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While 2016 was a horrible year for predictions—Brexit! Trump! FARC plebiscite! Leicester City! The Game of Thrones guy who deserved to die but no one thought would die and was finally killed by that other Game of Thrones guy!—that is not going to stop me from making prognostications. In fact, I feel very confident about my first prediction: 2017 is going to be a horrible year for predictions.

I also predict that Warren Hatch, a superpredictor who is a senior vice president of a forecasting consulting firm, will not be making predictions in this column like he did last year. Sure, he admitted to me that forecasters “took a few lumps” this past year, but he said increased global uncertainty only makes expert predictions more important. Then he defended oddsmakers who gave Clinton huge odds to beat Trump by arguing that “events with a 1-in-4 chance of happening are supposed to happen 1 in 4 times, so the election was far from a failure for those who didn’t put his chances below 1%.” That’s exactly the kind of academic mumbo jumbo designed to misdirect us from the fact that the elites know nothing.

So in 2017, I’m turning to people with common sense who speak truth from their guts and have the guts to speak common truth from their sense. Good people who don’t worry about whether their sentences are coherent as long as they sound good.

I recruited Lisa Vanderpump, the restaurant-owning star of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills and Vanderpump Rules, who has delivered such hard truths as “People are replaceable, and they need to know that,” and “You’re not important enough to hate.” She gets her intel not from big data but from real people. “When you’re in the restaurant industry, you’re around a lot of people and get a great pulse reading. I hear things before they hit the tabloids. I see the person out of rehab who orders a Diet Coke with a slip of vodka in it,” she explained. Unlike Nate Silver, she won thousands of dollars in bets with friends by predicting that Trump would win, based on what she heard drunk people saying.

For 2017, Vanderpump predicts that Trump will soften stances he took during the campaign: “He’ll be more moderate than people thought. He’s not so worried about the morality laws, like with the LGBT community. He’s more worried about the trade deals.” She thinks his Supreme Court pick will not come from the list he released during the campaign. “He’s chosen me to be a judge in the Miss Universe contest several times. He’s invested in my judicial prowess,” she said, before sending me a photo of the 45th President of the United States holding her dog Giggy, a tuxedoed Pomeranian that is so tiny, it makes his hands look big.

In technology, Vanderpump sees massive changes: “We’re going to have radar-based sensors so we can find a parking space. Imagine: you plug in to your phone and find your car-parking space. That’s cool.” In economics, department stores will suffer, with a few big ones going bust. The price of oil will increase. WikiLeaks will dump more files. Veganism will become more popular. George Clooney will run for office. Fashion will become glitzier.

A surprising number of Vanderpump’s predictions centered on dog eating. She thinks Congress will pass HR 752, a bill she got Florida Representative Alcee Hastings to sponsor that would scold China for holding the annual Lychee and Dog Meat Festival in Yulin. She has taken a harsh Trumpian stance against China, though I think it would be more effective to simply stress how great lychees taste by themselves.

Although Vanderpump’s guesses were even smarter than I’d hoped, I don’t have a lot of faith in predictions anymore, since they’re based on historical data and can’t calculate for huge new events. So the only 2017 prediction I feel totally comfortable making is that we’re going to hear an unprecedented amount of the word unprecedented.

In late November, President-elect Donald Trump announced that he had reached a deal with Carrier to keep about 800 manufacturing jobs in Indiana from moving to Mexico. After the announcement, we learned that the Indiana Economic Development Corporation would give US$7 million in tax credits and grants to Carrier’s parent company in exchange for keeping the jobs in the state.

Trump proudly praised the agreement as a “great deal for workers” and said that it was part of a larger approach to keep jobs at home, saying “this is the way it’s going to be.”

Having the chief executive of the United States negotiate individualized deals with corporations is certainly a new approach to economic policy nationally, though it is not without precedent. In fact, state governments have been negotiating targeted incentives with corporations for decades.

My research focuses on why states use incentives to attract and retain investment from corporations and whether they are effective. My work, as well as that of many others, shows that these deals do not create the jobs and economic growth they are purported to.

A common economic tool

Every year, states spend billions of dollars to entice companies to create jobs within their borders. These inducements include some combination of property, sales and income tax credits and rebates, tax abatements, cash grants and cost reimbursements.

