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It's difficult to be correct if your area of expertise is predicting the future.
by Shamiq 18y ago
It's difficult to be correct if your area of expertise is predicting the future.
- tokenadult 18y ago"It's difficult to be correct if your area of expertise is predicting the future." A very good point. I like the definition of "expertise" championed by K. Anders Ericsson, a researcher on expertise and how it develops. He defines expertise as RELIABLY superior performance to a degree that makes the performer a statistical outlier. In one of his studies, he discovered that there is no such thing as expertise in choosing common stocks in which to invest.
- nandemo 18y agoI don't know that his job is to predict the future. He's an economist, not a fortune teller. Of course, science can help us to "predict the future", in the sense that we know the sun will rise tomorrow and so on. But economics is not a natural or experimental science. Surely it can help you make reasonable predictions, but the nature of methodologically correct economic predictions -- meaning not necessarily predictions that turn out to be right, but ones you can reasonably make -- is much different from those of physics. Therefore, Krugman and other economics and financial pundits should rather refrain from making unsupported predictions. I think they get away with it because most people don't understand economics and also due to selection bias, as most of us pay attention only to the ones that turn out to be right.