FORECASTING THE ECONOMY: Keynesian Economics vs. Austrian Economics – [VIDEO]

The 2 videos are designed to convince you that the Austrians’- economic predictions are more accurate for use laser rangefinder -Laser Rangefinder for hunting.

The first video has an intro in French, sorry for that, but the rest of the video is in English (with French subtitles).

Keynesians’- forecasts (featuring Ben Bernanke and Paul Krugman) vs. Austrians’- forecasts (featuring Ron Paul and Peter Schiff):

InTrades prediction markets on secretive events are just an Irish scam. – [ANALYSIS]

Paul Hewitt:

How do we know the Intrade price was not accurate? Well, the raid wasn’t just executed on a whim. It had been planned for quite some time. Therefore, the true likelihood must have been much higher than the four or five percent chance the market was telling us.

Many people knew of the plans, albeit they were very high ranking, sworn-to-secrecy types. Since the market did not reflect the potential success of the planned raid, either the market was inefficient or the market, in an aggregate sense, did not possess enough information to make a reasonably informed prediction. In this case, I have to believe the market participants (every last one of them) knew next to nothing about the outcome being predicted.

The Intrade market prediction was nothing more than an aggregation of guesses. This is very different from an accurate prediction (based on calibration) that turns out to be wrong.

Markets such as these have no use, whatsoever, in decision-making. The useful information was that gathered by the SEALs and other secret services, and that was the information provided to the real decision-maker, The President. I would argue that these types of markets have no place as betting markets either. There is no way to test the calibration, so we don’t know whether they are “fair” markets (unlike the accurate calibration of horse races and casino games).

In other words, stop wasting our time operating and analyzing these markets. They are never going to be useful.

InTrade on the elimination of Osama Bin Laden – [ANALYSIS]

Mike Giberson:

How do we know, now, that Intrade&#8217-s market price was not an accurate estimate of the probability bin Laden was killed or captured by September 2011? Is an prior estimate of 50 percent likelihood that a tossed coin will come up heads wrong if the coin comes up as &#8220-100 percent&#8221- heads (and not half-heads and half-tails)?

I&#8217-m not buying Chris&#8217-s implied definition of success and failure.

However, one might ask Robin Hanson about what the Intrade market&#8217-s performance implies about the usefulness of his Policy Analysis Market idea.

Note that I was contrasting the InTrade-Bin-Laden failure with the high expectations set by Robin Hanson, Justin Wolfers and James Surowiecki.

Also, other than statisticians, most people don&#8217-t have a probabilistic approach of InTrade&#8217-s predictions. That&#8217-s the big misunderstanding, which is one part of the big fail of the prediction markets.

InTrade was not able to predict the elimination of Osama Bin Laden. – [PREDICTION POST-MORTEM]

I already blogged about the big fail of the prediction markets. Here&#8217-s more from the NYT, Eddy Elfenbein, and Barry Ritholtz.

Why you should never trust John Battelles opinion on tech – [PREDICTION POST-MORTEM]

John Battelle pumped up &#8220-Color&#8221- at inception, and now we have confirmation that it is a lemon.

John Battelle badmouthed the iPad at inception, and now we know that it is revolutionizing computing.