Capacity analysis?

[nancylebov]

http://www.2blowhards.com/archives/2007/09/qa_with_gregory.html#004438

is an interview with Gregory Cochran, who says that he used ordinary news sources to establish that Iraq simply wasn't rich enough to build nuclear weapons, and that no one is doing that sort of analysis for the Bush administration.

It seems to me that I haven't seen much about capacity analysis as a general thing--the only other example I can think of is from Brunner's _The Sheep Look Up_, a dystopian/disaster novel about environmental collapse. Someone figures out that the company which claims to be selling unpolluted food much be lying because there isn't nearly enough land to grow the amount they sell.

How much capacity analysis have you seen anywhere?

Comments

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

It's starting to be a factor in health care. I'm currently working on a proposal to provide analysis to the government on Allied Health professionals for planning purposes.

[supergee.livejournal.com]

I think that's what Heinlein used to argue in Expanded Universe that Moscow wasn't as populous as it was supposed to be.

[avram]

And I've since read that Heinlein turned out to be full of it in that particular regard.

[avram]

He's certainly got a high opinion of himself.

I've also got to wonder about his figures. Pakistan and North Korea both have worse GDPs than Saddam's Iraq did, and they've both developed nukes. The reason intelligent people doubted Saddam had nukes was not because of capacity analysis, but because the IAEA inspections revealed no evidence that the nuclear program had been started up again.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

He's certainly got a high opinion of himself.

He certainly does, and I hope you noticed that I didn't make a general endorsement of his views. I don't even know whether or not he made the predictions he says he did.

It's possible that people don't do much capacity analysis because it's a lot harder to do well than it sounds. On the other hand, it might be useful with appropriate caveats.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

That doesn't begin to settle anything about the population of Moscow.

If you find a cite, I'll be interested in it.

[avram]

Jim Gifford, in Robert A Heinlein: A Reader's Companion, says "Put simply, Heinlein was wrong on this point. His analysis was apparently based on cultural and social misunderstandings; no serious Sovietologist supports the notion."

The current population of Moscow is generally given as over ten million, and I have a hard time believing a hoax on that level could be maintained in the face of satellite imagery.

I did some searching for this a few years ago, and one source (which I haven't been able to turn up again this time) pointed out that all of Heinlein's analysis was based on traffic into the city, while Muscovites (this guy said) grow a lot more of their food inside their city than Americans do.

[thnidu.livejournal.com]

And in that case he said he got the same result from two independent analyses by different means. Doesn't mean he was right, but he wasn't as careless about the claim as it seems from the previous discussion here.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

That last is the kind of thing I'd expect to make capacity analysis very difficult.

[sethg]

Iraq, unlike Pakistan and North Korea, had fought a brutal eight-year-long war with its neighbor (Iran), followed not long after by a short war in which it was quickly crushed and occupied (Gulf War), followed by foreign-imposed sanctions restricting the revenue it could get from its only major export.

Pakistan and North Korea have superpower patrons; Pakistan has the US, and North Korea has China. Iraq under Saddam, ever since the beginning of the first Gulf War, had none.