Oops—Asterisk

In this issue, we’re talking about mistakes. Big mistakes with tragic consequences for tens of millions of people. Small mistakes, the kind you might make every day (at least if you’re the sort of person who spends your days participating in forecasting tournaments). And if not quite every mistake in between, then what we hope is at least a representative sample. Ricki Heicklen walks us through what has to be the flashiest demonstration of human error in the past two years in her review of Michael Lewis’s Going Infinite. And in lieu of a forecast for this issue, Molly Hickman explains where would-be superforecasters (and a few of the pros) most often go wrong. We talked to railfan extraordinaire Alon Levy about the pile-up of mistakes that have made American public transit infrastructure the most expensive in the world, which countries can build cheaply, and why we need more and better bureaucrats. John Yasuda helps us understand how China’s experimental policy regime proved so success

saved by

• Wendy Wu