Naming the Players

A contest easier to understand and more quickly resolved

Economist Tyler Cowen opined (see yesterday's comment) that Washington, DC, and the San Francisco Bay Area are "power centers" on a collision course. This is an example of the "coming clash of the titans" (CCOT) type of prediction.

One sees the CCOT most commonly in sports; for example, Las Vegas bookmakers favor the Houston Astros to meet the New York Yankees in the 2018 World Series, though neither team, at 5-1 odds, can be considered a heavy favorite. A better sports example is professional basketball, where most experts thought a fourth straight championship match-up between the Golden State Warriors and the Cleveland Cavaliers was inevitable; both teams have performed worse than expected this year, and a Warriors-Cavaliers Finals is far from assured.

In the business world your humble blogger recalls 1970's newspaper and magazine features about the looming battle between AT&T and IBM, as communications and computers began to converge. Both companies were so dominant in their respective fields that the Justice Department pursued antitrust actions against both. AT&T was broken up in 1982, and IBM, which introduced the PC in 1981, lost control of its invention to Microsoft and Intel. Today Microsoft and Intel are each more valuable than AT&T or IBM, and the clash of the 1970s-tech titans never occurred.

In 1835 Alexis de Tocqueville foresaw that Russia and the United States would battle for world supremacy.

Their starting-point is different, and their courses are not the same; yet each of them seems marked out by the will of Heaven to sway the destinies of half the globe.

For half a century de Tocqueville's prediction was spectacularly true, though today the principal rivalry seems to be between America and China.

Picking #1 is hard enough, picking both #1 and #2 is tougher.