Bruce Bueno de Mesquita

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita was born on November 24th, 1946 and is currently 78 years old. de Mesquita attended Queens College, New York where he received a Bachelor of Arts degree and the University of Michigan where he received a Master of Arts degree and a Ph.D.

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita is a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and Professor of Politics at New York University. He specializes in international relations, nation building, and foreign policy.

Bruce got his BA degree from Queens College, New York in 1967, and then his PhD and MA from the University of Michigan.

Bruce is one of the originators of selectorate theory, and from 2006 to 2016, he was the director of NYU’s Alexander Hamilton Center for Political Economy.

Bruce was a founding partner at Mesquita & Roundell, up until this company merged with Selectors, LLC, his other company, which used the selectorate model for macro-level policy analysis. It became Selectors, LLC and uses both the selectorate and forecasting model in its consulting work.

Into the early 2000s, he was known for his development of an expected utility model, which is an operationalized application of the expected utility hypothesis from mathematical economics.

Bruce was the subject of a 2008 History Channel special called The Next Nostradamus and was featured on How to Become a Tyrant, a Netflix series. He was discussed in 2009 in a Sunday New York Times Magazine article called “Can Game Theory Predict When Iran Will Get the Bomb?”.

The Invention of Power: Popes, Kings, and the Birth of the West solves one of the great puzzles of history: Why did the West become the most powerful civilization in the entire world?

Western exceptionalism, the idea which European civilizations are much wealthier, freer, and less violent, is a powerful and widespread political idea. It’s been a source of prosperity and peace in some societies, and of havoc and ethnic cleansing.

Yet in this book, Bruce draws upon his expertise in political maneuvering, deal-making, and game theory in order to present a revolutionary new theory of Western exceptionalism: that one single and rarely discussed event back in the 12th century changed the course of world and European history.

By creating a compromise between nation-states and churches which, effectively, traded money for power and power for money, the 1122 Concordant of Worms incentivized economic growth, improved much of the citizenry, and facilitated secularization, all of which set European countries on a course for prosperity. In the centuries which have followed, the countries which have had a dynamic of competition between state and church have consistently been better off than those that haven’t.

This book upends conventional thinking about European religion, culture, and race and it presents a persuasive new vision of world history.

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Bruce Bueno de Mesquita: F.A.Q