Futures Past. Economic Forecasting in the 20th and 21st Century

Bibliographic Information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche
Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available online at
http://dnb.d-nb.de.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the
Library of Congress.

We acknowledge support by the Open Access Publication Fund of
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.

Cover Illustration: @iStock.com/MissTuni

ISSN 2364-1304

ISBN 978-3-631-79316-9 (Print)

E-ISBN 978-3-631-81869-5 (E-Book)

E-ISBN 978-3-631-81870-1 (EPUB)

E-ISBN 978-3-631-81871-8 (MOBI)

DOI 10.3726/b16817

Open Access: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution
CC-BY 4.0 license. To view a copy of this license, visit
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

© Ulrich Fritsche, Roman Köster & Laetitia Lenel, 2020

Peter Lang – Berlin · Bern · Bruxelles · New York · Oxford · Warszawa · Wien

This publication has been peer reviewed.

www.peterlang.com

About the author

The Editors
Ulrich Fritsche is an economist and full professor of economics, especially applied economics, at Universität Hamburg. His research interests include forecasting methods, macroeconomic expectation formation of households and experts, and time series econometrics.

Roman Köster is an economic historian and currently visiting professor at the Bundeswehr University in Munich. His research interests include the history of economic crises and the history of economic thought.

Laetitia Lenel is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of History at Humboldt-Universität, Berlin. Her research project explores the history of business forecasting in Europe and the U.S. in the 20th century.

About the book

Ulrich Fritsche/Roman Köster/
Laetitia Lenel (eds.)

Futures Past.
Economic Forecasting
in the 20^th and 21^st Century

Few areas in economics are as controversial as economic forecasting. While the field has sparked great hopes for the prediction of economic trends and events throughout the 20th and 21st century, economic forecasts have often proved inaccurate or unreliable, thus provoking severe criticism in times of unpredicted crisis. Despite these failures, economic forecasting has not lost its importance. Futures Past considers the history and present state of economic forecasting, giving a fascinating account of the changing practices involved, their origins, records, and their implications. By bringing together economists, historians, and sociologists, this volume offers fresh perspectives on the place of forecasting in modern industrial societies, thereby making a broader claim for greater interdisciplinary cooperation in the history of economics.

This eBook can be cited

This edition of the eBook can be cited. To enable this we have marked the start and end of a page. In cases where a word straddles a page break, the marker is placed inside the word at exactly the same position as in the physical book. This means that occasionally a word might be bifurcated by this marker.

List of Authors

Laetitia Lenel, Roman Köster, and Ulrich Fritsche

Introduction

Tara M. Sinclair

Continuities and Discontinuities in Economic Forecasting

Jan Logemann

Measuring and Managing Expectations: Consumer Confidence as an Economic Indicator, 1920s–1970s

Marion Ronca

The Economist as Futurologist: The Making and the Public Reception of the Perspektivstudien in Switzerland, 1964–1975

Timo Walter

The Janus Face of Inflation Targeting: How Governing Market Expectations of the Future Imprisons Monetary Policy in a Normalized Present

Werner Reichmann

Social Interaction, Emotion, and Economic Forecasting

Olivier Pilmis

The Dynamics of Expectations: A Sequential Perspective on Macroeconomic Forecasting

Jörg Döpke, Ulrich Fritsche, and Gabi Waldhof

Never Change a Losing Horse?: On Adaptations in German Forecasting after the Great Financial Crisis

List of Authors

Jörg Döpke teaches economics and empirical research methods at the University of Applied Sciences, Merseburg. Before joining this institution, he has been affiliated with the Kiel Institute of World Economics and the German central bank. Research interests include empirical macroeconomics and business cycle forecasting.
Contact: joerg.doepke@hs-merseburg.de.

Ulrich Fritsche is an economist and Full Professor of Economics, esp. Applied Economics at Universität Hamburg. His research interests include forecasting methods, macroeconomic expectation formation of households and experts, and time series econometrics.
Contact: ulrich.fritsche@uni-hamburg.de.

Roman Köster is currently Visiting Professor at the Bundeswehr University in Munich. His research interests include economic and environmental history with focus on the 20th century. Among other topics he has written about the “Crisis” of German economics during the 1920s (“Die Wissenschaft der Außenseiter,” 2011) and the history of waste management after 1945 in West Germany (“Hausmüll. Abfall und Gesellschaft in Westdeutschland 1945–1990,” 2017).
Contact: roman.koester@unibw.de.