Vision thing

Forecasting is hard work, which makes central planning very hard.  Here are the 2006 economic assessments by some very smart economists.  They were very wrong.  No doubt that Ben Bernanke is among the best and the brightest.  It is simply that central bankers have taken on more than anyone can handle.

I am a fan of Arnold Kling's Unchecked and Unbalanced.  He makes the point that increasingly decentralized information and increasingly concentrated authority amount to a serious and dangerous mismatch.

Matt Ridley worries that we may be due for another ice age.  Are our warming activities sufficient to stop it.  Shall we burn more carbon?  Would that be the new "sustainability"?

No one doubts that it was difficult in 2006 to peer one year into the future.  But the "sustainability" people assert that they can look many years into the future -- and that they know how we should re-allocate trillions of dollars of resources in light of that vision.

ADDED

Paul Gregory sees the 2006 Fed transcripts revealing a 9/11-type intelligence failure.