its an odd situation where typically we can predict roughly the direction of change that would occur in response to eg a policy or environmental change. but predicting what will happen at the level is very difficult
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more concretely "if we do more of x, x will probably increase" is the sort of prediction we're fairly good at making and this is often though not always reliable but if you were to ask us in a void "what will inflation be next year" predictions are somewhat harder
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all of this is built around "ceteris paribus", ie "all else equal", which is a way of saying "this prediction depends on stuff that matters but not what we're explicitly considering staying about the same" when the environment gets volatile the assumption gets weaker
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in many cases the prediction about the difference--if we do x, y will increase-- stays valid despite environmental volatility, but it won't be obvious, because the environmental changes have an effect on y that overwhelms the effect that x had on y
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so--and im not saying this is what happened, i don't know enough here--a person might have reasonably predicted that the effect of the spring stimulus on inflation was going to be negligible, but then a bunch of supply issues caused inflation so were they wrong? who knows, maybe
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it gets even trickier because there are often interactions between the environment and the explicitly considered action. maybe the stimulus wouldn't have caused inflation without a supply crunch, but with the supply crunch happening it did accelerate inflation
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in the latter case, was the prediction good or bad? at this point i think we are getting into talmudic territory and i defer to those who are better equipped for such considerations :) anyway its all very tricky and i mostly wish people would speak with less confidence.
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Replying to @eigenrobot @Historycourses
If only someone who had studied a ton of Talmud was around... Thanks though!
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I guess the obvious question is, after we've forgiven economists for doing their best, what predictions are good to make at all? Like "do stimulus, it shouldn't hurt inflation much" seems helpful, but what's the point of predicting what inflation will actually be if they can't
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Maybe we want a baseline expectation to decide when we need to take action?
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basically there is this yes ive sat in on Fed meetings where we got predictions like this and that's how they were used but im not sure what the point was. it felt outdated even then
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