Are talking heads blowing hot air? With a record like mine, I’m not sure that I would welcome research being done in Australia like that just published in the United States by a class at Hamilton College led by public policy professor P. Gary Wyckoff. They analysed the predictions of 26 pundits who wrote columns in major print media and who appeared on the three major Sunday news shows: Face the Nation, Meet the Press, and This Week. The key finding? Most prognosticators are not very accurate predictors

The study evaluated the accuracy of 472 predictions made during the 16-month period between September 2007 and December 2008. A scale of 1 to 5 (1 being “will not happen, 5 being “will absolutely happen”) was used to rate the accuracy of each, and then divided them into three categories: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.

The students found that only nine of the prognosticators they studied could predict more accurately than a coin flip. Two were significantly less accurate, and the remaining 14 were not statistically any better or worse than a coin flip.

The study concludes:

Given this sad reality, who should you listen to? Good predictors tend to be liberal and are not lawyers. More rigorous study can  confirm our findings, especially the question of whether partisanship has an impact on an individual’s ability to make accurate predictions. There were nine prognosticators who were classified as “good” predictors. They were Paul Krugman, Maureen Dowd, Ed Rendell, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, Kathleen Parker, David Brooks, Eugene Robinson, and Hank Paulson. Five of these were journalists at the time of our sample. Six are considered liberal, and the average partisanship score was 5.87 (with 5 being a perfect moderate.) Three are female and one is black. It is clear that there is a significant amount of diversity in the “good” category.

The pick of the prognosticators

And who should you not listen to? Individuals who hold law degrees are less accurate when making predictions. Conservatives, according to our data, are also less accurate. But it is also important to keep in mind that the overwhelming majority of demographic factors have no bearing on a prognosticator’s accuracy. Gender, race, and age are all irrelevant, as are most career path choices, such as becoming a journalist.

When listening to current political advisers, keep in mind that they are more likely to make predictions using positive language. Similarly, it is important to remember that professional journalists and male prognosticators are more likely to make predictions using negative language. Younger prognosticators, politicians, and journalists with more experience are more likely to predict using extreme language.

On Crikey‘s The Stump blog there is a look at the reason why most predictions by pundits are so extreme.

When the cheering stops. That the sentiments live on after the death is clear from this story in this morning’s Jerusalem Post:

Channel Nine’s photos. They didn’t normally show photos of dead gun shot victims, the Channel Nine News in Canberra told us last night, but they were making an exception for Osama bin Laden. And then they flashed up a pair of before and after faces that purported to show the living and the dead. Yet somehow I have missed seeing the images anywhere else and read that the US administration is still considering whether to release the picture of the dead Osama or not. I await the explanation on tonight’s news for this remarkable scoop.

The error of his ways. At least the former South Australian Attorney General Peter Duncan — the man who introduced the extraordinary legislation preventing the publication of the name of the politician charged with child pornography offences — now sees his legislation might not be feasible or desirable. Writing from his now home in Lombok, Indonesia, Mr Duncan disputed the suggestion by The Australian columnist Mark Day that the repressive law was “constructed because then state premier Don Dunstan knew he and some of his colleagues were vulnerable to privacy intrusions and they changed the law to protect themselves.”

“I was the one who argued that accused persons should not have their names blackened in the event of false claims being made against them, not the deceased former premier Don Dunstan, who of course is no longer able to defend himself against slurs such as those in Mark Day’s article,” Mr Duncan said in a letter to the editor.