Chapter 2: Are You Smarter than A Television Pundit? Summary and Analysis

Nate Silver did an analysis of the predictions made by political analysts on the TV program, "The McLaughlin Group," and found that they were wrong as much as they were right on the nearly 1,000 predictions analyzed. But political scientists aren't much more reliable than political pundits. Political scientists failed to predict the fall of the Soviet empire in 1988 when all the signs were there. Philip Tetlock, professor of psychology and political science at the University of California at Berkeley, found that there were two main causes for the collapse of the Soviet Union that had to be considered together in order to clearly see the impending demise of the USSR. One of these concepts was held by liberal analysts and the other by conservative analysts. Analysts on...