Veridiction: Jose Marquina

For those of you who haven’t checked your tickets yet, all of you who selected the “March 5″ slot on your “When Will Hugo Die?” sweepstakes card can collect your winnings courtesy of last week’s announcement.

I have written before about how a certain ex-news anchor made a prediction about when the Venezuelan leader would pass and about how far off the mark Mr. Rather was.

This is a follow-on post to document the results of another person who predicted when Hugo Chavez would succumb to his cancer. Our subject for today’s veridiction (my completely fabricated name for the process of verifying predictions) is Venezuelan doctor Jose Marquina (who works in the United States). In December of last year, Dr. Marquina told a Florida radio station that Chavez had “between two and three months to live”.

When Dan Rather made his prediction, his source also said that Chavez had between sixty and ninety days left on the planet. However, that was guess was made back in May of 2012 and Chavez continued on far past that milestone.

So how did Dr. Marquina do? His timeframe of morbidity places Chavez’s expiration between February and March of 2013.

It appears that Dr. Marquina was spot on.

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Veridiction: The World Next Week

January – the months that heralds the start of the new year – brings with it the opportunity to look ahead and to look behind. Last year around this time, the folks at the podcast The World Next Week (brought to you by the Council on Foreign Relations) took their airtime to look ahead as to what the year 2012 would bring. During their glance forward, one member of that January 5, 2012, podcast said that he…

…wouldn’t be surprised if this was one of the top five stories we’ll be talking about next year.

The “this” mentioned by the on-air host was the threat of the Iranian government to close access to the Strait of Hormuz over sanctions from the European Union.

Now is the time where I look behind and execute my veridiction (my created word for the process of verifying predictions) on The World Next Week. I am going to make a linguistic leap and say that when the host said “next year”, that he was talking about the year 2012. Even though the podcast in question aired on the fifth day of 2012 and the phrase “next year” literally would mean 2013, I am still standing by my interpretation that the host was talking about 2012.

With that interpretation in mind, was he correct? Was the threat to close the Strait of Hormuz and curtail the export of oil from Iran one of the top five stories of the year.

In short, no.

According to Google, “this” was not one of the top ten trending news stories of the year.

Neither was “this” one of the top ten stories from Yahoo! News.

“This” also did not rank a mention in the top ten stories as ranked by the Associated Press.

In a year that held a Presidential election in the United States, a hurricane that battered the East Coast, a horrific shooting in a school, a fiscal cliff, and a guy breaking the sound barrier without a jet, a story about threats from Iran – that never happened anyway – was going to have a tough time grabbing people’s attention.

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Veridiction: Nate Silver

Last week, I wrote a few pieces for my “Veridiction” category (my made-up name for the process of verifying predictions) that had to do with folk who put forward their prognostications about what wold happen in the 2012 Presidential election. All of my contestants last week (Newt Gingrich, Bill Frezza, and Kenneth Bickers & Michael Berry) were spot-off wrong.

Was there anyone who correctly predicting the results?

According to this article from Bloomberg Businessweek, there were at least three.

Nate Silver, the gentleman who runs the FiveThirtyEight blog for The New York Times, is probably the one with the most name recognition for the moment. The model used by Silver for his blog correctly predicted the winner of all fifty states plus the District of Columbia. While national polls were showing a tight race between President Obama and Governor Romney, those numbers were irrelevant. The winner of a presidential election is determined by who wins the most votes in the Electoral College, so a presidential election is really 51 separate elections. Silver understood this basic fact about the American political system and his model reflected that reality. Kudos to Mr. Silver for being the UNIVAC of our time.

Other people who were correct in divining the winner last November 6.

Congratulations to Drew Linzer of votamatic.org who forecasted correctly that the President would garner 332 votes in the Electoral College.

Joining Silver and Linzer in the winner’s circle is Sam Wang of the Princeton Election Consortium whose best guess was also a 332-206 tally in the Electoral College for President Obama.

My bottom line about who was right and who was wrong in predicting can best be summed up by this cartoon from the wonderful xkcd.

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Veridiction: Kenneth Bickers and Michael Berry

In the aftermath of the 2012 Presidential Election, I am continuing my look at verifying the predictions (also known in this blog’s vernacular as veridiction) made by people in the weeks and months before the votes were actually tallied.