The deals are meant to reduce costs for the businesses that receive them in order to encourage their investment and job growth in a particular location. The most prominent packages usually grab headlines nationally.

In 2013, for example, Boeing received $8.7 billion in tax breaks from Washington state to secure the production of the 777x. This record-breaking package came shortly after Boeing had received $900 million from South Carolina for opening a new 787 assembly plant in Charleston.

Other examples include Tesla receiving $1.3 billion from Nevada in 2014 to subsidize a battery factory outside Reno and the Los Angeles Rams collecting $180 million in sales tax revenue from Inglewood for relocating there from St. Louis this year.

Just as Carrier threatened to move jobs to Mexico and promptly received a tax break, so too did Sears receive millions from Illinois to keep its headquarters in Chicago back in 1989.

From 1984 to 2012, incentive spending increased in the states from about $500 million per year to about $13 billion per year, according spending data gathered by the Good Jobs First Subsidy Tracker.

Has it worked?

Despite the hundreds of billions of dollars in incentives thrown their way, many companies have still decided to move more manufacturing jobs and corporate headquarters overseas.

This is because corporations consider many other factors when making decisions about where to build a factory or establish a tax home. In a 2016 survey, incentives lagged behind skilled labor, labor costs, highway access, corporate tax rates, available buildings, construction costs, proximity to markets and quality of life as important factors for location decisions.

For example, scholars have found that the Sun Belt has been able to attract investment away from the Rust Belt because it has lower wages but similar access to the interstate highway system.

In other words, jobs move (or don’t) based on the overall range of costs facing employers, which are determined by larger economic trends and policies and not necessarily by individually negotiated deals. When subsidies do matter is when corporations are choosing between equally strong locations. In those situations, incentives serve as “deal sweeteners” but don’t change the fundamental reasons for why the location was considered in the first place.

In light of the realities of corporate location decisions, there is scant evidence to support the arguments that targeted incentives produce economic growth. Rather, the evidence shows that they tend to fail to achieve their intended goals.

Often, subsidies fall short of job creation targets and fail to create growth, even if they retain jobs. As University of Iowa scholars Alan Peters and Peter Fisher argue, based on a review of several studies of their impact, “incentives work about 10 percent of the time and are simply a waste of money the other 90 percent.”

One reason why scholars have struggled to measure the impact of incentives is because of the complexity of the economy. Economic growth is affected mostly by national and international forces. State economic development strategies have little effect when compared with broad national economic policies.

The wrong kind of impact

Subsidies still can have an effect on economic behavior, just not in the way they were intended, such as by encouraging rent-seeking.

Critics of the Carrier deal have already noted that Trump may have opened the federal government up to increased threats from companies to move overseas unless they receive more incentives (aka rent-seeking). In the days following the Carrier deal, Ford Motor (already one of the largest recipients of state-level spending) expressed a willingness to make a deal with Trump to retain jobs scheduled to move overseas. In a first move, Ford announced that it had canceled a planned investment in Mexico and will instead invest $700 million in its Flat Rock, Michigan, plant.

There is also some evidence that incentives can exacerbate economic inequality.

Incentives, when used to influence location decisions, tend to be awarded to the largest and wealthiest corporations. These corporations need the money the least of all businesses and usually receive the money for making investments they likely would have made anyway in order to remain competitive. The result is that fewer resources are available for education, workforce training and social services. As a result, the gap between rich and poor tends to grow.

Raising red flags

While it is laudable that several hundred Indianans get to celebrate the holiday season with their jobs secure, evidence from the states raises red flags on the viability of targeted incentives as a national policy for growth.

Not only would Trump be needing to negotiate several packages per week in order to have a noticeable effect on the U.S. economy, doing so opens the government up to increased demands for subsidies, most likely from the wealthiest corporations, and could exacerbate income inequality in America.

Joshua Jansa is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Oklahoma State University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

When people have questions, they often ask Google. They expect high-quality, accurate answers. Late last year, it emerged that the top answer Google gave to “Did the Holocaust happen?” linked to a neo-Nazi, white supremacist, Holocaust-denying website.

