Did Economists Correctly Predict Who Would Win In Beijing?

Before the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics, I wrote about economic models that aimed to pre-empt thousands of hours of television coverage, sappy features, and tape-delayed tension. John Hawksworth of PriceWaterhouseCoopers and Andrew Bernard of Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business both aimed to predict national medal hauls based on factors like home-field advantage, the size and growth of national economies, and past political affiliations. (You can check out the PriceWaterhouseCoopers projection here and the 2008 Bernard projection here.)

So how did the economists do in the individual projection event? Both performed something like the American track-and-field team--several high-profile triumphs and a couple of splashy pratfalls.

Read the whole story here.

Comments

[themodernleader]

One of my competences is economist without portfolio. Economic activity is not everything that underpins human existence as Marx always claimed without proof. However, the economic well being over a period of time is a reflection of the advancing our declining of an organization. I predicted in an earlier blog that the Chinese would show us who was the superior nation in the Olympics. The question should occur: What comes first in causing the rise or decline of an organization, such as our Country: leadership or economic determinents?
The dogmatic Karl Marx argued that economics was determined by historical inevitiability and could not be started or reversed. The modern Communist leaders of China have discarded this fundamental tenet of Communism. They have learned that leadership directs any inevitablility of the rise and fall of organizations. They are no longer Communists (nor capitalists) but pragmatists. Their leadership is transforming the people from servants to masters. We should ask ourselves what our leaders are transforming our people from and to.

[RobinSeattle]

This reminds me of the old joke:

How many economists does it take to change a light bulb?

None. They sit there in the dark waiting for market forces to do all the work.

Such is the predictive power and efficacy of economists.

[gcallaghan]

30% of the economists incorrectly predicted there would be no Olympic Games and that they were merely a market phenomena driven by mass hysteria.