My previous post on this subject regarding Newt Gingrich saw a first with one quote containing three predictions, all of which were wrong.

This post also sees a first as I believe I have never had two individual people in the header of one of my posts about veridiction.

Today’s subjects are Kenneth Bickers and Michael Berry, two political science professors from the state of Colorado who have a model to help them predict the winners of presidential elections.

Here’s a link to a story written about them so you can read about this academic duo and their model in greater detail.

The article was published on October 4, a month before the election. The gist of the pair’s model is that it uses economic data, not polling numbers, to predict who will be the occupant of the White House next January.

Based on their model, Bickers and Berry said that President Obama would win only 208 votes in the Electoral College and Governor Romney would earn 330.

Now that the final final results are in and with the news that a winner has been declared in the state of Florida (Barack Obama), it can be shown that Bickers and Berry’s model came extremely close to predicting the actual number of Electoral College votes allocated, which turned out to be 332 to 206.

Unfortunately for the model from the pair from Colorado, it was President Obama who had the higher number.

The article I linked to had this to say about the model…

The state-by-state economic data used in their model have been available since 1980. When these data were applied retroactively to each election year, the model correctly classifies all presidential election winners, including the two years when independent candidates ran strongly: 1980 and 1992.

To this, I can only add the thought that a model is only as good as its last prediction.

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Veridiction: Bill Frezza

The problem with today’s wired world (okay, Western wired world) is that when I read someone’s electronic musings, I can’t tell if they are being sarcastic, ironic, or dead-on all-in serious.

I am confronting this problem as I continue my veridictions (my made-up name for the process of verifying predictions) concerning the presidential election last Tuesday.

The issue of hipster-detachment versus full-bore seriousness is staring me square in the face as I try to determine which side of the sarcasm/serious fence Bill Frezza, a contributor to Forbes, sits on.

In May of this year, Mr. Frezza wrote an opinion piece with the title, “Prediction: Romney Crushes Obama In Presidential Election Blowout”

Frezza does not go into detail about how many Electoral College votes Governor Romney would win on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November, but his use of the word “Blowout” would (to me) suggest that it would be more than the 206 (or 235 if Florida tips red) Mitt actually did garner.

Other events mis-predicted by Mr. Frezza include “The Supreme Court’s evisceration of Obamacare…” (which did not happen), and “[t]he Occupy movement’s escalating campaign of violence, which culminated in major street battles at both national conventions…“

The Forbes‘ contributor tone is so over-the-top that I can only assume his tongue is firmly in his cheek when he espouses such hyperbolic predictions (a la Stephen Colbert).

However, when you read his opinion piece of November 6 where he opines that a second Obama term will lead the country to ruin, I can only make the leap to conclude that he firmly believes what he says.

Therefore, Frezza strikes out with his prediction in May of a November “blowout”.

Let me put this prediction in my file and come back to it in four years to see if, as Frezza predicts, the bottom has fallen out of the currency, an Argentinean-style capital flight and double-digit inflation hits the economy, and the recession has “come back with a vengeance”.

My second-most-favorite part of Frezza’s latest piece is where he writes, “Six months ago, I confidently predicted that Americans would come to their senses and turn back the explosive growth of government unleashed by Barack Obama.”

My favorite part is where Frezza never admits he was wrong.

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Veridiction: Newt Gingrich

Now that the 2012 Presidential election is over and most of the votes have been tabulated, it’s time to get down to the serious business of looking at all the talking heads and see how their prognostications worked out.

Our first look to the 2012 Election edition of veridiction (my name for the process of verifying predictions) comes from former Speaker of the House of Representatives and former candidate for the Republican nomination in 2012, Newt Gingrich.

On October 26 of this year, less than two weeks before the election, Mr. Gingrich made the following prediction…

I believe the minimum result will be 53-47 Romney, over 300 electoral votes, and the Republicans will pick up the Senate…

This may be a first in my collection of veridictions, but this call from the former Representative from Georgia is a reverse-hat-trick where he gets all three guesses wrong.

1) The share of the popular vote did not break “53-47″ for Governor Romney, but instead President Obama won more votes nationally (as of this writing).

2) The Republican challenger did not earn over 300 electoral votes. Depending on how Florida falls, Governor Romney will finish the election with 235 or 206 possible votes in the Electoral College.

