Read this in The Manila Times digital edition.
It is not just the risk of being undone by some unexpected world-changing calamity that makes the value of economic forecasts uncertain. Such forecasts traditionally take a very broad view – there's a reason why it's called "macroeconomics", after all. This means they are rarely relevant or even understandable for anyone whose own economic management scope — household or business — is not on the same scale. Ninety-nine point ninety-nine percent of us are not economic policymakers and so the typical economic forecast is an abstraction.