Word: betters
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What might help us better use economic forecasts, then, is to more explicitly take into account the limits that come with any forecast. You wouldn't find an economist publishing a paper in a journal without margins of error around the data - and yet we routinely drop such nuance when we talk about economic variables in public conversation. "One of the things that gets lost is the fact that there are ways of trying to assess errors in forecasts," says Robert Eisenbeis, a former researcher at the Atlanta Fed who is now chief monetary economist at the money-management firm...
...there's no shortage of publishing and financial firms surveying groups of economists, presenting all of their opinions as "consensus" forecasts. A 2003 study by researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta found that the Blue Chip Consensus Forecast, which polls some 50 economists each month, is consistently better than any of its individual members. The researchers dubbed that result a "reverse Lake Wobegon effect": everyone was below average. During economic turning points - like the one we're currently in - the individual forecasts veered further off the mark...
...represent this visually: the fan chart. What starts as a line quickly becomes a blurry fan-shaped region, underscoring that as time marches forward, the variable being forecast falls into an ever broader range of possibilities. "The more you think in terms of distribution of outcomes, the better," says Gregory Mankiw, a Harvard economist who chaired President George W. Bush's Council of Economic Advisers. "You're always keeping in mind the inherent uncertainty." The Bank of England is a big user of the fan chart when its economists talk about inflation forecasts. Plenty of U.S. agencies, like the Social...
...better part of the past half-century, feminists, their opponents and armies of academics have debated the differences between men and women. Only in the past few years have scientists been able to use imaging technology to look inside men's and women's heads to investigate whether those stereotypical gender differences have roots in the brain. No concrete results have emerged from these studies yet, but now a new functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study of children offers at least one explanation for some common tween social behaviors: girls are hardwired to care about one-on-one relationships with...
...Western military commanders with opportunities they can exploit. Local populations that tolerated or supported the Taliban and al-Qaeda for ideological reasons are less likely to back criminal gangs. If Western commanders and the governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan can help protect and organize local communities, they stand a better chance of winning...