Matt Nolan

Cartoon: The two-handed economist

/5 Comments/in /by

Another Dilbert (I promise to cut back on posting them – it was just a great set of economist cartoons 🙂 )

Source Dilbert.

Never have I seen the two-handedness of economists and the “physics envy” of economists intertwined in one short cartoon.  Very good 😀

5 replies
  1. Jiani
    Jiani says:

    “The economy will either recover or not.”
    – haha but sometimes it does make sense to run different scenarios (in this case two scenarios – recover and not recover) to see how other dependent variables respond to the changes of key economic indicators. I’d add a worst case scenario here… the situation can be a) better; b) the same/no change; and c) worse.

  2. Matt Nolan
    Matt Nolan says:

    @Jiani

    It definitely makes sense to run different scenarios in order to try and express risks – but I think the company expects there economist to actually try and balance these risks and describe an outlook for them – rather than saying “the economy will either recover or not”.

    Economics can be used to explain anything – but this style of economist is being paid “for his value judgments”, so he should really make some 🙂

  3. agnitio
    agnitio says:

    Agreed. My inclination is to have a base case “expected outcome” and then also show what happens when you get deviations form that scenario in both directions.

    Then again I’m not a forecaster so take anything I say with a grain of salt:)

Comments are closed.