3) The Democrats remain in control of the Senate. In fact, when all the tabulation was done, the Democratic Party picked up two seats in the upper chamber of Congress.

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Veridiction: Dan Rather

I do believe this is my first veridiction (my made-up name for the process of verifying predictions) having to do with a death.

In May of 2012, Dan Rather – he of CBS News fame – ran a story citing “a highly respected source” that said that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez would be dead in two months.

Fast forward five months and in October of this year, Chavez won re-election.

Just so you know, Chavez was alive when he won.

Courage, Mr. Rather. It’s not like a “highly respected source” hasn’t led you astray before.

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Veridiction: CBO & W

The calendar marches on and with the start of October, the end of fiscal year (FY2012) arrived.

With that milestone on the calendar reached, the federal government announced that it ran a deficit in FY2012 of about $1.1 trillion.

For those of you who like your numbers written out in digits that would $1,100,000,000,000.

There are organizations and people who have the responsibility of attempting to predict what the deficit will be. I have written about budget predictions before (see here and here and here).

The overriding theme from those posts is that people and groups who make predictions about the budget are wrong.

This veridiction (my made-up name for the process of verifying predictions) posting is about predictions made about the FY2012 deficit.

Back in January 2003, The Washington Post ran a story about how the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) updated its projections from August 2002. Here is the graphic from that story…

Apologies for the pencil markings on the bottom

As you can see, the August 2002 estimate from CBO showed the federal government running a surplus at the end of FY2012 of $522 billion. The January 2003 revision cut the projected surplus to $451 billion. Those surplus numbers are a far cry from the actual deficit of $1.1 trillion.

In fact, if you can make out my pencil scrawlings at the bottom of the graphic, the CBO did not correctly predict the deficit or surplus for any fiscal year between 2002 and 2012.

Not to be dissuaded from their continued track record of failure, the CBO jumped on the prediction horse again and again. Five years later, the Post had another story about budget predictions. In this graphic, the CBO prediction competes for space with a prediction made by the Bush Administration.

Apologies for the misalignment

As in 2003, this 2007 prediction is off by a country mile.

The CBO predicted that the federal government would run a deficit of $146 billion at the end of FY2012 while the administration of the 43rd President signaled a surplus of $61 billion. Again, numbers that are far removed from the actual of $1.1T.

I’m not sure why people continue to make predictions about the budget because they – for the most part – are wrong. Not just wrong, but completely and fantastically wrong.

However, with the start of FY2013, I’m sure the CBO and the current administration will try again and gaze into their cracked crystal budgetary ball.

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Veridiction: Paul B. Allen

While I’m waiting for PunditTracker to step up their game, I still have the world of veridiction (my made-up name for the practice of verifying predictions) all to myself in the blog-o-verse.

With that in mind, I unveil my latest veridiction and it involves Paul B. Allen, founder of Ancestry.com (and probably someone who is confused a great deal with this Paul Allen, a co-founder of Microsoft).

In December of last year, Mr. Allen made the prediction (this CNNMoney story describes it as a “bold prediction”) that Google+ would have 400 million users by the end of 2012. He was so confident about this guess that he even took to – naturally – Google+ to repeat his prediction.

Well, I don’t have to wait until the ball falls in Times Square to verify Mr. Allen’s prediction because the news has come out that Google+ has 400 million users.

Congratulation to Mr. Allen on his correct prediction.

Maybe now he can work on having his own entry in Wikipedia. Just a thought.

BTW, I am one of those 400,000,000.

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Veridiction: John Carney and the Fed

He has been here twice before in this space (see here and here) and now comes the time for John Carney, senior editor at CNBC, to make his third appearance under my category heading of veridiction, my made-up name for the practice of verifying predictions.

On the September 7, 2012, edition of the radio program Marketplace (which I am able to hear through the technological marvel known as podcasting), Carney made the following prediction…

I guarantee right now that they [the Federal Reserve] will do something at the their next meeting.

This prediction was made on the Friday after the unemployment figures for August 2012 were released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (long story short – 96,000 jobs created, unemployment rate edged own to 8.1%)

So, the Federal Reserve held its meeting this week and what happened?

Kudos to Mr. Carney for his first correct veridiction on these e-pages because Ben Bernanke and Company decided that the Fed would start up another round of quantitative easing, known as QE3.

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