If you are not happy with the results below please do another search
The Reserve Bank of Australia has left their rates unchanged at 3.25% (statement here). We suggested that this was a possibility earlier in the day – and it is the closest thing to a correct rate call that I’ve have made for the last 18 months 😛 Relatively robust domestic demand, combined with commodity prices […]
I’ve been flicking back over some posts by Robin Hanson at Overcoming Bias and came across this one about judging the reliability of macroeconomists’ advice: It turns out that many macro economists frequently forecast future macro events. Furthermore, many places keep standardized track records of such forecasts, records that can be compared for accuracy; we […]
This is from Alex Tabarrok: Mark Thoma makes fun of Judd Gregg for thinking that tax cuts pay for themselves. Mark is right to make fun. What a ridiculous thing to believe. All the good economists know that it is spending increases that more than pay for themselves. 😀 . BTW, this is sarcasm – […]
I will give people a little more time to write comments on this post on economists and predictions before I discuss it – let me say that I’m very happy with the two comments (from HH and Kimble) so far. There is a related issue that I think needs a bit of attention before we […]
This was from Greg Mankiw’s blog: The role of the economist in discussions of public policy seems to me to be to prescribe what should be done in light of what can be done, politics aside, and not to predict what is “politically feasible” and then to recommend it. If you ever get annoyed with […]
Update: Clive Crook has a better discussion of what is going on than I do (original here) – and how irritating it is – than I do. I’m embarrassed to say that I’m a few days behind on my blog reading, so I only saw this after writing my post 🙁 Even if nothing else […]