Contrary to some claims, the outcome was a travesty for democracy and at odds with the will of the people. The referendum in question was initiated by the National Environmental Research Council (NERC) and involved a public ballot to choose a name for the new polar Royal Research Ship. Various options were mooted as suitable candidates, including “Sir David Attenborough” (the famous British naturalist), “Henry Worsley” (the famous British explorer) and “Pingu” (the famous cartoon penguin). The winner of the public ballot was none of these. With almost 80% of the popular vote, “Boaty McBoatface” romped home courtesy of a social media campaign. At that point, NERC jettisoned the will of the people. The ship was named instead “Sir David Attenborough” - though, in a small concession to democracy, its remotely operated sub-sea vehicle was named Boaty McBoatface. This is an object lesson in the perils of public polling for policy purposes. Sometimes, there is madness in crowds. 80  That is not to say, however, that public opinion is always and everywhere mad. In his book Superforecasting, Philip Tetlock uses evidence drawn from a variety of experimental studies to determine the ingredients of a good forecast. 81  He finds that the key lies in diverse perspectives, drawn from amateurs as  well as experts. Often, he finds, there is wisdom in crowds. If harnessed, the wisdom of crowds and of amateurs can improve the forecasting performance of experts.
Notes: Charts show number of mentions per decade  Chart 7: Publications containing ‘central bank communication’ as a percentage of publications containing ‘central bank’ Google Books (LHS) 0.3  Google Scholar (RHS) Per cent  Per cent  1.5  0 2015  0 2008  0.25 2001  0.05 1994  0.5  1987  0.1  1980  0.75  1973  0.15  1966  1  1959  0.2  1952  1.25  1945  0.25  Source: Google Books Corpus, search of http://scholar.google.com on 23/03/2017. Notes: Based on the methodology of Hansen and McMahon (2016). 31  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  31  Chart 8A: Word cloud for “labour market” topic  Chart 8B: Fraction of MPC minutes devoted to  in MPC minutes  “labour market” topic Proportion of minutes 0.12 0.1 0.08 0.06 0.04 0.02  1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014  0  Source: Bank of England calculations based on methodology of  Source: Bank of England calculations based on methodology of  Hansen, McMahon and Prat (2014). Hansen, McMahon and Prat (2014). Notes: Each word cloud represents the probability distribution of  Notes: The procedure estimates the allocation of each month’s  words within a given topic; the size of the word indicates its  MPC minutes to a topic which we label “labour market”. The  probability of occurring within that topic. chart shows a three-month moving average.