You Decide: Can we predict the economic future?

By Mike Walden | Oct 29, 2012

I’m often asked to be a fortune-teller. Not the kind that uses the
stars or cards to predict personal relationships and happiness.
Instead, I’m asked to predict the economy, on everything from growth
to types of jobs to the stock market highs and lows. People think that
because I have a Ph.D. behind my name and because I’ve been at my
teaching gig for 35 years, I must be able to see things in the
economic future that others can’t.

Let me be the first to say I’m totally flattered when asked for my
forecasts. And, like most of my colleagues, I certainly have forecasts
and am willing to give them. Yet I always say to take my or any
economist’s projections not with a grain of salt, but with a ton!

Indeed, when I give forecasts, I always include some unpredictable yet
looming factor that might occur that ...













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