Foreign Policy
The next 15 years will witness the transformation of North Korea and
resulting elimination of military tensions on the peninsula. No, this is
not our rosy assessment of Northeast Asian politics or the reformist
goals of Kim Jong Un. It was the verbatim prediction of the senior-most
officials in the U.S. intelligence community -- 15 years ago. Needless
to say, the Stalinist regime, though hardly the picture of health,
remains untransformed. In fact, Pyongyang has since tested nuclear
weapons, and relations between North and South show little sign of
improving; military tensions are high.
One suspects the analysts who wrote that line regret it. But the truth is that prediction is hard, often impossible. Academic research
suggests that predicting events five years into the future is so
difficult that most experts perform only marginally better than
dart-throwing chimps. Now imagine trying to predict over spans of 15 to
20 years. Sisyphus arguably had it easier. But that has not deterred the
intelligence community from trying; that is its job.
Starting with the 1997 release of Global Trends 2010 -- the report that featured the North Korea prediction -- the National Intelligence Council
(NIC) has repeatedly tried to predict the trajectories of world
politics over a 15-to-20-year period. These predictions run the gamut
from a 1997 prediction that Saddam Hussein would no longer rule Iraq by
2010 to the more generic prediction of global multipolarity by 2025 in
the most recent report. These predictions are the product of hard work
by talented analysts who work under political pressures and intellectual
constraints. And, in any case, we are skeptical how much better than
chance it is possible for anyone to do in forecasting 15 to 20 years
into the future.
That said, when we look at these reports in light
of recent research on expert judgment, we cannot help wondering whether
there are not ways of doing a better job -- of assigning more explicit,
testable, and accurate probabilities to possible futures. Improving
batting averages by even small margins means the difference between
runner-ups and World Series winners -- and improving the accuracy of
probability judgments by small margins could significantly contribute to
U.S. national security.
