by Why economists are useless at forecasting We forget – or willfully ignore – that our models are simplifications of the world … One of the pervasive risks that we face in the information age … is that even if the amount of knowledge in the world is increasing, the gap between what we know and what we think we know may be widening. This syndrome is often associated with very precise-seeming predictions that are not at all accurate … This is like claiming you are a good shot because your bullets always end up in about the same place — even though they are nowhere near the target … Financial crises – and most other failures of prediction – stem from this false sense of confidence. Precise forecasts masquerade as accurate ones, and some of us get fooled and double-down our bets … Now consider what happened in November 2007. It was just one month before the Great Recession officially began … Economists in the Survey of Professional Forecasters, a quarterly poll put out by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, nevertheless foresaw a recession as relatively unlikely. Intead, they expected the economy to grow at a just slightly below average rate of 2.4 percent in 2008 … This was a very bad forecast: GDP actually shrank by 3.3 percent once the financial crisis hit.
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Lars Pålsson Syll considers the following as important: Economics
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Why economists are useless at forecasting
We forget – or willfully ignore – that our models are simplifications of the world …
One of the pervasive risks that we face in the information age … is that even if the amount of knowledge in the world is increasing, the gap between what we know and what we think we know may be widening. This syndrome is often associated with very precise-seeming predictions that are not at all accurate … This is like claiming you are a good shot because your bullets always end up in about the same place — even though they are nowhere near the target …
Financial crises – and most other failures of prediction – stem from this false sense of confidence. Precise forecasts masquerade as accurate ones, and some of us get fooled and double-down our bets …
Now consider what happened in November 2007. It was just one month before the Great Recession officially began …
Economists in the Survey of Professional Forecasters, a quarterly poll put out by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, nevertheless foresaw a recession as relatively unlikely. Intead, they expected the economy to grow at a just slightly below average rate of 2.4 percent in 2008 … This was a very bad forecast: GDP actually shrank by 3.3 percent once the financial crisis hit. What may be worse is that the economists were extremely confident in their prediction. They assigned only a 3 percent chance to the economy’s shrinking by any margin over the whole of 2008 …
Indeed, economists have for a long time been much to confident in their ability to predict the direction of the economy … Their predictions have not just been overconfident but also quite poor in a real-world sense … Economic forecasters get more feedback than people in most other professions, but they haven’t chosen to correct for their bias toward overconfidence.