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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 Thalberg's warning to Louis B. Mayer regarding Gone With the Wind

"We don't 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 isn't 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 doesn't 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 don't 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.

  • Format
  • paperback
  • Pages
  • 480
  • Language
  • english
  • ISBN
  • 9780679778066
  • Genres
  • reference, history, humor, trivia
  • Release date
  • 1998