[sievebrain]

You didn't look, maybe?

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/jun/18/imf-says-br...

The entire global establishment of "experts" united together and made a series of predictions that weren't just wrong by a percentage, they were wrong in the wrong direction. There are NO organisations that I remember who predicted the outcome correctly. There were though, quite a lot of vox pops with the man on the street who said words to the effect of, "it'll be fine, we'll manage".

The brutal reality is that people who put their faith in the notion of expert understanding of politics or economics have been made to look very foolish, and worse, many of them don't seem to have accepted the uselessness or bias levels of the people the media present as experts. They are still being upheld not only as important, but actually as people who should be given vast new powers to run government! It's quite concerning.

[dane-pgp]

Thank you for going to the trouble to find that. I wasn't sure how to search for predictions about how the Brexit vote itself would affect the economy, rather than the effects of actually leaving.

The article starts "Leaving the EU would hit British living standards" and only talks about recession (occurring in 2017) in the context of the "adverse scenario" they modelled.

As explained here:

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/imf-christi...

"[The adverse scenario] was predicated on the UK’s EU negotiations collapsing and the UK eventually crashing out of the bloc without a trade deal."

which hasn't happened (yet).

So I think the lessons to be learnt are that journalists can be guilty of over-simplifying economic analyses (presenting conditional scenarios as certain outcomes) and that government analyses can be self-serving (if they are published before a vote in which the government is campaigning for one side).

[sievebrain]

LaGarde is obviously going to claim she was right when she was actually wrong, there's no incentive for her to change course at all. But look at the guardian article. The IMF says under "long negotiations" the UK would be in recession in 2017, in fact growth was awesome that year. I'm no fan of either the guardian or the Indy, but in this case I don't think the issue is the journalists. The scenarios the IMF presented for the situation the UK is in were just wrong.

Of course for people who still believe, economics is unfalsifiable because these predictions are often of the form "x.y% less than it would have been" but there's no way to tell what any given stat "would have been" unless you accept the premise that these people can predict the economy ... which they clearly can't.