The Experts Speak: The Definitive Compendium of Authoritative Misinformation (Revised Edition)

Did you ever have the uneasy feeling the experts are not . . . well expert?. Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.--Irving Fisher professor of economics at Yale University October 17 1929. Forget it Louis no Civil War picture ever made a nickel.--Irving Thalbergs warning to Louis B. Mayer regarding Gone With the Wind. We dont like their sound. Groups of guitars are on the way out.--Decca Recording Company executive turning down the Beatles 1962. With over fifty foreign cars already on sale here the Japanese auto industry isnt likely to carve out a big share of the market for itself.--Business Week 1968. There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home.--President of Digital Equipment Corporation 1977. Bill Clinton will lose to any Republican who doesnt drool on stage.--The Wall Street Journal in a 1995 editorial. The Experts Speak systematically catalogues footnotes and sets straight these and a couple of thousand other examples of expert misunderstanding miscalculation egregious prognostication boo-boos and just plain lies. The experts have been wrong about everything under including and beyond the sun: time space the sexes the races the environment economics politics crime education the media history and science. In this expanded and updated edition (now more error-filled than ever) we see just how much the experts dont know.  But the book also goes deeper presenting a through-the-looking-glass chronicle of human knowledge: the story of what was and is so as seen through the story of what we wanted to and did believe.