“'It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future'” is attributed to a baseball-playing philosopher, Yogi Berra
How often have you seen a headline and news story like this?
Hiring grows in U.S. as employers add 531,000 jobs, beating expectations
The economy added 531,000 jobs in October, blowing past economists' predictions of 450,000, and the unemployment rate fell to 4.6 percent from 4.8 percent.
The above headline appeared this morning. Last month the headlines were like this, "September’s jobs report sorely misses expectations".
Economists are nothing if not numbers and data guys. Every month these acknowledged experts pour over surveys of employers and employment agencies, government reports and all other available sources of information. Yet their ability as prognosticators doesn't seem much better than an average person's guesswork.
Predicting the US employment report is a very narrow and short-term prediction. They only have to concern themselves with what's already happened in the United States for the past month. After all, the monthly federal jobs report is a report of people who have already been hired.
The other predictions that are regularly in the headlines are predictions about the global climate. Many of these climate predictions, especially the most dire ones, are supposed to come to pass long after many of us are dead. Given my skepticism about predictions in general, I tend to shrug when I hear about climate predictions for the next century.
That I don't set my hair on fire about climate change predictions doesn't mean that I don't believe we should be less dependent on fossil fuels, make better use of wind and solar power, reduce methane emissions from livestock by eating less meat and conserve energy by insulating. I believe in all those conservation methods and more for a variety of very good reason unrelated to anybody's predictions.
I just have my doubts about the predictive abilities of the predictors. Donald Rumsfeld famously spoke about known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns. Rumsfeld was wrong about a lot of things, that is to say he was lousy at predictions. But he was right about our limits to know what he know and don't know.
