Skip to main content

Should the media have rallied round the "experts" about Brexit?

There has been much talk over the past year or so of the public flagrantly ignoring the advice of the experts on public policy such as Brexit.  What is surprising is that those supporting the experts seem to have so little knowledge of how well experts perform on matters of public policy. 

Philip Tetlock summarised research on the accuracy of expert predictions in his book Expert Political Judgement. How good is it, how can we know?, the conclusion was that experts performed overall worse than chance on predictions of public policy.  The research shows that trusting the experts to predict outcomes "...is worse than putting dart-throwing chimps in charge of public policy." (Zeljka Buturovic).

The best predictors seem to be crude algorithms that extrapolate from the present to the future - ie: things will be continuing roughly in the direction they have already taken.  Extrapolations from current trends were almost twice as accurate as the experts.  The experts actually performed worse than "dilettantes" who are people who are well read and qualified but not actual professional experts in a field.  The worst performers in the studies were ordinary undergraduate students.

We should all ask how anyone could consider themselves an "expert" who does not focus on current trends. In economics and the social sciences the dismissal of the continuation of simple trends seems to be a widespread fault.

This failure of the experts should not surprise us. Public policy is complex.  What should surprise us is that the UK media value "expert predictions" above current trends, especially when those trends contradict expert opinion and are widely available.  Given that the trade deficit with the EU is already costing 4% of UK GDP (an £80bn real reduction in GDP now) the media might be cautious about expert predictions that suggest Brexit will actually make this situation worse when it is a feature of continued EU membership.  

Raising the status of "predictions" above that of actual trends would seem to be simple political bias on the part of the media.

Social media is a factor that has altered the media response to public policy prediction. Media pundits garner the public mood from Twitter, Facebook etc. However, they fail to take account of the fact that these media are dominated by the young and inexperienced (undergraduates) and also fail to notice that much social media is the public face of employees.  Many managers now ask employees to be "Friends" on Facebook and many people allow co-workers as "Friends" which immediately distorts the user's pages into confirmations of corporate attitudes.  Corporate attitudes are often anti-Brexit because large multinational companies are heavily invested in the EU.  

Editors and journalists in the broadcast media are surrounded by expert predictions, student social media postings and corporate propaganda and have opted to favour the expert predictions that confirm the bias in their media environment over the current trends. The bias towards expert prediction is so marked in the case of the Brexit debate that broadcasters suppress all mention of current trends.

There is an excellent account of the accuracy of Treasury forecasts for Brexit at this link.

See Is the Treasury Really Lying?.

and "Expert" Predictions for Brexit.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Falklands have always been Argentine - Las Malvinas son Argentinas

"The Falklands have always been Argentine" is taught to every Argentine child as a matter of faith.  What was Argentina during the time when it "always" possessed Las Malvinas?  In this article I will trace the history of Argentina in the context of its physical and political relationship with "Las Malvinas", the Falkland Islands.  The Argentine claim to the Falkland Islands dates from a brief episode in 1831-32 so it is like Canada claiming the USA despite two centuries of separate development. This might sound like ancient history but Argentina has gone to war for this ancient claim so the following article is well worth reading. For a summary of the legal case see: Las Malvinas: The Legal Case Argentina traces its origins to Spanish South America when it was part of the Viceroyalty of the Rio del Plata.  The Falklands lay off the Viceroyalty of Peru, controlled by the Captain General of Chile.  In 1810 the Falklands were far from the geographical b
35 comments
Read more

Practical Idealism by Richard Nicolaus Coudenhove-Kalergi

Coudenhove-Kalergi was a pioneer of European integration. He was the founder and President for 49 years of the Paneuropean Union. His parents were Heinrich von Coudenhove-Kalergi, an Austro-Hungarian diplomat, and Mitsuko Aoyama, the daughter of an oil merchant, antiques-dealer, and huge landowner family in Tokyo. His "Pan-Europa" was published in 1923 and contained a membership form for the Pan-Europa movement. Coudenhove-Kalergi's movement held its first Congress in Vienna in 1926. In 1927 the French Prime Minister, Aristide Briand was elected honorary president.  Personalities attending included: Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann and Sigmund Freud. Figures who later became central to founding the EU, such as Konrad Adenauer became members . His basic idea was that democracy was a transitional stage that leads to rule by a new aristocracy that is largely taken from the Jewish "master race" (Kalergi's terminology). His movement was reviled by Hitler and H
1 comment
Read more

Membership of the EU: pros and cons

5th December 2013, update May 2016 Nigel Lawson, ex-Chancellor of the Exchequer,  recently criticised the UK membership of the EU , the media has covered his mainstream view as if he is a bad boy starting a fight in the school playground, but is he right about the EU? What has changed that makes EU membership a burning issue?  What has changed is that the 19 countries of the Eurozone are now seeking political union to escape their financial problems.   Seven further EU countries have signed up to join the Euro but the British and Danish have opted out.  The EU is rapidly becoming two blocks - the 26 and Britain and Denmark.   Lawson's fear was that if Britain stays in the EU it will be isolated and dominated by a Eurozone bloc that uses "unified representation of the euro area" , so acting like a single country which controls 90% of the vote in the EU with no vetoes available to the UK in most decisions.  The full plans for Eurozone political union ( EMU Stage
15 comments
Read more