A couple of years ago, taking questions on stage in front of a live audience, I was asked to do my duty as an economist and make an economic forecast. But the questioner had a demanding benchmark for what made a good prediction, informing me that the previous keynote speaker at this conference had been a prominent scientist, who warned of a deadly global pandemic. That was in the autumn of 2019. Would my forecast be as good?
I parried the question with two questions of my own: my interlocutor would never hear a more consequential forecast than what he was told in 2019, but had he done anything differently? I knew the answer was no. Why, then, was he so interested in hearing another prediction?
My non-answer was weaselly, yes. But the exchange points to a problem: producers of forecasts frequently give people warnings they ignore, and unless consumers of forecasts are honest with themselves about what they plan to use them for, their demand for a glimpse of the future seems fatuous. Or, to quote George Eliot, “Among all forms of mistake, prophecy is the most gratuitous.”