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HonoreDB comments on A question about Eliezer - Less Wrong Discussion
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The study linked to meant next to nothing in my eyes. It studied political predictions in an election year by political hacks on tv. 2007-2008. Guess what? IN an election cycle that liberals beat conservatives, the liberal predictions more often came true than conservative predictions.
Reminds me of the reported models of mortgage securities, created using data from boom times only.
Krugman was competing with a bunch of other political hacks and columnists. I doubt that accuracy is the highest motivation for any of them. The political hacks want to curry support, and the columnists want to be invited on tv and have their articles read. I'd put at least 3 motivations above accuracy for that crowd: manipulate attitudes, throw red meat to their natural markets, and entertain. It's Dark Arts, all the way, all the time.
This objection is not entirely valid, at least when it comes to Krugman. Krugman scored 17/19 mainly on economic predictions, and one of the two he got wrong looks like a pro-Republican prediction.
From their executive summary:
From the paper:
That's a good point. I didn't read the whole thing, as the basic premise seemed flawed. That does seem like real information about Krugman's accuracy. I'd still wonder about the independence of the predictions, though. Did the paper authors address that issue at all? I saw noise about "statistical significance", so I assumed not.
Are the specific predictions available online? It seemed like they had a large sample of predictions, so I doubt they were in the paper. This gives my estimate of Krugman a slight uptick, but without the actual predictions and results, this data can't do much more for me.
Here's their xls with the predictions
That is awesome! They actually put out their data.
Pretty much, Krugman successfully predicted that the downturn would last a while (2-6,8,15), made some obvious statements (7,9,12,16,17,18), was questionably supported on one (11), was unfairly said to miss another (14), hit on a political prediction (10), and missed on another (13).
He was 50-50 or said nothing, except for successfully predicting that the downturn would take at least a couple of years, which wasn't going out too far on a limb itself.
So I can't say that I'm impressed much with the authors of the study, as their conclusions about Krugman seem like a gross distortion to me, but I am very impressed that they released their data. That was civilized.