“It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”
-Yogi Berra
Imagine that you have an alien supercomputer that can simulate the future with perfect accuracy. You can look ahead and see what will happen to the world in 10, or 100, or 1000 years. Then imagine that you can make changes to the simulation to see how it affects the future. For example, you could check to see what would have happened if Hillary Clinton had been elected president instead of Trump. How would you judge who was a better choice for the world? One way might be to fast forward until humanity reaches a certain standard of peace and prosperity. Let’s assume that someday, whether in 100 years or 100,000, we’ll achieve a world at peace, where everyone on Earth truly has a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Everyone has access to food, most diseases have been conquered, and crime is near zero.
To judge any particular course the future might take, I would ask how quickly we are able to reach that utopian-ish world. How many people suffered or died from violence or needless reasons from now until that day? Your goal is to figure out which variables bring about success most efficiently, as you start playing around with your alien simulator. Does a single change, like electing Clinton instead of Trump, have an impact on on the success time frame? Or does it make no difference? What if you adjust White House’s list of goals, causing them to pursue policies x, y, and z as top priorities? What should x, y, and z be?
What do you think the most significant variables are? Healthcare? Foreign policy? Tech research? Climate change? Immigration? Foreign aid? GDP growth? Terrorism? Hostile dictators? Relations with China? Russia? Iran? North Korea? Globalization? Trade agreements? Supreme court nominations? Education? Gun laws? Inequality? Tax reform? Welfare reform? Military spending? Drone strikes? Racism? Pandemic risks? Soda regulations? etc., etc.
You must not only decide which variables are the most impactful, but also what the correct policy is on those issues. Are sanctions and threats the best way to deal with Iran? Or would that only serve to reinforce their anti-American sentiments and unite the people against us? Should we pursue negotiations, incentives and foreign aid? Or can we just stall until Iran modernizes and naturally becomes less hostile? Or would that simply forestall an inevitable showdown until after they have gained nuclear weapons? Maybe we should launch a first-strike invasion to prevent future catastrophe?
It’s especially difficult because these variables do not exist in a vacuum; they all play off of each other. Each change effects everything else. Let’s say you decide globalization is the most important variable. You decide it’s the fastest way to transform developing nations into developed nations, which you hope will be less war-prone and more free and Democratic. So you enact globalization policies as one of your simulation variables. You think you’re speeding the world towards free trade and global progress. But then there’s a backlash and someone like Trump gets elected and tries to undo everything you’re working towards. Was that two steps forward and one step backwards? Or Vice versa? Would you have been better off if you had done nothing at all? Were your push towards globalization even a good idea to begin with?
Of the thousands of political ideas to choose from, how confident are you that you can choose the right priorities and the right policies? If you were playing around with the simulator, could you get things right on your first try, and bring about success much faster? I’m not at all confident that I could guess right on any of these issues. Predicting the future is hard. Predicting anything more than five years out is really really hard.
I agree with economist Tyler Cowen who writes, “Given the radical uncertainty of the more distant future, we can’t know how to achieve preferred goals with any kind of certainty over long time horizons.” He describes how we might have lots and lots of policy proposals that we evaluate to each have a two percent chance of being the best. If we find an especially promising proposal, we might assign it a three percent chance of being right. That one would be the smart choice, but it still has a 97% chance of being wrong. I’d bet that 3% isn’t far off from where we should set our expectations for a lot of today’s political plans, despite how confidently they get promoted by the ideologues.
Even with the power of a god emperor, it’s hard to know what to do until you run the simulation and check. Even the simplest decisions can be tricky. I assume that stopping young Hitler would have prevented WWII and that the world today would be a much better place, if we could have skipped that awful chapter. But I could be wrong. Would the Cold War have stayed cold if the whole world wasn’t sick of war from fighting Hitler? Might it have escalated into a full-scale global nuclear holocaust if nobody had witnessed the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
So how do we predict the things that will set us on the right path for the long arc of history? Is it all hopeless to even try? No, of course not! Just because there’s uncertainty doesn’t mean we throw our hands up and give up. I think the alien supercomputer simulator idea is a good framework for helping us make correct decisions. I use it as a reminder to step back and look at the big picture as I try to figure out which levers are best able to nudge the world towards progress. Humanity has been improving its decision making for a long time. We’re using reason and science more than ever before in history. We’re going to keep making countless mistakes, but I’m hopeful that on average we’re going to make slightly fewer mistakes.
Vincit Veritas 