Nach einem Jahr voller düsterer Europa-Kolumnen für den Business Spectator entdeckte ich gerade noch rechtzeitig vor Weihnachten den Optimisten in mir. Und wie es dazu kam, das erzähle ich hier:

A few years ago, Berkeley psychologist Philip E Tetlock stunned the world. After a 20-year long empirical study analysing more than 80,000 individual forecasts he concluded that experts are not much better at foretelling the future than anyone else. But was this really surprising? If it were otherwise, the pundits would have made a fortune on the ups and downs of the markets and enjoy the rest of their lives sipping champagne in the Caribbean. Instead, they are still making a living from being, well, experts.

Tetlock’s findings are unpleasant for every analyst and guru – and let’s be honest and include columnists in this category (except, of course, those writing for the Business Spectator). Not only that experts’ forecasts were not particularly good. The worst experts were the ones with the most extreme predictions.

As Tetlock wrote, boomsters “assigned probabilities of 65 per cent to rosy scenarios that materialised only 15 per cent of the time.” Doomsayers, however, fared even worse with “assigned probabilities of 70 per cent to bleak scenarios that materialised only 12 per cent of the time.”

If it is of any consolation to the boom or doom saying pundits, Tetlock showed that their more extreme predictions guaranteed them media attention. Again, this is hardly surprising. A razor-sharp statement, delivered with the confidence that makes the Pope’s self-proclaimed infallibility look pale, will always generate more hits on Google than a nuanced admission of one’s own ignorance. Would you rather like to read a story about the imminent end of the world or an opinion piece arguing that most global threats are sometimes exaggerated, somehow? Quite.

Rereading some of my own predictions on Europe this year, it just occurred to me that readers may think I am a ‘Euro doomster’. This sudden flash of self-awareness truly shocked me. To say it with the polemicist Henryk M Broder, I had always preferred to regard myself as a ‘sceptical optimist and a hopeful pessimist’ – a typical, jovial German if you like.

Weiterlesen.

(Dr. Oliver Marc Hartwich)