A few people have recently asked me to recommend readings on political forecasting for people who aren’t already immersed in the subject. Since the question keeps coming up, I thought I’d answer with a blog post. Here, in no particular order, are books (and one article) I’d suggest to anyone interested in the subject.
Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman. A really engaging read on how we think, with special attention to cognitive biases and heuristics. I think forecasters should read it in hopes of finding ways to mitigate the effects of these biases on their own work, and of getting better at spotting them in the thinking of others.
Numbers Rule Your World, by Kaiser Fung. Even if you aren’t going to use statistical models to forecast, it helps to think statistically, and Fung’s book is the most engaging treatment of that topic that I’ve read so far.
The Signal and the Noise, by Nate Silver. A guided tour of how forecasters in a variety of fields do their work, with some useful general lessons on the value of updating and being an omnivorous consumer of relevant information.
The Theory that Would Not Die, by Sharon Bertsch McGrayne. A history of Bayesian statistics in the real world, including successful applications to some really hard prediction problems, like the risk of accidents with atomic bombs and nuclear power plants.
The Black Swan, by Nicholas Nassim Taleb. If you can get past the derisive tone—and I’ll admit, I initially found that hard to do—this book does a great job explaining why we should be humble about our ability to anticipate rare events in complex systems, and how forgetting that fact can hurt us badly.
Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?, by Philip Tetlock. The definitive study to date on the limits of expertise in political forecasting and the cognitive styles that help some experts do a bit better than others.
Counterfactual Thought Experiments in World Politics, edited by Philip Tetlock and Aaron Belkin. The introductory chapter is the crucial one. It’s ostensibly about the importance of careful counterfactual reasoning to learning from history, but it applies just as well to thinking about plausible futures, an important skill for forecasting.
The Foundation Trilogy, by Isaac Asimov. A great fictional exploration of the Modernist notion of social control through predictive science. These books were written half a century ago, and it’s been more than 25 years since I read them, but they’re probably more relevant than ever, what with all the talk of Big Data and the Quantified Self and such.
“The Perils of Policy by P-Value: Predicting Civil Conflicts,” by Michael Ward, Brian Greenhill, and Kristin Bakke. This one’s really for practicing social scientists, but still. The point is that the statistical models we typically construct for hypothesis testing often won’t be very useful for forecasting, so proceed with caution when switching between tasks. (The fact that they often aren’t very good for hypothesis testing, either, is another matter. On that and many other things, see Phil Schrodt’s “Seven Deadly Sins of Contemporary Quantitative Political Analysis.“)
I’m sure I’ve missed a lot of good stuff and would love to hear more suggestions from readers.
And just to be absolutely clear: I don’t make any money if you click through to those books or buy them or anything like that. The closest thing I have to a material interest in this list are ongoing professional collaborations with three of the authors listed here: Phil Tetlock, Phil Schrodt, and Mike Ward.
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