NYU’s Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, one of the country’s most prominent political scientists, pimped his latest book, The Predictioneer’s Game, on the Daily Show Monday night. Bueno de Mesquita is known for his predictive models based on rational choice theory. He quantifies the influence and desires of every actor involved in making a decision or causing an outcome, plugs the numbers into his models, and predicts, usually quite precisely, what will happen in the future. He says that a CIA study affirmed that his model is correct over 90% of the time.

Bueno de Mesquita is a fascinating guy – if you ever have the chance to see him speak at NYU, jump on it. Last semester, the Sharp Lectures club hosted him. I imagine he’ll speak again.

There are serious critiques of the theory he bases his work on (see NYU Local’s Luke Pattan’s here), but he stands by his predictive success.

Recently, Bueno de Mesquita ran his model to determine whether or not Iran will obtain a nuclear bomb. He claims that Iran won’t make the bomb – they will be just about to build one, but will suddenly stop by early 2010.

Read this excellent profile in the New York Times for more.