The ensuing outcry included people buying Google ads for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum so that it would appear near the top of the results as well. After initial resistance, Google tweaked its algorithm – but only enough to push the false, prejudiced information somewhat farther down in the results.

These responses, however, miss a crucial element of the interplay between the tactics of Holocaust deniers’ tactics (and conspiracy theorists more broadly) and Google’s search algorithm. Google wants to answer questions, and is often very good at it. But when the question itself has a hidden or implicit agenda, like expressing doubt about historical facts, the urge to answer that question shifts from a strength to a weakness.

Sowing doubts about the historical record is the bread and butter of Holocaust denial, and conspiracy theories more broadly. These illegitimate sites claim to be innocently curious, “just asking questions” about historical events and widely held beliefs. They are, of course, much more nefarious, seeking to spread anti-Semitism and right-wing hate.

As a scholar of political sociology and the Holocaust, it’s clear to me that sites intentionally presenting misinformation and propaganda are preying upon Google’s eagerness to answer questions. These sites, peddling what is sometimes called “fake news,” capitalize on people’s tendency to ask those questions directly on Google. This is one important example of the real-world effects of how algorithms are written. Human programmers need to be aware that there can be actual social consequences when they write what can seem like dry, straightforward code.

Many sites don’t answer the question

But code matters: Google’s search algorithm uses more than 200 factors to figure out how to prioritize results so as to give users the information they’re looking for. One of the first things it looks at is how well the site’s content responds to the specific inquiry.First, and very importantly: Of course the Holocaust happened. There are mountains of evidence proving it happened. The perpetrators admitted to it. There are documents outlining the transport and extermination process. There is forensic evidence from the extermination sites. And there is abundant corroborating eyewitness testimony.

For example, if a person searches for “running shoes,” Google doesn’t know, from the query, exactly what about running shoes the person is hoping to learn. So it will offer results ranging from reviews of running shoes to places selling running shoes.

But asking whether the Holocaust happened is the equivalent of asking “Did World War II happen?” Understandably, legitimate sites don’t typically engage with the idea that it might not have. Despite being filled with detailed discussions of what, when, where, why, how and to whom the Holocaust happened, the most authoritative sites on the history of the Holocaust don’t address this one direct underlying question: Did it happen? They know it did, and elaborate from there.

However, this appears to suggest to Google’s algorithm that those sites don’t have the most relevant information to answer the specific question a searcher is asking.

This problem is amplified because Google’s algorithm attempts to evaluate sites’ credibility when determining where to include them in search results. When reputable sites don’t seem to provide the answer, less trusted sources that offer direct – though false – responses are able to rise to the top of the search results.

Making matters worse, the algorithm uses machine learning to offer related suggestions about what the searcher might be looking for, even if they don’t use the exact search terms. An initial query premised on Holocaust denial will trigger the system to provide more options like it.

A way for experts to respond

Taken together, the way that deniers frame questions and the Google algorithm’s desire to answer specific questions combine into a recipe for spreading conspiracy theories across the internet. However, Google’s emphasis on credibility means that experts have avenues for addressing these issues: public writing, blogging and linking to factually accurate work.

To be sure, this will not eliminate Holocaust denier websites from Google’s search results entirely, and perhaps not even from the first page of them. Nor will it deter dedicated deniers from finding information that supports their preconceived notions about history. Holocaust denial is based on a selective interpretation of the historical record and deep-seated anti-Semitic beliefs. No website will correct or uproot these beliefs in one fell swoop.If the Holocaust Museum were to write an article titled “Did the Holocaust happen?” and provide some basic facts, the content and the site’s credibility would move it to the top of the search results. Its current page confronting Holocaust denial could even be quickly modified to add a line saying “Often this denial comes in the form of a question: ‘Did the Holocaust happen?’” That would introduce the keywords that could boost the existing page’s relevance to Google’s algorithm. (Whether due to additional tweaking on Google’s part, or its algorithm’s response to news coverage, Holocaust Museum content is, as of this writing, much more prominently displayed in Google’s results.)

However, offering accurate information alongside false information may give individuals who have yet to internalize these beliefs pause. And it suggests a useful path to those who seek to disseminate truth and fact in the face of denial and conspiracy theories.

Thomas Maher, is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Sociology at University of Arizona

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.