I like the economist example as a good illustration of the process, but it also makes me slightly reduce my (already-low) confidence in our ability to make our sensible predictions about things like take-off speeds, given that economists say things like this:
As my colleague Jeffrey Friedman argues, expert predictions about the the likely effects of changing a single policy tend to be pretty bad. I’ll use myself as an example. I’ve followed the academic literature about the minimum wage for almost twenty years, and I’m an experienced, professional policy analyst, so I’ve got a weak claim to expertise in the subject. What do I have to show for that? Not much, really. I’ve got strong intuitions about the likely effects of raising minimum wages in various contexts. But all I really know is that the context matters a great deal, that a lot of interrelated factors affect the dynamics of low-wage labor markets, and that I can’t say in advance which margin will adjust when the wage floor is raised. Indeed, whether we should expect increases in the minimum wage to hurt or help low-wage workers is a question Nobel Prize-winning economists disagree about. Labor markets are complicated!
Which in my mind could be summarized as “after 20 years of studying the theory and practical studies of this topic, I’ve got strong intuitions, but in practice they aren’t enough for me to make strong predictions”. And it seems that the question of minimum wage is one for which there is much more direct evidence than there is for something like take-off speeds, suggesting that we should be able even less able to make good predictions about that.
I like the economist example as a good illustration of the process, but it also makes me slightly reduce my (already-low) confidence in our ability to make our sensible predictions about things like take-off speeds, given that economists say things like this:
Which in my mind could be summarized as “after 20 years of studying the theory and practical studies of this topic, I’ve got strong intuitions, but in practice they aren’t enough for me to make strong predictions”. And it seems that the question of minimum wage is one for which there is much more direct evidence than there is for something like take-off speeds, suggesting that we should be able even less able to make good predictions about that.