Tag Archives: Prediction

News

How good are politicians at projecting the costs of social programs?

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From Big Government. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

Look back at when Medicare was first created:

At its start, in 1966, Medicare cost $3 billion. The House Ways and Means Committee estimated that Medicare would cost only about $ 12 billion by 1990 (a figure that included an allowance for inflation). This was a supposedly “conservative” estimate. But in 1990 Medicare actually cost $107 billion.

In 2007, total Medicare spending was $431 billion! That isn’t even close to the costs predicted in 1965. Why do we act like the numbers coming out of Congress and the CBO have any basis in reality?

The predictions for Medicaid were just as wrong:

In 1987, Congress projected that Medicaid – the joint federal-state health care program for the poor – would make special relief payments to hospitals of less than $1 billion in 1992. Actual cost: $17 billion.

The list goes on. The 1993 cost of Medicare’s home care benefit was projected in 1988 to be $4 billion, but ended up at $10 billion. The State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), which was created in 1997 and projected to cost $5 billion per year, has had to be supplemented with hundreds of millions of dollars annually by Congress.

This is always good thing to remember when people try to pass massive new programs – and this goes for Republicans too, e.g. – Bush’s Medicare prescription drug benefit. Blech!

Commentary

Does Darwinism explain anything?

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Dr. Cornelius Hunter answers the question here. (H/T ECM)

Here’s the criterion specified by naturalists to make an explanation scientific:

…in order to qualify as legitimate science a theory must distinguish between different outcomes. Naturalism is needed because otherwise each outcome is equally probable and the theory is not true science.

Deciding what does and does not qualify as legitimate science is notoriously difficult. There seem to be exceptions to every rule. But perhaps Felsenstein’s criterion is reasonable. Shouldn’t a scientific theory say at least something about the probabilities of what we might observe in the data?

Does Darwinism satisfy the criterion? Hunter argues that it does not.

Whatever we find in biology, evolutionists say it must have evolved. Their predictions and expectations are often falsified and they have to patch their theory repeatedly. And there is no distinction between a new, fantastic design and a repeated design–both are equiprobable under evolution.

If a new, fantastic design appears such as the trilobite eye, then evolutionists ascribe it to natural selection. If similar designs are found in different species, then it is ascribed to common descent. If later cousin species are found to lack the design, then common descent can be dropped as an explanation and the design can be said to have evolved independently. The evolutionary explanation is extremely flexible.

If distinguishing between outcomes is the hallmark of true science, then evolution is the theory that doesn’t qualify.

Read the whole thing!

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