Does anyone know how well the averaged forecasts turned out? I didn't see that in the article.
That guy who called the big one? Don’t listen to him.
21–30 of 54 posts
Re: That guy who called the big one? Don’t listen to him.
#22"when people study success stories exclusively — as many avid devourers of business self-help books do — they come away with a vastly oversimplified idea of what it takes to succeed. This is because success is what economists refer to as a “noisy signal.” It’s chancy, fickle, and composed of so many moving parts that any one is basically meaningless in the context of the real world. By studying what successful ventures have in common (persistence, for instance), people miss the invaluable lessons contained in the far more common experience of failure. They ignore the high likelihood that a company will flop the base rate and wind up wildly overestimating the chances of success."
As an entrepreneur this is worth taking note of.
Re: That guy who called the big one? Don’t listen to him.
#23This article is propaganda written by a shill. Based on the author's logic you might as well throw up your hands and stop trying to predict anything. Roubini didn't get his message from God, he made it based on a public, replicable analysis using standard economic theory from his economic school. Other people from his economic school also made the same predictions that followed logically from their premises and the i…
"Based on the author's logic you might as well throw up your hands and stop trying to predict anything."
You say this like it proves the author is wrong. This point isn't really that obscure, Nicholas Nassim Taleb sold millions of books making this very point over the last couple years.
"This is like saying when a doctor tells a patient that if he keeps smoking he will get cancer, and the patient gets cancer, he just did it by luck."
No, this is a poor analogy. Its more like saying that if you keep predicting someone is going to get cancer for smoking, eating apples, drinking Coors Light, and playing basketball you shouldn't get any credibility for being right on one and wrong on all the others.
"All the austrians predicted the housing bubble."
Yes, but they also mispredicted a lot of other things, thats the point.
Re: That guy who called the big one? Don’t listen to him.
#24This article is propaganda written by a shill. Based on the author's logic you might as well throw up your hands and stop trying to predict anything. Roubini didn't get his message from God, he made it based on a public, replicable analysis using standard economic theory from his economic school. Other people from his economic school also made the same predictions that followed logically from their premises and the i…
To be fair, Roubini is no Austrian, far from it, he is a Keynesian. He was simply a high-profile Keynesian who was not blind to the storm.
Re: That guy who called the big one? Don’t listen to him.
#25In October 2008, he predicted that hundreds of hedge funds were on the verge of failure and that the government would have to close the markets for a week or two in the coming days to cope with the shock.
Most hedge funds would have been bankrupt if not for the bailouts, so he was technically correct.
Re: That guy who called the big one? Don’t listen to him.
#26Personally, I like Schiller ( http://www.econ.yale.edu/~shiller/ ) more than Roubini. His record: he wrote a book called Irrational Exuberance, and the .com market promptly crashed. He wrote papers from 2003 to 2007 suggesting the housing bubble was real, what it's effects were and how it might be mitigated / avoided. Where Roubini simply says we're all walking in the dark, Schiller is the rare critical eye who offer…
Personally, I like Mike Whitney (most recent article http://counterpunch.org/whitney01062011.html ) more than Roubini. He's not so famous as Schiller but he's not afraid to connect the dots politically as well and call a wealth-based transfer from poor to rich class warfare when that is what it is. He called the Great Recession many times from 2006 onwards, just dig through that site for his articles, like this way f…
ugh, this guy seems to be nuts!
does he have any economic education at all?
also, his blog host seems to be unreachable.
Re: That guy who called the big one? Don’t listen to him.
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
The austrians also predicted 20 of the last 3 recessions.
the Austrian school is not scientific, but religious branch of Economics though: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austrian_School#Criticism_of_th...
Forecasting the economy is trickier than the weather, even with the advanced quantitative tools available to Economists today. Standard economic models were totally blind to the collapse. In fact, following standard models was worse than having no model at all, it created false security and hid risk from the markets.
Austrians don't concern themselves too much with quantitative models because they are inherently unreliable. The main idea is that interfering in prices produces negative consequences in the same manner that any control of prices does. The Austrians are simply extending the theory of price controls to interest rates.
Re: That guy who called the big one? Don’t listen to him.
#28We want to believe success is more probable than it is, that it’s the result of a process we can wrap our heads around. That’s why we’re drawn to prophets, especially the ones who get one big thing right. We want to believe that someone, somewhere can foresee surprising and disruptive change. It means that there is a method to the madness of not just business, but human existence, and that it’s perceptible if you look at it from the right angle. It’s why we take lucky rabbits’ feet into casinos instead of putting our money in a CD, why we quit steady jobs to start risky small businesses. On paper, these too may indeed resemble sucker bets placed by people with bad judgment. But cast in a certain light, they begin to look a lot like hope.
That sound you hear is the sound of a thousand VCs crying out en masse.
Re: That guy who called the big one? Don’t listen to him.
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
Personally, I like Mike Whitney (most recent article http://counterpunch.org/whitney01062011.html ) more than Roubini. He's not so famous as Schiller but he's not afraid to connect the dots politically as well and call a wealth-based transfer from poor to rich class warfare when that is what it is. He called the Great Recession many times from 2006 onwards, just dig through that site for his articles, like this way f…
ugh, this guy seems to be nuts! does he have any economic education at all? also, his blog host seems to be unreachable.
Please don't be crude :) Yes, like a fine malt whiskey Mr. Whitney can go straight to your head. I never said that he was an economist mind you, just that his economic analysis is spot on and he was yelling "housing bubble!", "credit bubble!" as the regular economists were ignoring Roubini et al. Whitney is pessimistic but if you hadn't noticed there has been a lot to be pessimistic about for the last 5 years of irrational exuberance and recessionary times. Besides, he's an accessible and engaging writer. Take the time to go back to a few of his articles from years gone by to get a feeling about his track record and insight.
Re: That guy who called the big one? Don’t listen to him.
#30I had a professor that told me it's actually a good strategy to make wild predictions far in the future. If you're right, you look like an oracle. If you're wrong, nobody remembers to go back and dig up "he predicted this on this date", primarily because they're already focused on the next predictions. Most of the time it's a win-win; the farther out in the future the better.
It's worked for nearly every famous psychic - see Jeane Dixon.