Free Markets Defeat Experts Again
According to John Tierney:
On the morning of Election Day, I printed out the expectations from the Dublin-based Intrade market as well as a roundup of predictions from nearly two dozen political consultants, journalists and academics that appeared at the Huffington Post.
The Intrade bettors expected Mr. Obama to end up with 364 votes in the Electoral College — one less than he actually got. None of the pundits came so close. Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory, came closest with prediction of 361; all the rest were off by at least 12 votes. Nate Silver, the much-talked-about statistician at FiveThirtyEight.com, underestimated Mr. Obama’s tally by 18 votes. Many of the pundits underestimated Mr. Obama’s total by more than 25 votes, like Chris Matthews, Arianna Huffington, and the strategists Paul Begala, James Carville and Alex Castellanos.
November 25th, 2008 at 4:59 pm
It’s a poll with money. So a poll with a very large sample size beat pundits pulling numbers out of their asses. Amazing.
November 25th, 2008 at 8:04 pm
This is a silly point. The article actually points out several “experts” that did a very good job. On top of that, the data used by bettors is based on models that have been developed through the guidance of polling experts. It’s not like this was a bunch of people that simply made a blind guess.
November 26th, 2008 at 9:23 am
Whats it like to know that deep in your heart experts blow compared to the market?
November 26th, 2008 at 10:45 am
So then it’s a good thing that Barack got elected because that’s what the “market” wants.
November 27th, 2008 at 6:54 am
I don’t see how those that you speak of can be called polling experts. James Carville might know running a campaign, but that doesn’t mean he predicts the numbers…. He had a staff of numbers geeks to give him the numbers. You know, people that use models…. Even though we know that models don’t work!!