When More Is Not Better

Chapter 4

The American Economy as a Natural System

In the spring of 2009, at a time when the global financial crisis still threatened to bring down the entire economy, I attended an event at which the dinner speaker was one of the world’s leading macroeconomists. He spoke confidently for about forty-five minutes on the state of the US economy and explained exactly what, in his view, Congress and the president needed to do in order to ensure the country’s economic recovery.

He was the chief economist for one of the fifty organizations that Aspen Publishers polls to create its widely followed Blue Chip Economic Indicators forecast. Every month Aspen releases both the consensus (which it defines as the average of the fifty forecasters) and all fifty ...