>you would be hard pressed to find someone who was making adequate predictions about where we would be now back in 2020, much less 2015
Macroeconomic and productivity forecasts from 10-15 years ago are pretty accurate, and if anything, were too optimistic on the productivity front, but there was certainly nothing wrong with taking them seriously.
Macro forecasts are generally much easier than those tied to specific technologies. We can be much more specific & confident about predicting next year's inflation rate than next year's ChatGPT+ pricing, for example.
Yup a lot micro factor in aggregate all average/cancel/smoothen out at macro levels, which is why effects at macro levels are more muted and much more predictable
Is there a good source that tracks the performance of these forecasts? I’d be particularly interested in seeing what things looked like in, say, 2005, looking ahead ten years, and then maybe 2008. That would be right before and right after the smartphone boom started, which might be our best recent basis for comparison.