Today is Election Day, and soon the professional prognosticators - those pundits and pollsters, social scientists and former politicians who opine and explain on 24/7 T.V., in newspapers and online - soon they will quiet down. They'll take a breath while the actual votes are counted, and then they'll be back in their seats, regardless of outcome, and begin explaining to us why the vote turned out the way it did.
Do these folks know what they're talking about?
Philip Tetlock, a psychologist and the University of California, Berkeley, tried to find out.
He noticed that foreign policy experts, just like the experts on voting behavior, often predicted diametrically opposite outcomes. When he tracked their predictions re Ronald Reagan's foreign policy toward the Soviet Union back in 1984 he found that all the pundits and experts had been wrong! Neither hawks nor doves anticipated the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev and glasnost.
Tetlock then took on the prediction industry by selecting 284 people who made their living giving advice or commenting on political and economic issues. They included journalists, economists, foreign policy experts and intelligence analysts. Over the next 20 years he asked them to make predictions (e.g., would Quebec secede from Canada? Would the dot-com bubble burst?), rating the probability of several possible outcomes.
