This course examines why people turn to quantitative forecasts to create certainty about inherently uncertain futures. Emphasizing how forecasts are shaped by their purpose and use, we will investigate how experts forecast weather, earthquakes, policy impacts, macroeconomics, elections, and the end of human civilization. We will consider how forecasts are constructed and evaluated, surveying topics including machine learning, utility maximization, scoring rules, stochastic recurrence models, simulation, silicon sampling, conformal prediction, and superforecasting. Pairing historical and sociological readings with mathematical and computational foundations, the course interrogates the ways forecasts acquire authority and shape the world they predict.
The course is broken down into topical units of two lectures. The first lecture will discuss readings from the history of technology and science studies to provide historical and sociological context (HSC). The second will focus on the mathematics and computation of forecasting techniques (MC).
8/27/26 - Lecture 0: The course at a glance
Unit 1: Past Returns Predict the Future Performance
9/1/26 (HSC) - Halley’s historical extrapolation
Assigned Reading
Chapman, A. (1994). Edmond Halley’s use of historical evidence in the advancement of science. Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, 48(2), 167-191. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.1994.0022
Edmond Halley, “An Estimate of the Degrees of the Mortality of Mankind”, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 17 (1693): 596–610. Read pp. 596–603 and look at the life table. https://jhanley.biostat.mcgill.ca/c609/material/Halley1693.pdf
Additional Reading
Hughes, D. W., Fowler, P. H., Lovell, B., Lynden-Bell, D., Message, P. J., & Wilkinson, J. E. (1987). The history of Halley’s Comet. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series A, Mathematical and Physical Sciences, 349-367. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsta.1987.0091
David R. Bellhouse, “A New Look at Halley’s Life Table”, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series A 174, no. 3 (2011): 823–832. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-985X.2010.00684.x
Moritz Hardt and Benjamin Recht. Patterns, Predictions, and Actions. Princeton University Press. 2023) Read the two excerpts in the Introduction and Conclusion about Halley, his life tables, and Isaac Newton
Notes.
9/3/26 (MC) - Forecasting the future by minimizing errors in the past
Notes
Supplementary Reading
Recht, B. (2025). The Actuary’s Final Word on Algorithmic Decision Making. arXiv:2509.04546.
Unit 2: Weather Forecasting
9/8/26 (HSC) - Should I bring an umbrella?
Assigned Reading
Lynch, P. (2008). The origins of computer weather prediction and climate modeling. Journal of Computational Physics, 227(7), 3431–3444. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcp.2007.02.034
Bauer, P., Thorpe, A., & Brunet, G. (2015). The quiet revolution of numerical weather prediction. Nature, 525(7567), 47–55. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14956
Additional Reading
Edwards, P. N. (2006). Meteorology as infrastructural globalism. Osiris, 21(1), 229–250. https://doi.org/10.1086/507143
Janković, V. (2015). Working with weather: Atmospheric resources, climate variability and the rise of industrial meteorology, 1950–2010. History of Meteorology, 7, 98-111. https://meteohistory.org/ojs/index.php/hom/article/view/54
Notes
9/10/26 (MC) - Probability, proper scoring rules, and calibration
Notes
Additional Readings
Glenn, W. B. (1950). Verification of forecasts expressed in terms of probability. Monthly Weather Review, 78(1), 1-3. doi:10.1175/1520-0493(1950)078<0001:VOFEIT>2.0.CO;2
Unit 3: Seismology
9/15/26 (HSC) - What is the chance of an earthquake?
Assigned Reading
David A. Freedman and Philip B. Stark (2003) What Is the Chance of an Earthquake? In Earthquake Science and Seismic Risk Reduction. 201–213. https://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~stark/Preprints/611.pdf
Kathryn Schulz (20 July 2015) “The Really Big One”, The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/the-really-big-one
Robert J. Geller, David D. Jackson, Yan Y. Kagan, and Francesco Mulargi (1997) Earthquakes Cannot Be Predicted. Science 275, pp. 1616–1617. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.275.5306.1616
Notes
9/17/26 (MC) - Survival analysis, stochastic processes, and event forecasting.
