A question I would have asked Professor Laibson during his interview is: How should we communicate about out-of-sample events to the public? It seems like so often, when an unexpected event arises — like the miscalculations that contributed to the Great Recession, like the election of Donald Trump, and even as simple as things like an unexpected “freak storm,” it erodes societal trust in the predictors and the institutions around them — often unfairly so. I would be curious as to Professor Laibson’s ideas for how we might communicate about these unexpected occurrences and the factors that trigger them so as to explain why these do not necessarily represent a “failure” of prediction systems.
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