When people discover that I am an economist, they rarely ask me for my views on subjects that economists know a bit about – such as how to respond to climate change or pay less at a supermarket. Instead they ask me what will happen to the economy.
Why is it that people won’t take “I don’t really know” for an answer? People often chuckle about the forecasting skills of economists, but after the sniggers die down, they keep demanding more forecasts. Is there any reason to believe that economists can deliver?
When I tell people I am studying economics, the most common response I get is: "Well, good. Maybe you'll be able to fix our economy someday."
People do have a woefully inaccurate conception of what economists actually do, but, really, why should they know? Milton Friedman used to note, in response to other economists' wailing about the inadequacy of the public's economic knowledge, that most people's ignorance is a rational ignorance. Learning a new subject takes a lot of time and effort. On the flip side, for any given person, knowing economics is next to useless. So, there are high costs, and low benefits for achieving economic literacy--could it actually be that a low level of economic knowledge is socially optimal? Maybe. I tend to think knowledge has large spillover effects (which, of course, is one of the major reasons we subsidize it so heavily in the first place), which complicates things.
In any case, the public does know enough about economists to know that they are dismal at predicting the future. Though, curiously as Harford notes, the public continues to demand such predictions nevertheless.
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