Becoming a Bit More Liberal. That’s Pretty Unusual Six Years Into a Democratic Presidency.

by MargotBugden Posted on May 30, 2014

Mother Jones

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Why are there more moderate Democrats than moderate Republicans? This has never been because Democrats are spineless wimps who won’t stand up for liberal values. The main reason is simple: there aren’t very many self-identified liberals in America. There never have been. Self-IDed conservatives have outnumbered self-IDed liberals by 10-15 percentage points for decades. This means that Democrats are forced to appeal more to the center than Republicans are.

But Gallup reports that this is changing. On social issues, the ID gap has narrowed to nearly zero. On economic issues conservatives still have a healthy 21 percentage point lead, but that’s way down from 2010. Here’s the chart:

In one sense, you should take this with a grain of salt. Sure, there are now more self-IDed liberals, but that’s compared to 2010, a high-water mark for conservative identification.

In another sense, this is pretty unusual. Normally, the country gets steadily more liberal during Republican presidencies and steadily more conservative during Democratic presidencies. This is, presumably, because voters get increasingly tired of whoever’s in power and more open to the idea that the other guys might have better answers. But this time that hasn’t happened. There’s too much noise in the Gallup chart to draw any definitive conclusions, but if you compare the numbers now to the average from the last few years of the Bush presidency, the country has actually gotten a bit more liberal. That’s something that rarely happens six years into a Democratic presidency.

The trend is more noticeable on social issues, which shouldn’t surprise anyone. On gay rights in particular, the country has plainly moved in the direction of more tolerance, and conservatives are just flatly out of step. As this trend continues—and it’s inexorable at this point—the conservative position strikes more and more people as not merely misguided, but just plain ugly. And you don’t self-ID with an ideology that you think is ugly.

It’s a funny thing. People say they don’t like President Obama’s foreign policy, but it turns out they approve of the specific things he’s doing. They say they don’t like Obamacare, but they like the things Obamacare does. They say they don’t like Obama’s economic policy, but they largely approve of his actual positions. You see this over and over. It doesn’t look like Obama is doing much to move the country in a more liberal direction, but in his slow, methodical, pragmatic way, he’s doing just that. A lot of people might not know it, but they’re attracted by his no-drama approach to incremental social change. It frustrates those of us who want to see things change faster, but in the end, it might turn out to be pretty effective.

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America Is Becoming a Bit More Liberal. That’s Pretty Unusual Six Years Into a Democratic Presidency.

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