representative sample of ten thousand smart neutral people is plenty.
I can be neutral about politics of Bahrain but I per definition can’t be neutral about the politics of the country in which I’m living. Being a citizen of a country means having interests.
The obsession about neutrality in US political discourse is quite a strange thing.
Specialization of labor FTW.
Bruce Bueno de Mesquita says in the Dictators handbook: “The difference between tyrants and democrats is just a convenient fiction. Governments do not differ in kind but only in the number of essential supporters, or backs that need scratching.”
Defining having a lot of essential supporters as waste leads you in the wrong direction.
Bruce Bueno de Mesquita says in the Dictators handbook: “The difference between tyrants and democrats is just a convenient fiction. Governments do not differ in kind but only in the number of essential supporters, or backs that need scratching.”
Isn’t that an awfully convenient position to find in a Dictator’s handbook?
Bruce Bueno de Mesquita is one of the most data driven political analysts out there. He has a big computer model in which he feeds various expert assessments of political situations and uses them to make political forecasts for the CIA and DoD.
He for example predicted the second Intifada two years in advance, When he makes the statement he means that his mathematical models make better predictions when he makes those assumptions.
Bueno makes money with selling high quality forecasts. He doesn’t make money with selling books. The point of the book is more about serving as advertisement for his expertise.
And also: regarding “waste”, there’s a glaring fact about a great many humans, summarized in Aristotle’s “man is a political animal.” Politics, like dancing or making music, is something a great many people find directly fulfilling.
I can be neutral about politics of Bahrain but I per definition can’t be neutral about the politics of the country in which I’m living. Being a citizen of a country means having interests.
The obsession about neutrality in US political discourse is quite a strange thing.
Bruce Bueno de Mesquita says in the Dictators handbook: “The difference between tyrants and democrats is just a convenient fiction. Governments do not differ in kind but only in the number of essential supporters, or backs that need scratching.”
Defining having a lot of essential supporters as waste leads you in the wrong direction.
Isn’t that an awfully convenient position to find in a Dictator’s handbook?
Bruce Bueno de Mesquita is one of the most data driven political analysts out there. He has a big computer model in which he feeds various expert assessments of political situations and uses them to make political forecasts for the CIA and DoD.
He for example predicted the second Intifada two years in advance, When he makes the statement he means that his mathematical models make better predictions when he makes those assumptions. Bueno makes money with selling high quality forecasts. He doesn’t make money with selling books. The point of the book is more about serving as advertisement for his expertise.
And also: regarding “waste”, there’s a glaring fact about a great many humans, summarized in Aristotle’s “man is a political animal.” Politics, like dancing or making music, is something a great many people find directly fulfilling.