Have you noticed that people are not held accountable for wrong predictions?

Dubner and I wrote a column in the NY Times that told people to bet on Seattle in the Super Bowl. The bet lost. Not more than three people mentioned this to me afterwards. Not a single angry e-mail from a stranger who lost their college tuition fund because of our column.

I’m glad people didn’t write me, but still, there should be punishment for wrong predictions.

For instance, there have been economists who predicted Japan’s economy would race past the American economy, that there would be depressions and ages of reckoning, all sorts of nasty stuff. There was Dow 30,000 or whatever the prediction was in a book by well-known economists. And what about all the doomsayers leading up to Y2K?

Just before the bowl season this last year, Michael Lewis made a case that the Texas Tech football who is the greatest offensive genius who ever lived in a NYT magazine cover story. A few weeks later Texas Tech scores 10 points in losing to Alabama in the Cotton Bowl.

It seems like predictors who go completely wrong get off too easy, me included.

So expect lots more predictions from me in the near future.