CalBusiness
Winter 2006
In Brief
International Press Praise Prof. Tetlock’sBook on Political Forecasting
Professor Philip Tetlock’s recent book, Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?, made a worldwide splash with its conclusion that expert political forecasts are frequently wrong. Media outlets such as The New Yorker, BBC News, and The Wall Street Journal tapped Tetlock’s book to expose how people who make a business out of making predictions are no better at it than the rest of us. In fact, Tetlock’s 20-year study of 82,361 forecasts from 284 experts found that the better known and more frequently quoted they were, the less reliable their predictions were likely to be. Tetlock’s book was widely cited in the media with the turn of the new year— just as pundits were puffed up with predictions for 2006.
