Are economists rational?

25 May, 2013 at 15:48 | Posted in Economics | 1 Comment

Now consider what happened in November 2007. It was just one month before the Great Recession officially began …

Economists in the Survey of Professional Forecasters, a quarterly poll put out by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, nevertheless foresaw a recession as relatively unlikely. Intead, they expected the economy to grow at a just slightly below average rate of 2.4 percent in 2008 … This was a very bad forecast: GDP actually shrank by 3.3 percent once the financial crisis hit. What may be worse is that the economists were extremely confident in their prediction. They assigned only a 3 percent chance to the economy’s shrinking by any margin over the whole of 2008 …

Indeed, economists have for a long time been much to confident in their ability to predict the direction of the economy … Their predictions have not just been overconfident but also quite poor in a real-world sense … Economic forecasters get more feedback than people in most other professions, but they haven’t chosen to correct for their bias toward overconfidence.