by JackRiddler » Thu Jan 10, 2013 6:13 pm
The fuzziness of the cumulative measures that are supposed to reassure us of the accuracy of demographic prediction is indicative. The article speaks of an "average six percent miss," without specifying the time period or the number of cases included. A six percent average error could mean a three or four percent median error with 15 to 30 percent of cases off by 10 percent or more. Any time I've looked at individual demographics predictions from the past they've been wildly off. The article even tells you why: They don't and can't assess the factors that actually alter birth and death rates, which are cultural, sociological, driven by historical contingencies, and unpredictable. In the big-picture long-run of 20+ year periods, birth and death rates will turn on a dime in a high proportion of countries because of economic shifts, wars, natural catastrophes, migrations or system changes. If demographers tried to include these factors in models of future trends, they would be out of their depth and would introduce even wilder inaccuracies. Actually, they'd be trying to do the impossible. Like most social sciences, demographics has more to say about the past and present and how things generally work than it can say about the future of specific cases. It may have a higher chance of affecting the future, as an applied science, than it does of predicting it as an observational one.
Last edited by
JackRiddler on Thu Jan 10, 2013 8:10 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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