I Know It's Cheaper To Fund An

Caesar Recognized The Omens, But He Didn't Believe They Applied To Him.

Economy Is Not Baseball, Where The Game Is Always Played By The Same Rules.

Expert Estimates Of Probability Are Often Off By Factors Of Hundreds Or Thousands. [...] I Used To Be Annoyed When The Margin Of Error Was High In A Forecasting Model That I Might Put Together. Now I View It As Perhaps The Single Most Important Piece Of Information That A Forecaster Provides. When We Publish A Forecast On Fivethirtyeight, I Go To Great Lengths To Document The Uncertainty Attached To It, Even If The Uncertainty Is Sufficiently Large That The Forecast Won't Make For Punchy Headlines.

We Want To Get 80%-85% Of Predictions Right, Not 100%. Or Else We Calibrated Our Estimates In The Wrong Way.

The Problem Is That When Polls Are Wrong, They Tend To Be Wrong In The Same Direction. If They Miss In New Hampshire, For Instance, They All Miss On The Same Mistake.