We often hear jokes like these:
Why did God create economists? In order to make weather forecasters look good.
Economists were able to forecast 9 out of last 5 recessions.
Economist is someone who will be able to explain tommorow why the things he had forecasted yesterday didn`t happen today.
But seriously, doesn`t the failure of economists to forecast the future mean that it is in some sense useless? Is the use of sophisticated mathematical models useful if they are unable to offer good predictions? Shouldn`t we re-evaluate its contemporary paradigm and replace it by something else? Gilles Saint-Paul, a French economist, recently wrote an interesting article on the topic. You can find it here:
Observing Economics 