Glad to see you back on the board...

Quote Originally Posted by Surferbeetle View Post
I find that I am starting to devote some of my time to this sport
My wife's favorite sport. I tend to take a good book...
Yet, I agree, none of these techniques and disciplines fully capture/describe the complexity we see.
True and that even slight degree of uncertainty drives many decision makers to dither -- generally the worst reaction but one which seem thoroughly embedded in the human psyche. I fear we'll just have to live with that.
I am not a mathematician...I won't be too surprised if computer power and analytical techniques will have evolved to the point where we are able to provide quantifiable predictions...which exceed those provided by the USG sponsored Political Instability Task Force (George Mason University).
I suspect you're mostly correct. While there are benefits to be derived, I fear there may also be some downsides in that removal of uncertainty, strongly desired by many , will not be the panacea they expect.
It's important to qualify that their efforts are but part of the story and some of my experiences in the ME (and banking for that matter) have revealed to me some of the darker aspects of people which they do not appear to account for in their analysis and calculations.
People can cause what Burns said: "the best laid schemes of mice and men gang aft agley..." Quantification has great merit, properly applied and that is correct even if there is massive human involvement. However, the larger the human quotient, the more latitude for error in quantitative analysis. Qualitative analysis can fill some gaps but even applying both types rigorously will not lead to certainty; people are simply too emotional and the probability of developing an algorithm to track that is slim...
Are some of the events in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, and Iraq directly comparable to those of Eastern Europe during and after the fall of the Berlin Wall? Perhaps, however my understanding is limited, and it’s still very early in the timeline to try and start making predictions.
My guess -- and it is no more than that -- is that most of the Eastern European experience wil not be transferable to North Africa or the ME. Just as Malaysian and Indonesian Muslims differ and both those are quite different than the Arabs of the ME, geography and demographics shape destinies and attitudes.

For assessments of potential and / or predictions of possibilities and probabilities, great familiarity -- let me emphasize that 'great' -- with a region and its people will enable a reasonably astute prediction when coupled with quantitative and qualitative data whereas the date sets alone will not suffice. Passing familiarity (my two years in the ME or four in Korea for example) do not equip one to make competent judgments. It takes long experience with actually living in a culture to do that -- and all peoples separate into cultures...

That's the difficulty with even phenomenal brainpower as in Sachs and Shreve applied to people problems, they miss the nuances -- and cannot stand the quirks...