Beware the Shifting Baseline!

George Will’s latest column got me thinking about a phenomenon that lends itself to pessimism about the status quo: Predictions that never come to pass go largely unnoticed, at least relative to the amount of attention the predictions initially garner. If the status quo seems more dangerous than it actually is, you are more likely to think that positive steps must be taken to change it. Will cites an article about the recent lull in hurricane activity. It illustrates that the hyped-up commentary around the time of Hurricane Katrina relating the disaster to global warming (a term abandoned in recent years in favor of climate change) was perhaps unfounded.

News stories that vindicate unsensational positions rarely make the front page. Not a single pundit or second-rate “expert” that made claims regarding the inevitability of more frequent and more potent natural disasters will be held accountable for their mistakes. I wish I could recall the specific culprits back in 2005. If readers of this blog know of any, please expose them in the comments section. All predictions, no matter how informed, are imperfect. When policy is shaped on predictions that favor a point-of-view, they should be looked at with skepticism and the decision-maker should be held accountable in the event that his prediction ends up being incorrect.

On a not-entirely-unrelated subject, Greg Mankiw reminds us today that the Obama team failed miserably to predict the effect of the stimulus on unemployment. From this graph alone, one cannot conclude that the stimulus has been entirely ineffective at lowering unemployment. Maybe, as CEA chair Christina Romer contends, things would have been even worse without a stimulus. Still, given that this sort of prediction was the basis for the support behind the stimulus, people should be more skeptical next time the government makes a case for a policy using internally generated predictions.

I pledge, as part of the mission of radicalignorance.com, to expose predictions that have failed to come to pass whenever I find them. Scientific-sounding predictions are a favorite weapon of the man of system, eager to persuade others of the virtue of his social engineering projects which, in reality, have widespread and immeasurable unintended consequences.