Full disclosure: for much of my professional life I have been an economic forecaster. So I felt targeted when Michael Gove, a leading Brexiter, said during the EU referendum campaign that “the people of this country have had enough of experts with organisations with acronyms saying that they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong”.
In a single blow, total denigration of experts, economic forecasting and forecasters. But surely there are some points to be placed on the other side of the ledger?
First, it is a feature of the human condition that we are interested in what the future will bring. We rely on forecasts in daily life more than we might think. Before we leave home in the morning we listen to a weather forecast to decide what clothes to wear and a traffic forecast to decide what route to take to work. We make our own forecasts. By opting not to take a raincoat and taking the car, say, I am forecasting, albeit implicitly, that it will not rain and that the traffic will be manageable.