Many retrospective, or backward-looking, studies might take a group of alcoholics and try to determine what common traits might have caused their alcoholism.
Mixed theories of punishment, drawing on backward-looking considerations as well as the notion of prevention, sometimes in terms of the reform of offenders, are also found to be untenable.
Many economists found this unsatisfactory since it assumes that agents may repeatedly make systematic errors and can only revise their expectations in a backward-looking way.
