We Should Have Seen This Refugee Crisis Coming

Conflict combined with high rates of fertility, poverty, failed governance and lack of opportunity is behind the refugee crisis in the Middle East and Africa. The world’s developed economies should have prepared, argues Rana Novack in an opinion essay for Wired. “Predictive analytics provides the ability to extract meaningful information from vast amounts of data allowing us to identify patterns and trends, make connections between seemingly unrelated data sets, and predict future outcomes,” Novack writes. “There are a myriad of predictive analytics tools on the market, both open source and proprietary, and even more applications.” The ability to model trends contributes to improved communications and efficiency. Novack concludes that policymakers have a global responsibility to use available technology like supply-chain logistics and mobile communications to prevent conflict from compounding into bitter legacies of hopeless migration and marginalization that contribute to new conflicts. – YaleGlobal