Expert economists - the appaling record of prediction

A_Medium_Size_Jock

I read in another thread about a former IMF deputy director saying:

The economic consensus was horribly wrong and here are the real reasons Brexit is succeeding

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/economic-consensus-brexit-succeeding-ashoka-mody-imf-a7509711.html

Conrad

IMF research reveals Economists’ forecasts virtually worthless, ergo Project Fear ('we'll all be poorer by £4300 pa by 2030') was pure nonsense;


https://www.theguardian.com/money/2017/sep/02/economic-forecasting-flawed-science-data


Prakash Loungani at the IMF analysed the accuracy of economic forecasters and found something remarkable and worrying. “The record of failure to predict recessions is virtually unblemished,”


His analysis revealed that economists had failed to predict 148 of the past 150 recessions. Part of the problem, he said, was that there wasn’t much of a reputational gain to be had by predicting a recession others had missed. If you disagreed with the consensus, you would be met with scepticism. The downside of getting it wrong was more personally damaging than the upside of getting it right.


In a world in which we rate restaurants on TripAdvisor and the effectiveness of hair straighteners on Amazon, it is curious, and perhaps dangerous, that we fail to rate the economists who provide us with the forecasts

westernpromise

It's not a secret that nobody believes energy price forecasts that look even a few months ahead, and rightly so, yet climate change alarmists want to trash the economy now based on forecasts that look 100 years into the future.