The Rational Prophet

Game-Theory Predictions About Power, Money, War, and the World After 2030 — Lessons from Professor Jiang

Book Four of The Laws of Game Theory

Nostradamus wrote in riddles. He had to. A prophecy vague enough can never be wrong, and a prophecy that can never be wrong can never be useful.

This book makes the opposite bet. Every prediction in it is numbered, tied to a public source, given a threshold that decides it, and written so that it can fail. All twenty-six are collected in an appendix — the Prediction Ledger — where you are invited to do something no reader of Nostradamus could ever do: keep score.

There is no claimed accuracy rate anywhere in the book.

Why thirty years is easier than three

It sounds backwards, and it is the argument the whole book rests on.

Over three years, noise dominates: personalities, accidents, elections, luck. Over thirty years, noise averages out and structure is what remains. Everyone who will be forty in 2060 has already been born. Most of the debt that will shape the 2030s has already been issued. The geography that will decide the resource conflicts of the 2040s has been fixed since the ice age.

The prophet who works from structure is not seeing the future. He is reading the present carefully.

How the book is built

Part I sets out the method honestly, including what it cannot do — and scores the predictions made in the earlier volumes of this series, failures first. A forecaster who will not grade his own record is asking for something he will not give.

Part II takes the method into the archive: five centuries of empire cycles, a century of monetary breakdowns, and the clustering of great wars around power transitions. A framework that cannot explain the past has no licence to describe the future.

Parts III, IV and V play the three great games forward: Power, Money and War. Part VI puts the whole arc in order — which things break first, and what the arrangement that follows looks like.

What is in the ledger

Twenty-six entries, sorted into three bands: near (one to three years), medium (five to fifteen), and far (twenty to thirty-five).

Each entry is built the same way. It names the game and the players who can actually choose, and what each is optimising for. It explains why the outcome follows. It names the consensus claim it is betting against — and the rival explanation that would account for the same evidence, with the observation that separates the two.

Then it commits. The bet in one sentence. Check it — the public dataset, named. Win and lose, as thresholds rather than impressions. Expiry. And the baseline, calculated and printed at publication so it cannot be moved afterwards.

All twenty-six carry a losing condition. Not one of them can be quietly reinterpreted.

A sample

GP-12 — The debt is repaid by repression, not default.

The bet: the debt cycle resolves through negative real returns to savers rather than through default or a growth miracle.

Check it: ten-year sovereign yields and official CPI, from FRED and the OECD.

Loses if: sustained positive real yields alongside a falling debt ratio, or a large-scale formal restructuring.

GP-19 — Taiwan's status changes without a great-power war.

The bet: the island's status changes — by absorption, neutralisation or settled autonomy — without sustained combat between the two great powers.

Loses if: an engagement between their forces exceeds seven consecutive days or a hundred combat deaths on either side.

GP-23 — Paying for babies moves the timing, not the number.

The bet: in states spending more than three per cent of GDP on family benefits for a decade, completed cohort fertility does not exceed the pre-policy trend by more than 0.2.

Check it: the Human Fertility Database and the OECD family database.

Loses if: one qualifying state exceeds it.

Who it is for

Readers who want a structural, incentive-first framework for the coming decades rather than commentary on the last one — and who would rather have a forecast that can be scored than one that can always be reinterpreted.

Expected 1 October 2026 Read the weekly analysis → Next: Book Five →

Last reviewed 14 September 2026