The trouble with economic forecasting, in general, and real estate forecasting, in particular, is that it’s pretty good at telling you what’s likely to happen … until it isn’t. And it’s particularly bad at forecasting unanticipated turns in the road, which, of course, is one of the main reasons to attempt to forecast in the first place.

After having read Michael Lewis’s latest tome on the partnership between Nobel Prize–winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman and his research partner Amos Tversky (The Undoing Project), I’m now re-reading Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow. Kahneman’s thesis hinges around a model of the brain that divides the thought process into two “systems” — one relatively fast that operates by taking shortcuts (heuristics) based on intuition and past experience; the other that is more rational, more systematic and much slower. The problem, as Kahneman