Notes
Some excellent lecture notes on survival analysis by Germán Rodríguez from his course on GLMs.
Unit 4: Government
9/29/26 (HSC) - Governance by Cost-benefit analysis.
Assigned Reading:
Theodore M. Porter (2007) The Rise of Cost–Benefit Rationality as Solution to a Political Problem of Distrust. In Research in Law and Economics, Volume 23. Richard O. Zerbe editor. Emerald Group Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0193-5895(07)23014-3
Charles F. Manski (2019)“Communicating Uncertainty in Policy Analysis,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116, no. 16, pp. 7634–7641. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1722389115
Larry Lohmann (1997) “Cost-Benefit Analysis: Whose Interest, Whose Rationality?”
Additional Readings
Philip Rocco (2021) Keeping Score: The Congressional Budget Office and the Politics of Institutional Durability. Polity 53, no. 4. https://doi.org/10.1086/715779
Notes
10/1/26 (MC) - Expected utility maximization
Additional Readings
John Maynard Keynes (1937) The General Theory of Employment.
Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 51, No. 2, pp.209-223. https://www.hetwebsite.net/het/texts/keynes/keynes1937qje.htm
Savage, L. J. (1971). Elicitation of Personal Probabilities and Expectations. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 66(336), 783–801. https://doi.org/10.1080/01621459.1971.10482346
Ben Recht (2025). Appraising Tea Leaves. argmin blog.
Ben Recht (2025). Gambling on the Richter Scale. argmin blog.
Notes
Unit 5: Economics
10/6/26 (HSC) - Forecasting the economy
Assigned Reading:
Francis X. Diebold (1998) “The Past, Present, and Future of Macroeconomic Forecasting,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 12(2), pp. 175–192. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2646969
Robert Evans (1997) “Soothsaying or Science? Falsification, Uncertainty and Social Change in Macroeconomic Modelling”, Social Studies of Science 27, no. 3, pp 395–438. Read pp. 395–410 and 425–434; skim the intervening case material. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/030631297027003002
Beatrice Cherrier (2017) The ordinary business of macroeconometric modeling: working on the MIT-Fed-Penn model (1964-1974) https://beatricecherrier.wordpress.com/2017/03/15/the-ordinary-business-of-macroeconometric-modeling-working-on-the-mit-fed-penn-model-1964-1974/
Additional Reading:
John M. Keynes (1939) “Professor Tinbergen’s Method”, Economic Journal 49, no. 195, pp 558–577. https://academic.oup.com/ej/article/49/195/558/5268457
Robert E. Lucas Jr. (1976) Econometric Policy Evaluation: A Critique. In Carnegie-Rochester conference series on public policy (Vol. 1, pp. 19-46). North-Holland.https://doi.org/10.1016/S0167-2231(76)80003-6
Paul Romer (2016) The Trouble with Macroeconomics. https://paulromer.net/trouble-with-macroeconomics-update/WP-Trouble.pdf
Notes
10/8/26 (MC) - Uncertainty quantification and prediction intervals
Unit 6: Epidemiology
10/15/26 (HSC) - The preparedness paradox
10/20/26 (MC) - Parametric modeling and model discrimination
Unit 7: Public Opinion
10/22/2026 (HSC) - Opinion polls: From surveys to predictions
10/27/2026 (MC) - Model-based and survey-informed statistical adjustment
Unit 8: Human Behavior
10/29/2026 (HSC) - Simulating People to Forecast Policy Outcomes
11/3/2026 (MC) - Silicon Sampling
Unit 9: Prediction markets
11/5/2026 (HSC) - The promise of prediction markets.
11/10/2026 (MC) - Defensive Forecasting
10 - p(doom)
11/17/2026 - I feel fine
11/19/2026 - The course and beyond
Project presentations on 12/1/2026 and 12/3/2026