How Student Debt hurts school performance and the US Economy!

http://www.alternet.org/education/how-student-debt-hurts-everything-school-performance-us-economy?akid=14008.294211.I7hiL6&rd=1&src=newsletter1051277&t=22

This is why I want to talk about how student debt levels today are not only hurting students and recent graduates, but are hurting our businesses—and our country. 

Success starts with failure

Is the world too complex for people to predict global events?

Philip Tetlock asked this question in his 2005 bookExpert Political Judgment. Tetlock looked at expert opinions from 1984 to 2003 and quantified how well their forecasts turned out compared to amateurs. Three hundred experts submitted more than 28,000 specific, quantifiable predictions about the future. Tetlock then followed the predictions to see if they came true.

Tetlock came to some startling conclusions. First, experts performed better than random chance—but only marginally better. And second, what mattered more was not what they thought, but how they thought.

The problem is not the experts. It is the complexity of the world we live in.

Paul Ormerod, a British economist, compared the extinction model of dinosaurs to that of businesses. He found that, although the timelines were different, extinction patterns were similar. He also found that when he modeled corporations as successful planners, he wasn’t able to duplicate what happened to businesses in real life. Patterns of extinction were completely different in models that viewed corporations as successful planners.

What Ormerod’s models imply is that there is little correlation between a firm’s amount of planning and its success. What both Tetlock’s and Ormerod’s results suggest is that in these situations where the future is largely unknown, trial and error—and the ability to learn from experience—is essential.