Forecasting Errors Quotes

Years ago, I noticed one thing about economics, and that is that economists didn't get anything right.

Economists often get the market wrong.

The CBO is the only group that makes the weatherman's ten-day forecast look like exact science. They seem to miss their projections with extreme regularity.

What do you call an economist with a prediction? Wrong.

Economists have predicted seven of the last two recessions.

You look at these past predictions like there's only a market in the world for five computers [as allegedly said by IBM founder Thomas Watson] and you realize it's not a good idea to predict too far into the future.

It's human nature to extrapolate the recent past into the future, but it's terrible that managements go along with this.

An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn't happen.

If you've read a lot of vintage science fiction, as I have at one time or another in my life, you can't help but realise how wrong we get it. I have gotten it wrong more times than I've gotten it right. But I knew that when I started; I knew that before I wrote a word of science fiction.

We have the best mathematical economic models in the world, and just because our models have been wrong for 14 straight quarters does not mean that they will be wrong in the 15th quarter.

An unsophisticated forecaster uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts - for support rather than for illumination.

The mistakes we make when we try to imagine our personal futures are also lawful, regular, and systematic. They, too, have a pattern that tells us about the powers and limits of foresight in much the same way that optical illusions tell us about the powers and limits of eyesight.