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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: greenspirit who wrote (110745)	5/5/2009 7:17:50 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 541477

If Krugman was making some non-political point about trade and I was interested in the ideas under discussion I'd take his point seriously (which doesn't mean I'd necessarily agree). Even outside of trade I recognize that he has a lot of knowledge in economics. But if he (or probably anyone else) is making an economic prediction, I'd discount it. Economic predictions are unreliable things. And if he is making a political point, I don't consider him to have any privileged position, he's just another person making an argument. So, it's a good idea to check their past record before investing in their advice. It is, but even here you have a problem. There are a lot of people giving advice. Just by random chance some of them are going to be right. Some of them are going to be right multiple times over the course of years, without necessarily really being better at the game than others who aren't right. It can be hard to tell real skill from relatively random selection (I suppose you can weed out spectacular stupidity, but "competent and lucky" can be hard to distinguish from "supremely competent", and "lucky" to the extent it actually is really luck, isn't something that you can reliably estimate from past performance.