"The real irony of our forecasting boom is that as fortune-tellers proliferate, fortunes become harder to read."

The Dismal Art

Economic forecasting has become much more sophisticated in the decades since its invention. So why are we still so bad at it?

James Surowiecki

"The real issue here is one that the economist Oskar Morgenstern identified back in the late 1920s—namely, that economic predictions actually end up shaping the very outcomes they’re trying to predict. And the more predictions you have, the more complex that Möbius strip becomes. In that sense, for all the challenges they faced, men like Babson and Fisher had it easy, since forecasts were few and far between. The real irony of our forecasting boom is that as fortune-tellers proliferate, fortunes become harder to read."