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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Experto credite, you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows
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The number of opinions = n+1
The real test is when the excrement hits the air blower - how many of the experts dare to predict that in advance?
The physicist says: "Let's smash the can open with a rock."
The chemist says: "Let’s build a fire and heat the can first."
The economist says: "Let us assume that we have a can-opener..."
Its as likely in their London bubbles they talk themselves in to a depression just as we go into a period of rapid growth.
...in a book called Anticipations (full title: Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought), which the Young Fabians' magazine is still named after.
Meanwhile, not content with looking like complete idiots for not having planned for both possible outcomes of the EU membership referendum, Britgov are boasting that they aren't planning much for a victory of one of the frontrunners in the French presidential election either. They have made contact with other candidates, but not with Le Pen.
The way the Telegraph talk about Le Pen reminds me of the Daily Mail's attitude towards Oswald Mosley in a certain period. And they wrongly say it is her policy to withdraw from the EU. It isn't. How can someone get such a simple fact wrong?
Does the print come off the Torygraph? Does anyone know?
I think medicine is a field where most would say they have high confidence in experts.
But the effective feedback they rely on to learn uses - when possible - highly controlled experiments of a sort not really possible in economics...
So im not sure economics does have that effective feedback you mentioned... There are always other factors that can be blamed for the failure of a policy.
So I have long ago economists' forecasts are not worth reading.. It's rather like weather forecasting. Remember in the mid 2000s the Met Office forecast we would have drier summers and warmer wetter winters. http://tinyurl.com/hqrzoab (2009)
Then we had 2 cold winters (-16C here both years) in 2011 and 2012 and a wet summer last year.
http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2017/01/fake-news-buzzfeed-cnn-fall-trump-piss-story-4chan-prank/
The Blanchflower's of this world only have thenselves to blame.
It was the commentary or the press release which was more alarming.
I am not entirely sure that those forecasts may not turn out to be correct. Once the real terms are known, things could change. As it is, the fall in disposable income as a result of higher inflation will slow down the economy.
One more point: apart from tariffs on cars, there seems to be very little discussion about other WTO tariffs. Some of them are mind boggling.
Recessions happen when bubbles burst or when rising interest rates choke off growth. There's certainly a possibility of either sooner rather than later but it's far from guaranteed.
FPT (to some extent):
Being a Party leader isn't the same as Prime Minister. Very few have in my view done both jobs well - perhaps Harold Wilson.
I would argue for instance Neil Kinnock was never credible as Prime Minister but he was an excellent Party leader dragging Labour from the brink in 1983 to near victory in 1992. Indeed, one could argue Kinnock was the reason Labour lost in 1992 but he was also the reason they got as close as they did.
Margaret Thatcher was an excellent Prime Minister but not a good Party leader - after all, it was the MPs who ousted her and she faced persistent internal dissent throughout her leadership.
Of the more recent figures, I'd argue both Blair and Cameron struggled with the party leadership role once they became Prime Minister though in both instances winning elections helped.
Michael Howard was an effective party leader but would have been a lousy Prime Minister while John Major was arguably the reverse and had basically lost control of the Conservative Party by early 1997 - by then the Party was mad and exhausted.
I'm not sure either Gordon Brown or David Cameron score highly on either count - I'm sure Jeremy Corbyn doesn't and as for Theresa May, it's too early to tell.
We will have a recession within the next five years. I'll be astonished (though delighted!) to be wrong.
When you have short feedback times (and few exogenous factors) you can expect predictions to get better and better and better.
In the case of climate forecasting, we don't have short feedback times, and there are plenty of exogenous factors (such as volcanic eruptions) that make it difficult to get models that work.
https://www.buzzfeed.com/tomphillips/how-the-media-will-report-the-apocalypse
Essentially, the Western World went from 1992 to 2007 with only a very mild Y2K slowdown (15 years of almost uninterrupted growth), and this led people to be too sanguine about economic prospects and therefore to build up too much debt. The longer it is stable, the more unstable it becomes.
Pissing in the wind they are !
I think it is true to say (a) Brexit will increase non-tariff (and possibly tariff) barriers between the UK and the EU. Because that's what Brexit means: breaking from a single regulatory regime, and customs union, so we can the option to forge a different regulatory and trade path. They are also true to say it causes (b) disruption and uncertainty in the short-term, as that new UK-EU relationship is negotiated and established, which is likely to suppress some activity, but not (c) that it means permanently lower growth to the UK in the long-term, yet alone (d) that an independent UK will not be able to forge any trade deals of its own to its economic advantage, nor (e) that it will permanently sour relations with EU countries nor (f) be unable to respond to global developments and events more flexibly and quickly in future.
What experts are unable to do is to accurately forecast political developments worldwide, the future global balance of supply and demand, and how flexibly the UK will respond to that economically and politically using the new tools it has.
