People expect too much from expert prediction, but at least some experts are also willing to stand on their clairvoyance strongly enough to sell it. For decades, the political science professor Bruce Bueno de Mesquita has been using “proprietary software” to make predictions about world events for both public and private customers. His firm’s clients over some thirty years have included the US Central Intelligence Agency, which in a 1993 study said that in hundreds of predictions he “hit the bullseye” twice as often as its own analysts did.
