Tag Archives: policy makers

Thomas Kochan: U.S. Companies Versus the U.S. Economy

MIT Sloan Prof. Thomas Kochan

From Harvard Business Review

It’s obvious to anyone paying attention that the United States needs well-educated, technically skilled workers if it’s to remain competitive in the global marketplace. Just as obvious: We need a robust middle class with adequate disposable income and a sense that our economic system is working in a reasonably fair way. Yet business leaders and policy makers behave as if they don’t believe either of those things: Read More »

MIT Sloan academic on the art of ‘forecasting forecasts’

Policy makers, the press, and others are increasingly turning to forecasting to predict things like gas and housing prices. And when choosing which forecasts to trust, it would seem perfectly logical to turn to individuals who have been accurate in the past. But based on research I helped conduct, this turns out not to be the case.

Instead, we find that forecasts are more accurate when they are drawn from large and diverse groups, even if some individual members of that group have been wrong before.

That’s because the larger the group, the greater the inputs as well as the likelihood that wrong pieces of information will cancel each other out.  Read More »