Language Roller Coaster Tycoon 3: Platinum

Sorry for not foreseeing the unforeseeable

is big news these days (eg 1 , 2 , 3) the report made by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) which makes a fairly self severe inability to foresee the crisis in which we are immersed. Many tests are made on the issue, if Rodrigo Rato could not know, that if the internal dynamics of the body was flawed, to be put measures to correct the situation.

But I think it is forgotten essential, not because it was impossible to predict.

course now in retrospect is that some of the hundreds of workers from the IMF if it had said would happen. Surely there were predictions tables of all kinds, so that one is right insurance. What happens is that nobody knows in advance which is going to hit this time. In fact the reports amounted to matched non-official. JR Lucas was amazed yesterday that, having RNE so successful prediction does not make case you forget that there were dozens and ex ante none was the right one. Today commented on the uncertainty that produced the prediction failure of the CIA regarding the resignation of Mubarak in Egypt (which yesterday was highly probable its director).

We are so accustomed to have experts able to predict eclipses with millisecond precision, the behavior of electrons at the nanoscale to run smart phones and many wonders like that we think that everything has to be predictable. But this extrapolation includes a serious error: not all processes are predictable. In the case of meteorloogía we all know we can trust (much in the time of morning, less in the past and nothing at all on the inside of a month), but of course, men of the time we are seeing years every day, and have gained this reputation (both positive in predicting the short and long negative) based on verifiable results.

economic variables are as or more unpredictable than the weather, however it remains very strongly the myth of predictability, also has an aura of high technicality (surely the IMF hustle charge much more than meteorologists). Seen this way, with a swinging as spectacular as on this crisis, the best that could be done to maintain the myth is to make a statement (also in report format supertecnificado) that are looking for a reasonable reason to blame the failure.

That

that economics is a science capable of making reliable predictions is a myth. A myth of living (and well) many people, and that helps make some policies more socially acceptable, but as false as that Disney is cryogenic or not he went to the moon ...

UPDATE: Things of serendipity, moments after posting this, I find a collection of failures economists predict very good here in the new blog where he publishes Llaneras Kiko.

Reading The black swan (although it seems irregular, and some confusing points) helped me to support this idea of \u200b\u200bthe myth of scientism of the economy that is already a classic this blog.