Bruce Bueno de Mesquita

Brainstormer, Business adviser, Consultant, Educator/Teacher, Entrepreneur, Idea generator, Parent, Policy maker, Student, Writer/Editor

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita is the Julius Silver Professor of Politics and Director of the Alexander Hamilton Center for Political Economy at New York University and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He is also a partner in Mesquita & Roundell, LLC, a New York-based consulting firm that uses his game theory models to forecast and engineer outcomes in negotiations involving mergers and acquisitions, litigation, regulation, and national security. He received his doctorate in political science from the University of Michigan in 1971 and a doctorate (Honoris Causa) from the University of Groningen in 1999 on the occasion of that University’s 385th anniversary. For 2001-2002, Bueno de Mesquita was President of the International Studies Association. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Council on Foreign Relations, a former Guggenheim Fellow, was selected as one of Queens College’s (CUNY) 100 leading alumni, and was in 1985 the recipient of the Karl Deutsch Award from the International Studies Association. Bueno de Mesquita’s most recent books include Predictioneer (Random House, forthcoming), The Strategy of Campaigning (with Kiron Skinner, Serhiy Kudelia and Condoleezza Rice, University of Michigan Press 2007), The Logic of Political Survival (with Alastair Smith, Randolph Siverson, and James Morrow, MIT Press, 2003, selected as the best book in 2002-2003 on conflict by the Conflict Processes section of the American Political Science Association), Principles of International Politics (CQ Press 2000, 4th edition, 2009) Predicting Politics (Ohio State University Press, 2002), Governing for Prosperity (with Hilton Root, Yale University Press 2000),and a novel, The Trial of Ebenezer Scrooge, published by the Ohio State University Press in 2001. He is the author of 15 books and more than 100 articles, and numerous pieces in major newspapers (e.g., New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, International Herald Tribune) and magazines, as well as the subject of feature stories in US News and World Reports, The Independent, The Financial Times, Good Magazine, and a 2-hour documentary about his forecasting broadcast in November 2008 on the History Channel. In addition to his academic research, Bueno de Mesquita has been an advisor to the American government on national security matters and to numerous corporations on questions related to complex negotiations. Bueno de Mesquita has received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Conflict Processes Section of the American Political Science Association, the 2008 Distinguished Scholar Award from the Foreign policy Section of the International Studies Association, the 2007 DMZ Peace Prize for his contributions to the promotion of peace and reunification of the Korean Peninsula and many other academic honors.

Changing decision making in government and business to rely more on logic and evidence rather than seat-of-the-pants guesswork. Wisdom is great but it is better when complemented by science.

The future is more predictable than most people think. Often when people say it's impossible to predict what they really mean is they don't know how. Learning to predict the future through science is not that hard and it sure beats sheep entrails.

Business Negotiations, Ebenezer Scrooge, National Security, Political and Economic Development

explaining why Ebenezer Scrooge lived a saintly life and was generous to a fault until he struck a Faustian deal with the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future. I know Scrooge better than dicke