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A Matter (cont'd) |
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The unbearable levity of economic forecasts
One of the most disliked/undesirable phenomena in economic life is 'uncertainty'. This leads to the popularity of people/institutions that can predict/foresee the future well. If the predictions come true, this gives the person/institution that made the prediction a sense of self-confidence and encourages them to make new predictions.
But what is interesting is that those who deal with the Economics, whose laboratory is essentially society, do not look favorably on making such predictions. Because there are always as many scenarios as there are people in the laboratory, so there is always a margin of error in these predictions. Therefore, the duty of an Economist or the expectation from him/her should not be to make predictions about the future, in other words, s/he should not be a futurist.
So what is/should be expected from an Economist? It is to make analyses and evaluations for the future by taking into account past (adaptive) and current (rational) data. This means that the analyses and evaluations made should be based on scientific and real data rather than gossip.
But what can you do, just like a broken clock being right twice a day, if even 1 out of 10 predictions made by economic futurists (?) come true, the interest/demand/favor for these people/institutions increases and this gives them an unbearable feeling of levity due to their few accurate predictions despite all their inaccurate claims.