Dan Roberts

IS THE ECONOMIST ALWAYS WRONG? Scandalously, in some circles @TheEconomist has a reputation as a contrarian indicator. This week we fessed up to getting a big call on oil prices from April wrong. Obviously our goal is not perfectly-hedged (and perfectly boring) predictive accuracy: often it is to stimulate, provoke, and challenge. But I did want to test that wider allegation, so I ran a series of LLM scorers across our full leader database since 2000 (7,000 leaders in all.) You can see the results in the chart below: each dot is one of the 1,400 leaders where we identified concrete and falsifiable predictions that were central to the argument. Higher = more accurate, further to the right = more contrarian. We do well, unsurprisingly, when aligned with conventional wisdom. We often do worse when truly out on a limb. But actually, on average, we are a bit likelier to be right than wrong on our somewhat-out-of-consensus calls. All round, a respectable performance. And as @ecurrnomics points out an accompanying leader, there is no shame at all in being beaten by the market: as good free-marketers we believe deeply in the aggregated wisdom of prices. Take a look at my piece here, which includes a canter through our best and worst calls of the last quarter-century: economist.com/interactive/fi…