About the Authors

Michael D. Ward is an emeritus professor of Political Science at Duke University, having previously taught at Northwestern University, the University of Colorado, the University of Mendès-France France, and the University of Washington. He received an A.B (Honors) from Indiana University and a Ph.D. from Northwestern University. He is the recipient of over two dozen research grants and contracts, spanning a variety of topics related to international peace and commerce in the context of the dependencies among international political and economic actors. He collaborates with political scientists, economists, network scientists, geographers, ethnographers, and remote sensing specialists to study the dynamics of conflict. Ward has published a dozen books and more than ten dozen refereed articles in a variety of disciplines and languages. He is an elected fellow of the Political Methodology Society and recipient of the Society's 2018 Career Achievement Award. He is also the founder and president of Predictive Heuristics, a risk analysis firm.

John Ahlquist is a political economist, an Associate Professor in the School of Global Policy and Strategy at University of California, San Diego, and a fellow at Stanford's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences during 2017-2018. His work looks at how advanced capitalism and democratic government reinforce or undermine one another, with a special focus on distributional conflict and the political mobilization of wage earners. Current projects include field and laboratory experiments on unemployment insurance and specific skills; the politics of spite; and efforts to rebuild our social data infrastructure along the lines of distributed "socio-economic weather stations." His past research has appeared in numerous outlets, including the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, and Political Analysis. He is the author of In the Interest of Others (with Margaret Levi; Princeton) and Maximum Likelihood Strategies for Social Science (with Michael Ward; Cambridge). He holds a BA from UC Berkeley and a Ph.D. from the University of Washington. http://johnahlquist.net/