KEYNES ON HOW LITTLE WE KNOW.

KEYNES ON HOW LITTLE WE KNOW. Kids, many economists would say that John Maynard Keynes was the greatest economist of the last century. I think he was. His biographer, Robert Skidelsky, had an article in the Washington Post which quotes some wisdom from Keynes which you should bear in mind when reading about economic forecasts: “The outstanding fact is the extreme precariousness of the basis of knowledge on which our estimates of prospective yield have to be made. We disguise this uncertainty from ourselves by assuming that the future will be like the past, that existing opinion correctly sums up future prospects, and by copying what everyone else is doing.”