efosong

Latest market-based forecast from my model: 38%. Tweaking to 34% to account for my expectations and slight deference to crowd.

Israeli tanks have amassed on the Lebanese border. Israel have told the US that a ground incursion is about to happen. The Israeli defence minister is quoted as saying: "The next stage in the war against Hezbollah will begin soon."

Unless this is all a bluff (unlikely given the events of the past few weeks), we should expect a ground invasion soon. I assume this, in addition to the quote from the defence minister (and reading past softer language like 'limited incursion') will resolve this question "Yes".

Some source links via reuters:

• https://www.reuters.com/world/lebanon-israel-live-updates-hezbollah-hamas-yemen-port-hit-by-airstrikes-2024-09-30/ (this is a live feed, so I'm not sure how well the link will age)
• https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/apartment-building-beirut-hit-israel-widens-air-campaign-2024-09-29/
  
  

Still unsure on resolution here. I think the success of the recent strikes from Israel's perspective is likely to mean that they don't need a full-scale ground invasion and can continue a programme of targeted strikes. If the bar for this question resolving "Yes" is a ground invasion, I think that has become less likely in the past few days.

I still think it's unlikely Iran get involved in a full-scale war with Israel, but in the wake of the strikes on Hezbollah, the odds have gone up fairly significantly.

I don't think there's much support in Iran for getting into a full-scale war though, so if Israel don't escalate to the level of declaring war on Iran, I don't think it will happen. From my perspective, Iran's geostrategy may wait, and allow Hezbollah to rebuild at the same time as completing the nuclear programme, after which Iran may act much more muscularly in its relationship with Israel.

I generally agree with other commenters who have established a ~40–50% base rate: I reached the same conclusion via a Poisson approximation, though I'd like to introduce an alternative data source. Others have linked data or news sources which seem to be based on work by J. M. Powell and C. L. Thyne, which concludes that there have been 104 successful coups in Africa since 1960.

However, Powell & Thyne's bar for coup success is that the coup must survive for 7 days. There's no such stipulation in the resolution criteria, though I find it somewhat ambiguous what "maintains authority" means. This 7-day rule means that the 1971 Sudanese coup is not counted — but for resolution of this question it may or may not be.

An alternative source is the Cline Center's Coup d'État Project which tracks coups (including self-coups). The Cline centre talk of "realized" vs. "unrealized" coup, where a "realized coup" is defined as:

A coup that achieves the effective removal or displacement of the targeted incumbent actor or that ends their ability to direct national governance. The plotters need not accomplish the effective takeover of the state apparatus.

To my reading, this is probably a bit weaker than the resolution source. Perhaps the Powell & Thyne criteria is closer, but I think we should look at both, and then make a judgement.

A Poisson approximation from the Cline data gives me around 70% for "Yes".

Since there may be some amount of autocorrelation in the timing of coups in a given country (e.g. maybe a recent coup makes another coup in the short-term more likely, or maybe less likely) I also computed base rates by considering the historical fraction of 6 months periods on which this question would resolve 'Yes' for both sources. We get:

It looks like the 2020s have been quite active in terms of coups so far (e.g. all the coups in the Sahel) which could indicate a real uptick in the number of coups. It's not clear whether this uptick is 'significant', and it's not clear whether it will be sustained. But I'd generally put 48% as a good base rate.

Why go through all this again? I think this is one of the cases where the base rate is likely to be a fairly good estimate, in the absence of specific indicators of developing coups (that are likely to be successful). We may be able to identify possible points for coups (e.g. specific elections) but Africa is big enough that staying close to the base rate is a good idea. Also, by the nature of coups, there are often few explicit warning signs, so treating them as generated from a random process is probably fine. Considering more data and trying to refine the base rate is likely to be useful.

I think though I'd be keeping my eyes out for the following scenarios:

• Possible self-coups following elections. Though historically these have been quite rare: the Cline dataset records 7 successful African self-coups since 1960 (Uganda '66, Lesotho '70, Chad '75, Burundi '76, Lesotho '90, Algeria '91, Lesotho '94, Tunisia '21).
• Ongoing coup attempts

Only 3 months left until resolution. MSRA are still hiring for researchers in Beijing per their website.

Coming down mechanically with time. Since my last forecast, there haven't been any updates to the catalogue.

Significant escalations recently make war look quite inevitable. The pagers and walkie-talkie incident were signs that Israel doesn't seem too concerned with further provoking Hezbollah, and now an Israeli general has suggested a ground invasion may be on the cards. Countries, including the UK are once again telling their citizens to leave, and the UK has even sent troops to Cyprus in anticipation of an evacuation.

I'm not actually sure what will make this question resolve "Yes": Netanyahu has already used the word "war" in relation to the conflict with Hezbollah, for example.

Crowd is too low on this imo. Even a simple mortality baserate would put it around 2–3%, and I don't think Putin is more than half as likely than the average 71 year old man to die given his recent health rumours, despite the fact that he presumably has access to the best medical care in Russia.

I think direct threat from Ukraine has slightly dropped since my last forecast. Putin remains firmly in power, with no clear potential usurpers like Prigozhin as far as I can tell, but an assassination attempt by Ukrainians or disgruntled Russians remains a possibility, though one against which Putin is presumably well-guarded.

2% from base mortality and 1% from other causes.