A 2061 year old tradition will be broken this year: Ides of March this year will be not on 15 March but on 11 March when not one but three Caesars – those of Punjab, Uttarakhand, and UP – will fall to political execution.
My ‘tea leave reading’ prediction of election outcomes:
Punjab – Congress
Uttarakhand – BJP
UP – BJP
Manipur – Congress
Goa – BJP
To those who sneer at my ‘tea leave reading,’ please remember it is as accurate a method of predicting election outcome as are the polls and surveys by psephologists using complex algorithms and super computers.
Do I have to remind you that in the US President election, 2016, every major poll except one got the outcome wrong! And that the creator of “Daybreak poll” which correctly predicted not only Trump victory but also Obama re-election, 2012, was not a psephologist but a 70 year old economist – Arie Kapteyn.
“When you look at pundits and their predictions, the correlation is zero” between what they forecast and how things actually turn out, Kapteyn said, citing the work done by Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize-winning behavioral economist.
I will be abroad and will miss the thrills of 11 March. But BJP might as well start their victory song right now.
It is only appropriate that I should end this piece with two of my favorite quotes from Daniel Kahneman:
“We’re generally overconfident in our opinions and our impressions and judgments.
We’re blind to our blindness. We have very little idea of how little we know. We’re not designed to know how little we know.”
Vincenzo Camuccini – La morte di Cesare
