Martin Mayer Quotes

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

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

The techniques I developed for studying turbulence, like weather, also apply to the stock market.

An economist is someone who knows all the answers to last years' questions.

An economist's guess is liable to be as good as anybody else's.

On the way from Chicago, I spent the summer of 1947 in Ottawa, helping to build the first of a series of econometric models for the Canadian government.

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.

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

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

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.

When my job was attempting to predict future economic developments for the Shell oil company, I was frequently reminded of an Arabic saying: 'Those who claim to foresee the future are lying, even if by chance they are later proved right.'

[Discussing economic trends:] You can find a study that says anything.

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

The markets were run by mathematicians and their models but they had no business sense.

Sometimes the statistics themselves, the means by which we perceive the economic universe, are unreliable.

The specific experience with which economics and economic statistics are concerned always refers to the past. It is history, and as such does not provide knowledge about a regularity that will manifest itself also in the future.

The current fad in economic forecasting is to project so far into the future that no one will be around to hold you accountable.

All models are wrong, but some are useful.

… 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.

The data are what matter in economics, and the more ruthlessness that an economist can summon to make sense of the data, the more useful his findings will be.

Economics is a good degree to have but the subject is very theoretical at Cambridge and I found it frustrating that you can't apply a lot of the models to particular circumstances.

In economics, it is easier to agree on the data than to agree on causality.

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.

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.