Governing is Prediction

My last post called attention to W. Edwards Deming's observation that management is prediction.

This is true of government as well.

Ideally, both elected officials and civil servants would take into account during policy deliberations some prediction of the effects of the policies. But how can the public follow the issues and know what are the intended or probable outcomes of government measures?

We have prognosticators. Pundits. Professional explainers and predictors. Some write for newspapers and magazines and some talk on television. Surely the most influential of these pundits are the ones whose punditry is most accurate, right?

Not Exactly.

Recently a group of scholars in Public Policy at Hamilton University decided to examine the accuracy of prognostications by professional prognosticators, with interesting results.

This was not a ground breaking study. A more comprehensive twenty-year study of political and economic forecasting was summarized by Philip Tetlock in his book Expert Political Judgment. Tetlock's study was based on predictions by 284 experts on political and economic trends, and a subsequent analysis of the accuracy of the predictions. His findings:

-Extrapolation using mathematical models does better than human prediction
-Education and popularity increase the predictors' confidence but not their accuracy
-Prognosticators overpredict change and underpredict the status quo
-Extremists predict worse than moderates
-Some people predict better than others, even outside their area of expertise

The Hamilton study was more limited in time and scope, but focused on contemporary prognosticators. The most accurate prognosticator in their study was Paul Krugman of the New York Times. The least accurate was Cal Thomas. In general, they found that liberals were better prognosticators, especially if they had no law degree.