A few fields, such as meteorology, closely monitor predictive accuracy. And there are curious cases—recall the pundits in 2012 who predicted a President Romney—where we have a good idea who got it right. But mostly, no one knows. And because of that, no one can be sure if forecasts are the best available, or if they can be improved, or how. We can’t even be sure that the forecasts guiding our decisions are more insightful than what we would hear from oracles examining goat guts. Worse still, we often don’t know that we don’t know.
