James Surowiecki

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  print Feb/Mar 2008

  Export Opinion

  In the 1980s, as developing countries across the world struggled with crushing debt burdens and slow-growing economies, they were pushed—by the United States and international financial institutions—to embrace a set of policies that promised to rescue them. These policies, which are often grouped under the label neoliberalism, proceeded from the assumption that developing countries interfered too much with the workings of their markets. Instead, countries needed to lower tariffs and embrace free trade, privatize state-owned industries, end subsidies to businesses and consumers, balance their

• culture Spring 2001

  LAW AND MORDER
• culture Summer 2003

  POWER AND COLLEGE
• culture Oct/Nov 2004

  Still the Champ
• culture Dec/Jan 2005

  Highlight Reel
• culture Feb/Mar 2005

  The Puck Stops Here

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  print June/July/Aug 2007

  Swan's Way

  Americans are enamored of the practice of prediction. Pundits, policy wonks, Wall Street analysts, hedge-fund managers: Their careers and their fortunes derive, in one sense or another, from their ability to forecast the future. And yet when you look at studies of expert judgment, what you find is remarkably little evidence that individual experts have any clue about what the future will hold. (In his 2005 book Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?, for instance, the political scientist Philip E. Tetlock showed that, in predicting consequential events in their fields of