What's Wrong with Expert Predictions? (Cato Unbound Book 72011)

Experts must love making predictions. They keep right on predicting, even though by any reasonable standard, they're terrible at it.

Many of them, though intelligent and well-informed, nonetheless have difficulty even beating a random guess about future events—or, if you will, beating the proverbial dart-throwing chimp. This applies to many realms of human activity, but above all to politics, and the subject of expert political judgment forms this month's theme at Cato Unbound.

Once we grasp that the experts aren't so reliable at predicting the future, a question arises immediately: How can we do better? Some events will always be unpredictable, of course, but this month's lead authors, Dan Gardner and Philip E. Tetlock, suggest a few ways that the experts might still be able to improve.

To discuss with them, we've invited economist and futurologist Robin Hanson of George Mason University, Professor of Finance and Cato Adjunct Scholar John H. Cochrane, and political scientist Bruce Bueno de Mesquita. Each will offer a commentary on Gardner and Tetlock’s essay, followed by a discussion among the panelists lasting through the end of the month.