“We got most of the world wrong”

Michael Cox, Direktor des LSE IDEAS Centre bringt es selbstironisch auf den Punkt: Vorhersagen von Ökonomen und Politikwissenschaftler haben oft eine kürzere Haltbarkeit als eine Flasche Frischmilch:

We experts have been wonderfully good at making predictions over the last 20 years. We didn’t predict the end of the Cold War, but it happend. After the end of the Cold War we then predicted a multipolar world order – and what did we get? We got unipolarity. In ten years we were told of a new American century. When President Bush – the less intelligent one – came into office in 2000, if you look through his national security predictions for the future, what does he worry about? Rising powers! And what does he get on 9/11? Well, he doesn’t get rising powers. He gets non-state-actors, acting in ways which he neither anticipated or predicted or maybe should have done. And as the good Queen of England said to an economist here at the LSE: “Why didn’t you predict the financial crisis, dear boy? After all, you’re paid enough!” So we got most of the world wrong over the last 20 years.

Diese Passage ist jedoch lediglich die Einführen eines Podcasts mit Martin Jacques, der sein Buch “When China rules the world” vorstellt. Den Podcast und die dazugehörigen PowerPoint-Slides finden Sie auf der Webseite des LSE.

Foto: rizobraker, Lenin, Lizenz: CC BY 2.0