Noah Smith, Columnist

Economists' Biggest Failure

March 5, 2015 at 1:00 PM UTC

Noah Smith is a former Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He was an assistant professor of finance at Stony Brook University, and he blogs at Noahpinion.

There are a lot of things we're not good at predicting.
Photographer: Martin Bernetti/AFP/Getty Images)

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One of the biggest things that economists get grief about is their failure to predict big events like recessions. Even the Queen of England, that most reserved of personages, got in on the game, back in 2008, according to the U.K. Telegraph:

The queen is correct. Here, courtesy of Institute for Monetary and Financial Stability economist Volker Wieland and Goethe University economist Maik Wolters, is a picture of how badly economists’ models failed to predict the Great Recession: