Butler 1, Quiggin 0

The ShadowLands' favourite celebrity columnist, John Butler of the John Butler Trio is usually a pretty conservative chap, and a great believer in the free market.

John Butler surprised many ShadowLands readers a couple of months ago with his bold prediction that a terrorist attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team in Pakistan would prove to be the Taliban's Pearl Harbour and that Pakistan would strike back.

Butler has a first name and a hairy chin in common with Professor John Quiggin, but not much else. Quiggin is a Queensland academic renowned for his spectacularly wrong forecasts of Australian unemployment and for advocating that unemployment be solved by getting the government to give everyone a job.

So how did Quiggin's (admittedly, much earlier) forecast go against our own John Butler's? Huzzah - looks like we're winning!