Ruchir Sharma Quotes

Of course, economic forecasts must be revised when new information arrives and are thus necessarily provisional.

There are two kinds of economists in the world. Those who don't know the future and those who don't know that they don't know the future.

An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn't happen today.

The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.

Prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future.

An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the outcome he predicted yesterday did not happen today.

I'm an economist, I do a lot of forecasting, and I'm probably one of the most successful forecasters in terms of very specific kinds of forecasts.

Perhaps one day earthquakes, hurricanes and financial crashes will all be predictable. But we don't have to wait until then for seismology, meteorology and economics to become sciences; they already are.

I never understand why 'economist makes forecast' is ever a headline. Whether the economist in question is from the International Monetary Fund, a City forecasting group or the Treasury - a forecast is still not news.

Economists are very good at saying that something cannot go on forever, but not so good at saying when it will stop.

Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again.

… they made the cardinal error of extrapolation. Forecasters assumed that recent trends would continue indefinitely and that hot economies would stay hot…. Euphoria overcame sound judgment, a process that has doomed economic forecasting for as long as experts have been doing it.

There is only one difference between a bad economist and a good one: the bad economist confines himself to the visible effect; the good economist takes into account both the effect that can be seen and those effects that must be foreseen.

Predictions are hard, especially about the future.

Economists are about as useful as astrologers in predicting the future (and, like astrologers, they never let failure on one occasion diminish certitude on the next).

If you're an economist and you're asked to predict what something is going to be like 50 years from now? It's going to be guesswork.

The game of investing is one of making better predictions about the future than other people. How are you going to do that? One way is to limit your tries to areas of competence. If you try to predict the future of everything, you attempt too much.

I never try to make any far-reaching predictions, so much can happen that it simply only makes you look stupid a few years later.

Forecasting is very difficult, especially when it involves the future.

I was really interested to see whether we could make predictions or forecasts by listening in on what people were saying on social media.

I am an economist, not an astrologer.

Economic forecasting has actually got pretty good over the years, though admittedly, we don't always get it right.

As chairman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers during the 1990s, I had to make projections about where the economy was going to be one, two, or three years ahead; frankly, I often found myself facing a cloudy crystal ball. Forecasting a few years out is hard enough; forecasting seventy-five years out is essentially impossible. Slight changes in life expectancy, immigration, wage growth, and interest rates could have large effects on the solvency of the (Social Security System.)

We have the best mathematical economic models in the world, and just because our models have been wrong for 14 straight quarters does not mean that they will be wrong in the 15th quarter.

The pollsters are engaged in an ancient and primitive rite—trying to predict the future.