Therefore, experts are right on some of the "weather" regarding Brexit in the short-medium term, but not the climate that will result and how well we (and others, including the EU) will adapt to it. To the extent they do , PwC/Open Europe etc, forecasted a slightly lower rate of growth by 2030, using a number of assumptions and scenarios, but not decisively so.
I stick to my forecast that Brexit means a short-term hit, and a period of lower growth whilst new relationships are established, pretty much neutral by 2030, but better in the longer run.
Not that I "know" either.
I am truly impressed. This is a starting point for debate worthy of the very best of academic minds in systems science.
However, the first point could be argued to rule out climate change. And while that tickles my sceptic bone, I think it may be a little too restrictive of a definition ...
For the experts on this site, what do you think such a definition would mean re the value of expertise for systems that are:
1. chaotic in the mathematical sense?
2. complex, in the sense of producing emergent properties?
FWIW, I think expertise can draw us to useful learning in both chaotic and complex systems without necessarily being able to produce reliable predictions. For example:
1. Chaotic systems: we know wild fires caused by lightning are chaotic systems and that it is impossible to predict if any particular lightning strike will cause a fire and even if it does, how big and dangerous the fire will be. But studying the chaotic system does enable to understand critical factors that go into creating the conditions for a dangerous fire and to attempt to manage those (e.g. dryness and quantity of dead scrub and wood). Furthermore, on a more theoretical level, understanding the attractors in chaotic system can help in providing more probabilistic (but not necessarily reliable) forecasts.
2. Complex systems: in High Reliability Organizations, the focus moves from using predictions and arriving at risk calculations, to imaging all the ways in which the system can fail (including outside of the box ways), planning for how to deal with such failures, and drilling those responses so that if they happen the effects can be mitigated. There are also organizational structure preparations that can be made ahead of time to assist in rapid situational awareness and flexibility of analysis and response to be better prepared to tackle the unexpected and rapidly evolving.
All of this relies on expertise without the ability to predict reliably. However, I do believe that there are some systems, that would include the overarching socio-technico-economic system that is politics, that are so complex and chaotic that useful learning is currently almost impossible as feedback cannot be attributed to any causal factor reliably.
De Gaulle 68
Pompidou 57
Giscard d'Estaing 48
Mitterrand 64
Chirac 62
Sarkozy 52
Hollande 57
Current candidates, age in May 2017:
Le Pen 48
Macron 39
Fillon 63
Valls 54
Mélenchon 65
Macron may be too young, Mélenchon too old. Both Mitterand and Chirac had had "eventual president" written on them for years.
The improvements eked out in weather forecasting have been gained by throwing enormous amounts of computing power at the problem. Modelling the weather is easier (in my view) than modelling the global economy.
Manchester named top place to visit in 2017 by San Francisco Chronicle
http://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/whats-on/food-drink-news/machester-listed-san-francisco-chronicle--12436253
Gove
Gove on your side
'Cos you've got Gove
Gove
Gove on your side."
Hilarious.
Paul Joseph Watson
Buzzfeed just published more shocking revelations about Trump. This is not fake at all.
Nominal income growth has been running at around 3-3.5% in the UK in the last few years. I think it will edge up in 2017: partly because labour markets will continue to tighten, partly because rising inflation will result in employees demanding higher wage settlements. I’d reckon nominal income growth of about 4% in 2017. Consumption is close to 70% of GDP, so assuming the savings rate remains at its current extremely low level, this gives us a 3.2% boost.
Investment (Gross Capital Formation) is almost certain to fall somewhat in 2017, and to remain somewhat subdued until we have a better idea of what Brexit looks like, and what tariff schedules and the like are going to be. This is only around 16% of GDP, so a modest slowdown here is only going to have a relatively small impact on the overall GDP number. (Perhaps knocking 0.2% off the total figure.)
Net exports will likely improve in 2017 on the back of weaker Sterling, although the combination of that and the higher oil price will be a drag. I’d reckon on a small positive, perhaps 0.2% of GDP.
Finally we have inflation: producer price inflation has been extremely high, squeezing corporate cash flows (which also drags on investment). The 20% depreciation in Sterling should, ceteris paribus, result in around 4% annual inflation. I think that feels a little high (although some people I respect think UK inflation will get that high). I reckon a number around 2.5-3.0% for 2017 sounds about right.
Put those all together and you get growth of between 1% and 1.5% in 2017.
Where could I be wrong? I think the risks are mostly to the downside.
Inflation could be closer to 4%, which would result in GDP growth dipping lower.
The savings rate could edge up, which would mean consumption would grow less than incomes. This is the big risk: we are now at record low savings rates of c. 3%, if it were to move back to 6% (which would still be lower than any of our continental peers), then it would likely push us into a recession.
