Thanks for this. There’s a lot to digest and I’ll come back in a day or two with a longer comment. But I wanted to quickly jump in and suggest you revise the second bullet point in your summary. It reads:
In particular, risk of a US-China war is real (Metaculus gives it 50⁄50 odds of happening by 2050).
This is not true. The Metaculus question you’re referring to is this one, in which the median forecaster prediction for the next great power war is 2045. However this is not specifically about a US-China war. Rather, this includes any war between two countries which are in the top 10 by military spending according to SIPRI’s index. That includes the US and China, but, crucially, Russia, Germany, India, Japan, and South Korea (among others) as well.
Given the number of potential combatant-pairs in that set, some of which are probably about as likely to go to war as the US and China, I think your bullet point as written is very misleading. The odds of a serious US-China war by 2050 are closer to 10-20% IMO (a more specific Metaculus question has it at 16% by 2035).
There’s also a Metaculus question about the chance of >100 deaths in US-China conflicts before 2050, with the community prediction at 53%. But 100 deaths is well below the threshold for a war and way, way below even your “shorter, limited” war scenario (which assumes 25,000 combined US-China deaths, plus >200,000 Taiwanese deaths). Because war deaths follow a heavy-tailed distribution, I think a lot of the conflict probability mass lies between 100 and 25,000 deaths.
I think a 10-20% chance of war is probably still high enough for many of your arguments to go through. But I think starting your piece off with such a misrepresentation does it a disservice. I recommend you edit that bullet point.
(Like I said—overall I’m really happy to see this piece and will come back with a more substantial comment in a day or two!)
Thanks for this Stephen. We wrote the TLDR at the last minute and switched out the 2070 for this one. Will adjust the draft accordingly to reflect this. However I gotta say the fact that most of the China war metaculus markets barely moved in the leadup to the Pelosi visit did make me downweight my confidence that the predictions in these markets mean much.
Thanks for this. There’s a lot to digest and I’ll come back in a day or two with a longer comment. But I wanted to quickly jump in and suggest you revise the second bullet point in your summary. It reads:
This is not true. The Metaculus question you’re referring to is this one, in which the median forecaster prediction for the next great power war is 2045. However this is not specifically about a US-China war. Rather, this includes any war between two countries which are in the top 10 by military spending according to SIPRI’s index. That includes the US and China, but, crucially, Russia, Germany, India, Japan, and South Korea (among others) as well.
Given the number of potential combatant-pairs in that set, some of which are probably about as likely to go to war as the US and China, I think your bullet point as written is very misleading. The odds of a serious US-China war by 2050 are closer to 10-20% IMO (a more specific Metaculus question has it at 16% by 2035).
There’s also a Metaculus question about the chance of >100 deaths in US-China conflicts before 2050, with the community prediction at 53%. But 100 deaths is well below the threshold for a war and way, way below even your “shorter, limited” war scenario (which assumes 25,000 combined US-China deaths, plus >200,000 Taiwanese deaths). Because war deaths follow a heavy-tailed distribution, I think a lot of the conflict probability mass lies between 100 and 25,000 deaths.
I think a 10-20% chance of war is probably still high enough for many of your arguments to go through. But I think starting your piece off with such a misrepresentation does it a disservice. I recommend you edit that bullet point.
(Like I said—overall I’m really happy to see this piece and will come back with a more substantial comment in a day or two!)
Thanks for this Stephen. We wrote the TLDR at the last minute and switched out the 2070 for this one. Will adjust the draft accordingly to reflect this. However I gotta say the fact that most of the China war metaculus markets barely moved in the leadup to the Pelosi visit did make me downweight my confidence that the predictions in these markets mean much.
Metaculus performed decently well anticipating the Russia-Ukraine conflict, so I do think they can provide information about conflicts
still very excited to read your longer thoughts!!
;(
just came across your series—should’ve just outsourced my estimating to you you did a good job in those posts