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)
