Paul Ormerod

Economic thinking out of touch with real world, says forecaster Economic thinking in the West was out of tough with the real world and forecasting was prone to serious error, Professor Paul Ormerod of the Henly Centre forecasting organisation told the meeting Little in standard economics text books was known to be true. The ability to predict events was “a fundamental test of the validity of any scientific approach to the world. ”He posed four questions to which he said, economics had no effective answer “why has unemployment risen so strongly in many Western economies in the past 20 years? Why has the unemployment experience of Western Countries been so diverse? What determines economic growth in the long term? What will be the rate of growth of the British economy over the next year? He criticised the pressure on eastern European leaders to move to free market economies as soon as possible. “This advice seems to be contrary to virtually the whole of economic history since the industrial revolution.” The Age 1992