Indeed, I would argue our record low savings rate (rather than Brexit) is the key risk to the UK economy in 2017 and 2018. In the three months to end November unsecured personal credit was increasing at an 11% annual pace. That is an unsustainable level.
Severe shock was -1% and then -0.4% for next three quarters.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/hm-treasury-analysis-the-immediate-economic-impact-of-leaving-the-eu
If there are n objects in a system, and each object can be in s different states, the number of combinations in the system = s to the (n-1). That gets to be a ridiculously big number very quickly.
This is a fairly brutal way to look at an event which led to so many deaths, but those were - and perhaps still are - the terms in which war is viewed.
The fact that it was an ANZAC force doing the heavy lifting has led it a subsequent political dimension, but I'm sure the decisions would have been the same had the regiments been from the British Isles.
On this basis, the Gallipoli landings were the right decision strategically, even if they ultimately failed.
I have no idea if this analysis stacks up!
To predict GDP growth for the next quarter in a reasonable stable environment is not too hard.
To predict that there will be financial meltdown in 2008 & that Northern Rock, Alliance and Leicester, Bradford & Bingley, etc will go bankrupt is hugely more significant & impressive.
Unfortunately, no economist predicted the financial crash with any degree of accuracy.
The economic consequences of any huge event (like leaving Europe of Scottish independence) are almost unpredictable. There is no prior data on which to train models.
I know he and I have disagreed vehemently in recent times (and we probably will, although I hope not quite so stridently, continue to do so in future) but this was a genuinely interesting piece of work that I learnt a lot from.
I can't remember a leader of a country being seen as such a vulgarian as Trump. Even Berlusconi who comes closest was known to have a personal charm which you couldn't accuse Trump of having. The zeitgeist can quickly turn and what seems like the Theatre of the Absurd might soon repulse. So like like SeanT says enjoy America's humiliation while you can. It's hilarious but it won't last
(Well the capital repayment part of the mortgage payment not the interest portion obviously)
In any case, investigators will go through his empire , company by company and like Tiny Rowland did to Alan Bond, we will find that Trump is actually bankrupt.
Personally, I think his entire campaign was about publicity and brand name. I don't think he actually believed he would win !
Travel around the city is a nightmare at the moment though. I wonder how long before congestion charging is suggested again. A shame we can't get an underground system.
I'd argue that any lad culture currently exists, exists alongside - and in reaction to - a climate of oppressive political correctness. And, relatedly, Trump only won because he was up against such an awful candidate from the Democratic Party who embodied this (though in all the ways in which Hilary was an awful candidate, oppressive political correctness is a fairly minor element).
But in general, I agree with you.
This sounds a horrible experience. Don't know how the guy remained sane!
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/thinking-man/cope-three-unwanted-voices-live-inside-head/
The clip is especially disturbing. Try to imagine if this went on day after day year after year.
Well that was the plan.
Much like Germany's 1914 offence was supposed to take Paris before the Russians could mobilise and end the war before Christmas.
Which goes a long way towards explaining why the 'experts' were wrong, perhaps ?
They were essentially guessing the reaction of the UK consumer to the Brexit vote.
"Unsustainable level"... And how long do you think it might sustain the unsustainable ?
Not sure if Andy Burnham recognises successes in Manchester he doe see rather busy to ignore them.
https://kingstonelabour.org/2017/01/03/andy-burnham-2016-is-over-it-is-time-to-let-its-rows-and-divisiveness-die-with-it/
What do people do if the washer breaks down ?
Edit: I guess the figures include everyone with unexpected expenses as they're an aggregate anyway. Still it is very very low..
Unless expressly invited.
Scepticism of expertise is not synonymous with ignorance- as any Scientist would tell you - it's what experts are - unless of course they are so secure in their ivory tower they don't dirty their hands in the real world. Real experts learn....
The other thing is that many predictions are probabilistic. The assumptions and reasoning may be just fine if the most likely outcome doesn't transpire. The public are hopeless at probabilities and experts poor at educating them. I believe Michael Fish's miss was one such. In a highly volatile weather system the question was what path the storm was going to take and the probability of it passing through the south of England, rather than the model itself being defective on the state of the art at the time.
We were about two years off getting an underground system in the 1970s when the economy gave way. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picc-Vic_tunnel, although the broader history of proposed underground railways in Manchester dates back to about the 1840s and is terribly interesting if you're interested in that sort of thing.) The one great advantage of the tram, though (besides cost) is that you're already at street level when you get off it. If you're only going one stop within the city centre (e.g. from Sale to St. Peter's Square), the benefit of being at street level when you disembark outweighs the cost of your light rail having to negotiate for space with other street level road users.
Bank of England Governor Mark Carney: "scale of the immediate risks around Brexit have gone down" & risks are greater for Europe than for UK