Sawyer says society tends to overestimate short-term change while underestimating long-term change.
Mycle Schneider, a Paris-based nuclear policy analyst, accuses the industry of overestimating its capacity to build highly complex reactors, while underestimating skills gaps.
British governments have always been cheerleaders for free movement of goods, services and capital, while underestimating the continent's attachment to the same privilege for people.
But well before that debacle, studies by the National Academy of Sciences and others had found that the agency routinely inflated the economic payoffs of its construction projects to justify steadily greater budget outlays, while underestimating the environmental damage of those projects.
The Greenspan put has in effect been replaced by the Bernanke pushover.The second risk is that the central bankers pay too much attention to potential weakness while underestimating the dangers from inflation.
Most British disasters in the Middle East over the past century have stemmed from wishing to be a major player in the region, while underestimating the resources necessary to do so.
But analysts say now that the industry's prognosticators essentially overestimated the effect that Federal Reserve policies would have on interest rates, while underestimating the role of foreign economic events.
The various industries responsible for much of the country's air pollution -- the oil companies, the automakers, the big utilities -- have usually resisted federal clean air regulations, routinely overestimating the costs of the regulations while underestimating the ability of their engineers to satisfy them.
He relied exclusively on policy 'experts' who understood military and geopolitical strategy in the light of World War II and Korea, but who had no direct experience combating a 'people's war,' while underestimating the North Vietnamese and misunderstanding the importance of the South Vietnamese, who were treated as bystanders.
But it is worth noting that ever since the original Clean Air Act was written into law in 1970, industry in general has regularly overestimated the costs of environmental rules while underestimating the ability of its own engineers to satisfy those rules in a timely, cost-effective way.
