This year hasn’t exactly been great for expert predictions and modeling projections. The countless polls that predicted a double-digit victory for Joe Biden and the forecasts that gave the Democrats a 4-in-5 chance of winning the Senate simply didn’t pan out. Earlier in the year, pandemic models that informed significant policy decisions ended up overestimating the number of fatalities by a multiple of 10.
What then of the credibility of economists in 2020? With the onset of the downturn in March, economists seemed to forget completely the lessons from government responses to the last economic crisis and the decade of economic literature that followed. With COVID-19 cases soaring once again, a new relief package in the works, and some of the extra unemployment benefits set to expire at the end of the month, economists are again making predictions. So let’s look at how they fared when they analyzed the impact of the earlier relief spending and, in particular, the expansion and extension of unemployment insurance.
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