Few economists predicted the current economic crisis, and there is little agreement among them about its ultimate causes. So, not surprisingly, economists are not in a good position to forecast how quickly it will end, either.

—Robert Shiller: via Project Syndicate

The bottom line is that we should expect less of economists

—Russ Roberts, George Mason University: via NYT

Our results indicate that this sort of journalistic fact-checking often fails to reduce misperceptions among ideological or partisan voters. In some cases, we found that corrections can even make misperceptions worse.

—Brendan Nyhan, political scientist at the University of Michigan, speaking on healthcare through a related note on cognitive biases and why it’s always inadvisable to argue with a fool: via NYT.