Tag Archives: forecasting

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action Claudia Goldin charts a century of women in the workforce I’ve heard these days in medicine there’s a glut of papers that are all essentially “[thing I was doing already] + in the time of COVID,” which seems like is true of all fields now. The German Development Institute for Evaluation (DEval) has a helpful roundup of several useful new hubs for evidence, research, and methodology resources for dev/social science. A few weeks ago...

There is a big difference between predicting and forecasting. Scientific theory is about causal explanation and prediction through formulating testable hypothesis that challenge the theory rigorously based on experimental evidence. Forecasting is making educated guesses based on limited and variable information information. The former applies chiefly to ergodic systems and the latter to non-ergodic, or if the system is actually ergodic, not enough it known about it to construct a rigorous...

J.W. Mason kicked off the latest skirmish in the never-ending macro wars with his Jacobin article "A Demystifying Decade for Economics." (Note: at the time of writing, the article was taken down until its publication in Jacobin.) This prompted a Twitter debate about representative agent macro, which eventually led to this Beatrice Cherrier article on heterogeneous agent models. In my view, the debate about representative agent models is a red herring. Mainstream macroeconomists main skill...

Having run through the Kalecki profit Equation (link to the first part of a two-part primer), I just want to make some brief remarks about how it ties into the notion of forecastability (description). Should we be able to expect to forecast the business cycle? Bond Economics The Kalecki Profit Equation And ForecastingBrian Romanchuk

When most people think about macroeconomics, what they want is the ability to forecast economic outcomes. However, economists' (of all stripes) reputation as forecasters is not particularly high. My view is that this is not too surprising: what we want forecasters to accomplish is probably impossible. (I am hardly the first person to note this, as variants of this idea go back at least to Keynes; I could not hope to offer a history of this idea.) However, I think if we want to approach...

So how do you make good predictions? I met “superforecaster” Michael Story, who was ranked 18th best among the 20,000 people who formed the Good Judgment team. The team took part in a competition conducted by the US intelligence community to find the world’s best forecasters. Launched in 2011, the four-year contest required the group to provide forecasts on 500 questions ranging from the future for oil prices to the financial outlook. The Good Judgment team won the tournament, reportedly...