In fact, it's pretty awful. But the others are worse.

From Dan Gardner's Future Babble. An excellent read, chock-a-block full of new and interesting information despite the odd choice of title. Gardner's thesis is that experts by and large are fooled by their own expertise and their forecasts generally are worse than chance and worse than that of an informed non-expert. On top of the examples he has unearthed to support his thesis, he also is master of simple storytelling. From page 34.

"Oil experts, economists, and government officials who have attempted in recent years to predict the future demand and prices of oil have had only marginally better success than those who foretell the advent of earthquakes or the second coming of the Messiah," wrote James Akins, a U.S. foreign service officer. Akins penned that acid assessment in 1973, but it could as easily be written today. In fact, simply by removing the phrase in recent years, it could be chiseled on the tombstone of almost every oil analyst since oil became an industrial commodity in the nineteenth century. In 2007, economists Ron Alquist and Lutz Kilian published a paper in which they examined all the sophisticated methods one could use to determine the price of oil one month, one quarter, or one year in the future. They looked at fancy econometric models. They looked at oil prices in futures and spot markets. They looked at the consensus opinion of oil analysts. And they found that anyone could do better than all the crystal balls, sometimes far better, by applying a mindless rule: Always predict that the price in the future will be whatever the price is now. True, this technique is far from accurate. In fact, it's pretty awful. But the others are worse.