Tuesday, July 13, 2010

The Dangers Of Premature Jumping To Conclusions

After it became clear which teams had qualified for the quarter finals in the World Cup in soccer-football, some pundits argued that the fact that only 3 (Spain, Holland and Germany) out of 8 were from Europe, this showed that European dominance of football had ended. But even apart from the fact that non-European teams (Particularly Brazil and Argentina) had often been quite successful in the past, this proved to be a very premature conclusion, as Spain went on to beat Paraguay, Holland went on to defeat Brazil and Germany went on to defeat Argentina in the quarter finals and as Uruguay was defeated by first Holland in the semi-final and by Germany in the match for third place, the three top teams actually turned out to be European.

This shows the dangers of jumping to conclusions too fast and neglecting the fact that it was likely coincidences in lotting which pitted European teams against each other at earlier stages. Something which is often also the case in economic events, where coincidences could produce early results which are sometimes misleading, something which economic analysts needs to keep in mind.