2021 Global Order Colloquium Report and Thought Pieces

The world failed to prepare for the COVID-19 pandemic; the U.S. government did not foresee how quickly the Taliban would reconquer Afghanistan; economists failed to predict the collapse of Chinese real estate giant Evergrande. Could new forecasting methods have made a difference?

Colloquium Report

There is a major gap between academic research and policy application in forecasting methods. Scholarship and experiments have shown that new methods - particularly crowdsourced probabilistic forecasting - can significantly improve forecast accuracy. However, the world's governments, including the United States, have mostly failed to implement these new methods and integrate them with existing tools for predicting the future.

To help bridge this gap and advance discussions on forecasting, Perry World House convened a two-day colloquium, How to See the Future: Forecasting and Global Policy, on September 27-28, 2021. Our new report on the colloquium explores how better forecasting can facilitate better policy. When governments can rank the probabilities of global threats, they can tailor policy more accurately to the world's most pressing problems. 

Click here to read the report.

Thought Pieces

The Global Economy

How Much Will Vaccine Equity Cost? by Agathe Demarais, based on a white paper published by the Economist Intelligence Unit

The Pandemic Debt and the Future of the Global Economy by Ana Beatriz Galvão

How Long Can Markets Ignore Political Risks? by Mark Rosenberg

Inferring Economic Risk from Options Contracts and Public Prediction Markets by Eric Zitzewitz

Global Health

New Thinking for a New Dawn by Harvey Rubin

How to See the Future: Forecasting and Global Public Health by Ridhwaan Suliman

What Are The Odds Of A New Major Global Health Emergency Over The Next 5 Years? by Caroline Wagner

National Security

Geopolitical Forecasting and Actionable Intelligence by Ian S. Lustick (published in Survival)

War with China: Five Scenarios by Stacie L. Pettyjohn (published in Survival)

National Security and Climate Change: The Attention It Deserves? by Erin Sikorsky (published in Survival)

Connecting Intelligence and Policy by Gregory F. Treverton (published in Survival)